Saturday 30 September 2017
Recollections in tranquillity
To be honest, I am not sure if my tranquillity is regained, if I ever had it in the first place, but I have been catching up on all the articles, radio programmes I missed while I was in Brighton and I need to put down my impressions before they become influenced by what I have read and heard.
Am I glad I took the plunge and went to the conference as a delegate? Overwhelmingly yes!
I felt I was taking part in a historical moment, that the centre ground in Britain is changing and the move to the right for the last thirty years has been halted. Things that were unacceptable in my childhood have become the norm. Food banks, homelessness, unsafe housing side by side with unimaginable wealth, these are from the 1920s and 30s Britain. Never again, British people said in 1945 when they elected a Labour government. Well, they did come again and when I stood in the conference hall in Brighton, cheering not just Corbyn and McDonnell but the many impassioned speakers from the floor, I sensed a huge will to create a new Britain and a belief that it is now possible.
Apart from the politics, it was the people I met who made the days in Brighton such a great experience. I loved sharing a house with such a diverse group of people, we had so many laughs. I loved entering the conference area on the seafront each morning and being greeted by the party activists, handing out the newsletters they had written and printed overnight, the leaflets for meetings they had organised and just pressing their case in a friendly, if passionate way. The security staff and the stewards were friendly and helpful and in fact some became friends, useful when my comrades took my bag with the much-prized ticket for Corbin’s speech into the hall without me and I was allowed in anyway!
In the interminable wait to go through passport control at Alicante airport (they must have the slowest responding machines in the world) I talked with two young couples behind me in the queue who were going to Benidorm to celebrate a birthday. They were surprised to hear I had been to the conference, perhaps I didn’t look the part, but talking we established that they were angry at the way jobs were taken by machines in the retail sector, to increase company profits and one, a NHS nurse, told me how far her standard of living had slipped since she joined seven years ago. These are people who need a Labour government for the many and I realised how important it is to talk to everyone I meet.
That is what the conference was about for me.
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