I’ve drifted left with age, not right. If only Labour would do the same | Lynsey Hanley

Hope is far too important to dismiss as youthful idealism. Faced with our current political reality, it’s the only option we have

I became a socialist at the age of 41, just at the point where conventional wisdom says I should have been heading in the opposite direction. In truth, I always was a socialist at heart, but my generation – born in the social ferment of the 1970s, raised amid the deranged individualism of the 1980s, coming of age in the era of Blair and Brown – grew up believing that socialism was a dirty word, not to be embraced or admitted aloud.

If, like me, you’re in your late 40s and came of age declaiming that Things Can Only Get Better, look around you now. Everything I learned about “global warming” as a primary school child in the mid-1980s is coming true as we speak. Fuel hikes set by conglomerates are going to treble the bills of every household in the country. Your children are less protected in every sense from the predations of landlords, profiteers and exploitative bosses. If they go to university, they will probably be in tens of thousands of pounds of debt for a higher education you didn’t have to pay for.

Lynsey Hanley is a freelance writer and the author of Estates: an Intimate History and Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/J8gHTLw