I've been tagged by controversial* 17-year-old Lib Dem blogger Irfan Ahmed to say what I'd done politically by 17.
Irfan says "At 17 I have canvassed at election time, delivered leaflets, blogged and blogging, wrote press releases and wrote leaflets."
Surprisingly enough, I hadn't been blogging when I was 17 as blogs hadn't been invented back then. Babbage's Difference Machine was just being built and Ada Lovelace had her stellar programming career still ahead of her.
I don't think my record of youth activity is very impressive - certainly less so than the following list might suggest.
Anyhow, by the time I was 17 I'd worked on a Lib Dem campaign in school elections, been membership secretary of my local party (very badly, I might add), delivered rather a lot of leaflets and done a little canvassing. I'd attended one party conference and run an Amnesty International campaign in my school (sadly, despite my best efforts, the Burmese junta did not crumble under the weight of schoolboy letters).
I'm pretty sure I'd helped writing leaflets (again, very badly, but those were the days of dodgy clip-art and Pritt-Stick) and I'm also more or less certain I hadn't written a proper leaflet on my own.
Away from politics, I'd decided to write a great novel, slogged my way through fifty pages of derivative, unimaginative bilge and chucked the whole lot to hide my shame; not to mention expressed a number of opinions I was entirely certain of at the time and am now greatly embarrassed ever to have contemplated.
Anyone else want to have a go? Sara? Caron? Jennie? Anyone called Alex? Anyone else?
* By which I mean frequently very wrong, but I don't hold it against him.
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2 comments:
It worries me that Irfan has written press releases and leaflets for the party!
At the age of 17 I'd done absolutely nothing for the Lib Dems or any other political party, and personally I think the party benefitted greatly from that!
I went to university at the age of 17, and joined the university Liberal society, and hence through paying my sub to ULS, the Liberal Party.
In the years before that I had been swaying between Liberal and Labour. First awakening was living in Hove constituency during Des Wilson's by-election campaign in 1973 (narrow loss at a time when the Liberal Party was picking up wins in by-elections elsewhere).
Living in a (well, in those days, the) Labour stronghold ward in a true-blue Tory constituency was and remains the fundamental shaping aspect of my political life.
Class loyalty to Labour was whittled down by Labour seeming to be a party of the industrial north and the inner cities, no-one in it with a southern rural/suburban working class accent. Actually no-one anywhere in public life who looked and sounded like us. We were - and are - the invisible people. Tories unspeakable, the class enemy (yes, I did think strongly in those terms in those days). Des Wilson did seem to be the first person who spoke for us, and the Liberal's PR seemed necessary to give us a voice.
University socialism seemed to be about middle class kids striking a pose, the more I saw of this sort the more I disliked them. Liberals seemed a bit funny, but underneath decent and down to earth. Actually, I still hate middle class political poseurs whatever their politics, and if I think about myself, that's still a prime motivating factor. That's a confession, not a boast. My political motivations don't seem to have changed that much since I was 17, which I suppose is a bit sad.
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