Keep Left

It still appears to surprise some people who find out that, despite being a lawyer and having a liking for such things as art and good food, I don't come from a privileged (in monetary terms), or at the very least vaguely affluent, background. This isn't me reading between the lines, rather in the last couple of months I've been told by a couple of different people that they were surprised in such a fashion.

My politics often give me away. I think Mel is annoyed in equal measure at me not being rich; and also being somewhat left wing in my leanings. But some things are just ingrained in your psyche. I didn't grow up on the roughest council estate out there, but council estate it was; and I know that growing up things were harder for my parents than they would have let on to us kids. We used to get vouchers from the government for school clothes at the start of a new year; free school meals were on offer (though one of the joys of getting my own paper round at 13 was that I could buy my own lunch); somehow they managed to pay for glasses for me that weren't Joe 90 NHS jobs (though now, of course, they would make me a cool hipster). At university my grant was topped up with a 'hardship allowance'; and I spent the first two years of uni living at home, sharing a bedroom with my 9 years younger brother, because I simply couldn't afford to move out, despite having been in continual part-time employment from the point of getting that paper round.

That kind of background is something you can't shake off. It forms your thinking in so many different ways. For me it gives a true appreciation of what I have now; as well as a genuine amazement at my parents raising three kids through that. And it means that while I don't grudge people wealth, I do grudge those who think it gives them a right to laud it over others, somehow feel that they are better, and in so doing automatically assume that those living on more stricken means are somehow 'lazy' or just not trying. Or in short, I really hate the Tories. And at present 'hate' isn't too strong a word.

Someone on Facebook asked me a little while ago what it was that I thought the Tories were doing that was so bad. I started listing. From the slow dismantling of the NHS (often through methods of putting insurmountable hurdles in the way then decrying the organisation for finding the hurdles insurmountable) to their hateful policies on immigration that simply kow-tow to the baying masses of the Daily Mail and UKIP; the constant bemoaning of any major controls on the banks (in case the best bankers move away you understand), while stripping back the aid that those most in need rely on (it struck me that after my sister and I had left home my parents would actually have been hit by the 'bedroom tax' reduction in benefits and so would have had to either put up with a serious blow to the pocket, or had to move, actually had to leave the house, in order to remain financially-head-above-water). Oh, and 'greenest government ever'? Don't make me fracking laugh.

Of course it wasn't really that long after I'd left home, a few years anyway, that my dad (who had gone to university with me, and studied law with me, having done an access course) got a decent job, and moved into financially-secure, which means that when people ask me in a professional context "Is your dad a lawyer?" I have to answer that he is, before launching into the background story lest they think I'm one of those family-tradition lawyers myself. I still find it funny that the first firm I worked in I was asked on a number of occasions by different people what school I went to.

Telling people you don't like golf is a good way to get out of that particular hole (if you'll pardon the pun).

Anyway, that's all a longwinded way of saying that I don't think my politics are going to change any time soon, I'll be kept left.