Come to be, How did it come to be, Tied to a railroad, No love to set us free, Watch our souls fade away, And our bodies crumbling, Don’t be afraid, I will take the Cold for you
Politics is a funny old game; it consumes you, sucking in all facets of your social life, love life and work life, and gorging itself on your time and energies.
For instance, this Thursday I’ll be going back to my old Uni haunts for the return of Birmingham Lib Dems and LGBTQ’s Homophobia is Gay Barcrawl, and hopefully catch up on some gossip from some of my mates, this Saturday I’ll be chairing a meeting between students at Keele University, Staffordshire University and Stoke Local party on an action plan for improving our youth presence in the city, Sunday I’ll be chairing the youth party’s International Committee in London, ahead of the roll out of our Darfur Campaign to the branches, and to begin organising the seminar we are running with our Irish Sister parties next year, as well as plan another (well I think it’s) exciting media driven campaign which should get us a lot of coverage, and generally plot about how we intend to take over the world, then a week on Sunday (My Birthday… yayness!) I’ll be on a plane to meet hundreds of our fellow youth party sisters and brothers in Sarajevo for the International Liberal Youth World conference.
Somewhere in between all this I also have to find time to do the day Job – case working and researching in Yardley for the Lib Dem MP, put together documents for the various meetings I have to attend, put together a training document for Sarajevo on community politics, and send off individual letters to all the BME councillors in Birmingham to canvass more support for the BME network I’ve got planned to begin co-ordinating BME officers and students in the regions universities, which currently doesn’t happen – I think I might skip the regional party executive meeting on Saturday mind.
The point of this rambling isn’t particularly clear, which is the particular point of a ramble.
Perhaps I’m trying to retrospectively warn myself of the dangers of taking up politics as a way of life. I could have had it so easy with some graduate recruitment job in the city raking in dough by the thousands – but where’s the fun in that? Where’s the stress, and hours stretching from 8 – 11, and demanding constituents, and big ideas, and grand projects? Where’s the grass roots activism, and passion filled anger? Where’s the demonstrations in the square mile, and pickets on shop floors? Where’s the running around trying to whip people to an event, or demonstration or vote at the odd conference, or random excursion at 2 hours notice to a conference in a completely different part of the country, or grand plots, and gin, and ideological debates, and more gin?
And where else would I meet such interesting people, who care dearly for the society they live in, and want it improved being such honest, decent and drink prone folk? It’s something that causes you to continually make new friends, and strive to build up the existing ones, for what other perspective is more poignant than that viewed from the roof terrace of the grandest parliament in the world in the centre of the most important city on the planet with new and trusted friends?
I can see why politics can be so passionate. How it drives people together and forces them apart, kindles relationships and smothers them like a bear hug; its such an intense experience and way of life, dashing off from meeting to meeting, calling people in a mad panic with the few seconds you have before the lift reaches the ground floor, trying to do some work and that damn landline blasts its ringtone with yet another constituent trying to catch your ear. Tempers are short and patience thin in a climate like this; no wonder it drives people to affairs, ministers to do daft things, party leaders to drink, and men and women to question their morale code time and again.
What it has made me appreciate is where I’ve come from, certain people at Birmingham University, friend and rival alike, and they know who they are; continue to impact upon my life in a very positive way. My successor as leader of the student branch in particular continues to impress me, as does the rest of what is and was the committee which helped sustain what began as the ramblings of a naive undergraduate in up to his neck, and is growing into something altogether far more important and far reaching than that. Those Labourites who turned me off the Labour party by their incoherent arguments and support for a leadership which continues to prove its ineptness which taught me the importance of opposition, and more importantly those Labourites who I have a massive amount of respect for their sensibility in their personal outlook, and who taught me that dialogue is not futile. It is a shame however that the better the talk, the deeper you go.
