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A MATTER OF ROOTS

Charles Clarke is the son of a distinguished civil servant and Whitehall mandarin, Sir Otto Clarke. That this background has equipped him to compensate for Neil Kinnock's own innocence of any experience of Whitehall can be readily understood. Whether it has equipped him to appreciate and value the Labour Party's past achievements and respect its better traditions is another matter. All the evidence suggests otherwise. But then it cannot be said of Charles Clarke that he has any roots in the Labour Party or Labour Movement whatever. But I have roots of this kind. 

I am the son of an upwardly mobile Welshman who was himself the son of a Welsh miner (and beyond that the descendant of generations of highly cultured Caernarvonshire carpenters and Cardiganshire blacksmiths) and who had developed an exceptionally lucid, principled and reasonable brand of socialist politics and inculcated this in his children. In 1950 my father, who had by then been living in Yorkshire for several years and was at that time a Staff Tutor in Economics and Industrial Relations at Hull University, contested Skipton for Labour in the general election. The following year he would have been elected to Parliament for Labour in the Shipley division of Bradford had the Liberal vote not collapsed and largely transferred to the Conservative candidate. He never fought an election again, although he was short-listed in his native Caerphilly in the 1960s. But my mother, who had become a socialist under his influence, decided to have a go for Labour herself in 1955, when she contested Bridlington, where she waved the red flag with style and gusto (which was about all that could be done in Bridlington, it must be said). 

I grew up in a strongly Labour household and the foundation of my political outlook was given me by my father on the basis of his own experience in South Wales during the worst days of the mass unemployment, lockouts and blacklists of the 1920s and 1930s, his subsequent experience of the Communist Party from around 1935 to around 1943, and his active involvement in the Labour politics of the Attlee-Bevin period. It is because of this particular background that I was inoculated against most if not all of the varieties of nonsense in student politics, and refused, unlike Charles Clarke and to his explicit regret at the time, to make a career in student politics when a career was there for the taking. 

Because I detached myself from student politics at precisely the moment when Charles Clarke and many others of his and my generation were investing heavily in them for the future, I developed a profoundly sceptical attitude to the political seriousness of this generation as it began to make its way into and up the Labour Party. And since this generation has achieved precisely nothing of value, and has only an endless succession of absurd defeats and shameful capitulations to show for all its activity, I have no reason to regret my decision in 1973 to break completely with student politics and do something else, and no reason to reconsider the reason for this decision, which was the opinion I had formed of student politics by that time after four years of active involvement in it.

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