qwghlm.co.uk : because all the other domain names were taken

Three days go to the polls and nothing new to say, so I’m going to fall back on that old blogger’s trick and reminisce about the past.

1997 was the first election I really paid attention to. I’m too young to remember 1983 and 1987, and for the 1992 election I was in Hong Kong – the most I remember it was seeing a series of numbers appear at the bottom of the television screen during regular programming. That and my mother bemoaning how that ‘nice Mr Patten’ had lost his seat; we would return to Britain from our holiday for five more years of Major, and Patten would be flying in the opposite direction to become the man who suffered the ignominy of handing Hong Kong back to China. He got the better deal.

Forward to 1997, then. I was 16 and as well as all the usual problems 16-year-olds have, I had also become vaguely politically aware (very much the masochist), having settled on the left after some rather inadvisable teenage dabblings with anarchism and libertarianism (I blame the Internet). By the start of 1997 I had settled on Labour and had realised what a miserable excuse for government the Major administration had become; I did the publicity/campaign stuff for our school’s mock election (it being a private school, we got thrashed by the Conservatives), and eagerly stayed up on election night. However (like many people I suspect), I have an utterly false memory of watching Portillo losing Southgate to Twigg on the television; I know it’s false in my case as I stayed up in bed listening to the radio; my parents had objected to me watching television till 4 in the morning.

The next day, having not had enough sleep, I went to school as news of Labour’s enormous majority sunk in (even I, the optimist, had predicted 60-70 in the sweepstake my Economics teacher ran). A well-meaning teacher had dragged out a television showing election coverage, which screened the various celebrations as Blair was heading to Downing Street. On my way to get breakfast/lunch from the local sandwich shop I decided on a whim to jump on the Tube for Westminster to join the crowds, before realising while halfway there that my free period was nearly up and that my teachers would not approve of me bunking off lessons to celebrate a Labour election victory.

So that’s it. Shame to think, eight years on, how I’ve gone from that euphoria to having totally fallen out of love with the Labour Party. That, and “whatever happened to the Natural Law Party?”. Turns out they disbanded in 2001 to concentrate on other ways of changing the world. Shame.