Harry Paterson

Since I let slip I was writing my first book, I’ve had lots of enquiries and questions from friends, readers and acquaintances. I wasn’t being deliberately rude when I refused to say anything. Not at all. It’s just that I’ve found, in the past, I tend to ‘talk the idea out’. That is to say, if I say too much, the urge just seems to go. Kinda like being chef at the barbecue; by the time you’ve cooked and fed everyone, you’ve lost interest. You feel like you’ve already eaten. At least I do.

Now, however, I’m sufficiently far along with it that I’ve decided giving a sneak preview from the first draft might help answer some of those questions I’ve been getting and not do the work any damage either. It has a working title of “What Did You Do In The Class War, Daddy?”  A couple of other potential titles might be, “Arthur Scargill Ruined My Life” or “I Was A Teenage Communist”. Don’t know yet.

Anyway, what it’s all about is easily understood by reading the extract below. It’ll end up being the introduction, if it survives the rewrite, so there you go. I hope you like the idea but tough if you don’t; I’m finishing it anyway

Thanks for the support and the genuinely nice and much-appreciated comments I’ve received thus far. They’ve been most encouraging and I thank you all for them. Cheers. Here goes then…

Extract from first draft

At a time when young people seem to be the most politically illiterate generation in living memory, it was with something approaching amazement that I revisited some of the events in this book. It seems incredible now that a bunch of sub-thirty somethings (as we were then) could know the things we knew, do the things we did and end up the way we have. The world was a very different place then. The past is a foreign country and all that.

Yeah, the world’s shittier now than it has been for a long time (and this comes from someone who came of age in the Thatcher years) but, incomprehensibly, there has been no corresponding upsurge in youthful protest and rebellion; where’s the teenage kicks, guys? Where’s your anarchy in the UK? What are you doing about your Eton rifles?

When I was no’ but a lad, we went on CND demos, we fought toe-to-toe with the fash, took hammerings off the cops, went on strike and ran from police horses through mining villages and got expelled from the Labour Party.

We were in Militant and the SWP and any one of a number of other weird and oddly cult-like far-left sects. We sold revolutionary socialist newspapers. Except for the centrists and reformists, of course. And they tended to be every organisation you weren’t in. We knew this, too, as fact because our leaderships told us so, see?

We spent most of our free time in the clichéd smoke filled rooms, drafting resolutions to pass at our union branches and conferences. We plotted and schemed to take control of the leadership and win over the working class to genuine revolutionary socialism. We tried to make a difference. And, in some spectacularly successful cases, Militant and Liverpool City Council, the Anti-Poll Tax Federation, the Anti-Nazi League, Rock Against Racism and other initiatives, we actually did, albeit for a purely finite period of time. You see we gave a shit. We really did. We were angry. Fecking furious, actually. What did we want? Thatcher’s head on a spike. And when did we want it? Now, of course…

Yet today, in some bizarre way, the generation gap seems to have turned on its head. Where once revolutionary zeal and fiery idealism was the sole province of youth, now it’s the other way around. My generation, the product of punk, the great industrial battles of the 70s and the Thatcher years, did all we could to leave today’s generation with a better world. Ultimately, of course, we failed, oh boy did we. In essence, the Cold War was a class war and the bad guys won. But we tried. Christ, did we ever. Wapping, Timex, Greenham Common and a dozen other causes and battles were where we did our growing up and we marched more miles than the Aborigine Olympic Walkabout Squad. But, as I said, we failed.

So now we have rampant, unbridled, vicious capitalism with its teeth more starkly bared than at any other time in world history. It is, literally, destroying the lives of millions around the globe. The boss class and the politicos reckoned the fall of the USSR would usher in the end of history, give birth to a brave new world where wars would cease and prosperity and milk and honey for all would be the legacy. Of course, we knew that was just so much bullshit. We knew what was coming and, sure enough, here it is; entire economies and whole countries utterly wrecked by greedy and rapacious bankers. More under-twenties on the dole than ever and millions more being hammered from every conceivable direction by a truly disgusting bunch of inhumane, upper-class crooks.

And what has been the response of the kids? Well, the sum total of sod all seems to be the depressing answer. I’m almost embarrassed that my eldest has turned 22 and hasn’t had his collar felt on a picket line. Not even once. Bloody kids these days, eh? Yeah, X Factor, laptops, mobile ‘phones and video games. Reality TV, bling and swagger. These are the concerns, seemingly, of the vast majority of the younger generation.

So this book is intended not for the ageing rebels just like me, although no doubt many will enjoy a wry smile as they trip down memory lane. No, this book is intended for our kids. This is the memoir of a once-angry young man and his heroic, and embarrassingly often, frankly stupid, deeds in pursuit of winning the masses to socialism.

Make your kids read it. Get the overweight, apathetic, consumerised, internet-lobotomised, video game-obsessed young pups to sit down and learn how we did things back in the day. Make ‘em see that we tried to give ‘em a better world and that, so far, their response has been nothing less than piss-poor. And we aint too fecking chuffed with that, as it goes.

When young people, along with the disabled and the unemployed, are the demographic suffering the most under Cameron’s nauseating reverse Robin Hoodery, I just cannot get my head around the pitiful and apathetic response from today’s kids.

Oh sure, there’s the Occupy thingy and whatnot and there’s been the odd student demo here and there and some of ‘em even did a spot of rioting last summer but the absence of a programme, the lack of a political response, is just another thing that marks out the differences between our generation and theirs. It all very well knowing what you’re against but what, pray tell, are you for, kiddies? Hopefully this book will give you a few ideas.

So, read, digest and learn. And then organise, educate and agitate. This is for you, kids. It aint much but it’s all I’ve got. Get off your collective arse and man those barricades. We’re old. We’re tired and we’re knackered. At least I am. I’m more of a keyboard-class warrior, these days. I’ve done my bit. It’s your turn now. So turn off the TV, switch off the video games and put the pizza down. Get to it and chop, chop. Time’s-a-wasting and the revolution won’t make itself, you know.