The Labour party is as a good a place as any. My mother was always a member and I during the numerous elections of the early 1970s had plenty of opportunity to get in amongst the party faithful. On election days I got a chance to run the numbers on the polling cards to see who had and who had not exercised their privilege at the booth. With my collection of sheets filled with this vital information I would report to the election office. This task gave me the chance to enter the homes of the constituency agents and other party stalwarts, who had made over their homes to the election excitement. The cosinesses of ex-Communists, the dark palaces of liberal lady drunks and the quiet motherly homes of trainspotters, I wandered. All the nights of leaflet folding and delivering, standing outside supermarkets, canvassing support all came to a climax on this one night which now all seem to have taken place on one balmy summers nights, with stops at Pub gardens for refreshment.

Election nights til late, the television, the punditry, the swings these are a few of my favourite things

Of course I come from East Finchley, the constituency if not the home of Margaret Thatcher. Her presence alone forced me into politics, everything in life is political and Finchley more so. 

In a primitive television age that failed to fill the yawning afternoon hours with programming, excepting occasionally for the Cricket or too often for the unutterable frigid drabness of racing from Kempson, or Lingfield or some other misbegotten home of societies most hapless the Horse racing enthusiast. I being rarely at school, and always in search of diversion looked forward with relish to the televising of the conference season. The limpness of the Liberals, the terrible frightful Tory ladies who packed the front rows always in search of a yet handsomer cabinet minister, the camaraderie and jolly incompetence explicit in their continual time tardiness of the Labour.  Even better was the Trades Union Congress conference. The chance to see and hear Sid Weighell, Len Murray, Tom Jackson, Joe Gormley and Vic Feather the great and the good of the Union movement caught in the time-stilled fly trap of my childs eye. 

There seems little point in watching todays politicians lie. I left the politics of East Finchley a while ago, I last fought in 1983, and that year still means everything to me. The year I went on a save the GLC march and missed the first Stop the City. I was never to make that mistake again. Now Ken is back and East Finchley has a Labour member, Mrs Thatcher alas is too long gone. 

 

 East Finchley © 2000
 
 
 

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