When family becomes politics....
At what point does respectful difference become belligerent rudeness?
I am not a member of the Labour Party. I have never been a member of the Labour Party. I will never be a member of the Labour Party. Nor have I ever voted for the Labour Party, nor will I ever vote for it.
This is not exactly an uncommon position in a population of 60 million.
Why do I make those statements?
A combination of family circumstances, life experiences and sibling behaviour.
I grew up in a family where a fairly autocratic father was incapable of allowing any meaningful discussion about politics. Any attempt to challenge the mantra that the Labour Party was king led to immediate smearing, belittling of a boy by a fully grown man. It taught me that Labour Party members didn’t believe in debate. It taught me that I didn’t have the right to a voice. And it taught me that, if I wanted to have an independent voice, I had to look elsewhere.
As things turned out, I had a seminal gap year in Austria where the ‘do what I say, not what I do’ mantras of the Labour Party were expunged forever. I experienced truly encouraging mentorship, utterly free of ‘I’m in charge, do what I tell you’. It transformed my sense of self, it transformed my levels of performance in key aspects of life and it taught me forever that environment, just as much as genes, affect life outcomes.
I had had two experiences: being told by the Labour Party what to do; and being encouraged by non-political people to stretch myself in areas chosen by myself. The Labour Party’s way lost.
This led to vengeful feelings of loss of authority from the father when I returned to the UK. Not for nothing did I once bitterly say: ‘I should never have come back’.
Once you have experienced emancipation, you can never go back, not spiritually. That leads to the path of depression, deep-seated depression. ‘If you love them, let them go’ was never on the Labour Party family agenda. It was another nail in its coffin for me.
From 19-35, I kept my head down, never voted Labour but said little of consequence about politics. It wasn’t relevant to my life, really. Climbing mountains were, so were running, ski-ing, trying to do science research (not successfully). I learned that Labour apparatchiks would never support my independently chosen outlets, as I had moved beyond the ones chosen for me by that Apparatchik.
I had one sibling who didn’t have a seminal gap year aged 18. The first born was more savvy, used everything of the feminist agenda to advance herself and thought nothing about crushing her sibling whenever she perceived a threat. She was not a family member for me, she was a permanent foe. Not my choice, hers.
That sibling took over where the father had started: the Labour Party was constantly plugged, anything else was constantly trashed.
Strangely, in 1990, I had a guest in a Swiss ski resort who was a Conservative MP. He was a gentleman. I also met many people out there who were successful in business, as entrepreneurs and I was working in an entrepreneurial situation. Funnily enough, much of it suited me, although a few glaring weaknesses came through. Another life’s experience not in tune with family dogma.
1990 saw the first permanent branch in the family road. The sibling behaved psychotically toward me, then tried to impose control over my future holiday plans. I said nothing, resisted for 7 years silently and no doubt enraged the psychopath. Once again, there was no point in arguing. Bullies don’t reason, they smear and trash. I had no emotional survival strategies against that: family had scorned me for not having them naturally aged 8, no-one had taught me any survival skills since. Overt disagreement is not the only way to resist: silent resistance conveys an identical signal.
In the Noughties, the Labour feminazi psychopath trashed three more times, each time when I was working in arenas nothing to do with medicine. This taught me that the Labour Party principles didn’t exist any longer. All the claptrap about ‘opportunities for all’ should have read ‘opportunities for all who can bully the bullies’. It openly tolerated psychopaths in its ranks, female feminazi psychopaths. Parties which tolerated that had no place in my life and that was now a lifelong reality. 40 years of family Labour stalwarts trashing my very existence was never going to see me engaging in Stockholm Syndrome.
My first overt rebellion involved promoting the views of the Liberal Democrats, primarily because they were the only party opposing the Iraq war. This was in tune with my principles as well as their then principles of strong local communities. My sibling didn’t really care about me doing anything with the Libdems up to 2004, as they were regarded by power politicians as an irrelevance. That tended to change a bit in 2005….
My next semi-covert rebellion was writing a skit on ‘The Fall and rise of Libdem’s Perrin’, starring Boris Johnson, Vince Cable, Nick Clegg and Simon Hughes. It included the line ‘a rainbow coalition to beat up the Labour Party’. It predated the 2010 Coalition by over 5 years.
Rather more startling was writing a football song starting: ‘Tony - you’ll soon be on the dole….’ This was pugilistic, over-18s language leading to the overthrow of a sitting Labour Prime Minister. Hardly the act of anyone wanting to vote Labour….more the act of someone wanting that man sent to the International Criminal Court.
I of course had never joined the Security Services and it took me until I was about 40 to realise that the other members of my family had. This explained to me the emotional dishonesty of the family, the lack of true cohesion and the obvious selfish, self-centred pair of Labour acolytes making sure that it would never exist.
I realised that my life’s path had been a fruitless search for familial emotional support and that the times I had found it, family members had overtly trashed it or ensured it died through not recognising it and supporting it further. It taught me that the Labour Party had nothing to offer me and that thinking that it would have was a fool’s errand.
The 2010s were about the family trying to force me to change tack, as the election riggers were using me as a ‘bellwether’ in many ways. As I was not paid for my bellwether activities, I had zero interest in what outcome they desired, I just said what I felt, particularly when no-one else felt able to say it. It was a decade of emotional maturity, a decade when any belief that family harmony would ever come was finally entrenched as utopian nonsense and a very important permanence to the belief that life without family might be less desirable in theory, but if reality dictated otherwise, then family was absolutely expendable.
And now, with three years of Covid19 Great Reset shenanigans bringing my consultant doctor sibling fully into the firing line of ‘those seeking accountability for all that was forced upon humanity’, it is looking like a war to the death.
Still the family Labour acolytes press, now coming from cousins groupings, trying to force the nonsensical Labour nonsense onto me.
Nowadays, my tolerance pushed beyond breaking point, numerous amounts of no-holds-barred seven-barrels fusillades of verbal anger and wrath delivered without mercy, without pity and certainly without caring the consequences for other family members.
All of this could have been avoided if family narcissists and family psychopaths had simply let me leave in my 20s.
But if they had had the humanity to see that, I would not have had to leave in the first place.
‘You can choose your friends, but you cannot choose your family’.
For some of us, our experience of the emotions supposed to be found within family has come solely from experiences with those who turned out to be friends.
Families can be microcosms for politics: there are enlightened and genuinely democratic families; there are competitive families; there are families with two scheming oligarchs and the rest feeding off scraps; and there are families run by a dominant dictator.
Just as Plato described thousands of years ago, families can evolve/mutate between those possibilities and the outcomes for different family members can be rather like the outcomes for political parties at election time.
The only lesson I can share with those who had a similar circumstance to me but many years later is this: never, ever believe that what you didn’t get in a family unit can be supplied by a political party.