A respectable radical

We moved to Worcester a couple of years ago. Before that we were in Lancashire for four and half years, and London for twelve.

We are very committed to public transport. So rather than living in the countryside and my husband commuting into Birmingham from there, we chose Worcester. We’ve always used public transport to get to work, stemming from London times when it felt like second nature to get the tube. In Lancashire my husband got the bus into work, which was considered very odd.

Here, we are eight minutes’ walking distance from the train station, five minutes’ cycling distance from the city centre. The countryside is really close. That’s very important. It’s a nice environment for the children. You can be on the Malvern hills in twenty minutes.

It’s difficult because public transport is so bad. But you try to do your best. It’s more the cycling really, we try and persuade people to cycle more. If people keep on using cars then we’re all going to be in dire straits. Car use is destroying our environment. Take away the cars and urban spaces can be really pleasant.

My concern has grown since having children. Pushing them around in pushchairs and asthma. I have two children, with the third on the way. My eldest is eight. We didn’t have bikes until we came here, but then we’re not involved as much in environmental issues as we are interested in the political process and the power of multinationals. We’re World Development Movement (WDM) more than Greenpeace. I am very supportive of environmental activists but I’m not an activist myself, not in that way.

I am active in an organising sense, though – writing articles and organising speakers. We are trying to get something off the ground, but there is not much support for these ideas in Worcester. There are only about three people in the local group. There was a WDM stall in the pedestrian way a few weeks ago, but there was far more interest in a stall about the Huntingdon Life Laboratory Campaign. The image was all wrong. The WDM people looked more like Big Issue sellers, handing out leaflets. People didn’t have a clue what it stood for. No-one has ever heard of it, so no-one was interested.

I used to be a solicitor. Now, I’m a piano teacher, which is definitely preferable. I really, really enjoy dealing with children. I feel I’m doing something very useful. There is a shortage of piano teachers and if I wasn’t teaching, quite a few of my 100 pupils wouldn’t have a teacher.

I stopped working as a solicitor when I was thirty, because of having children. I missed it when I stopped working – the office life, the scheduling, everything being set up so you know what you’re doing hour-to-hour. Having children comes as a complete and chaotic surprise. You can’t plan. And if you do, nothing gets achieved anyway.

Pragmatic activism

I’ve been quite lucky. There are lots of choices open to women. But women’s representation is not a big issue for me. I’ve always felt that it’s up to the individual. There are so many groups in society that have to fight their corner. I’ve never felt particularly hot under the collar about ‘not having my rights’. I care about childcare costs and maternity rights. The government has done quite well on this. I was very upset at one recent proposal – to pay child benefit through the man’s income packet. That’s wrong: it would get used up. From my point of view, it’s not being a woman that’s the significant thing, but how much money you have to start off with. If you’re a poor man then that’s just as important as rights for part-time women. This is the inequality of the poverty trap.

It’s so difficult to know how bad the gap between rich and poor really is. You read all the reports in the papers and get desperately sad about all these sort of conditions for some people. Because of my children, I feel particularly strongly for those people with children who have to make do with small amounts of money. I try to educate my children to understand the world and the way it works and not to be greedy. The trouble is that there is just such a huge amount of inequality – although in this country we are relatively fortunate compared to many other places.

It’s difficult. One can get so hung-up on pursuing ideals. A friend of ours is from Malaysia and she said that the people there were basically a very contented people: they enjoyed the weather, had enough food to eat, enough to get by, but they weren’t hard-working, weren’t ambitious and were below the poverty line in any western sense of the word. But they were basically content. And the Chinese influence of working very hard and so forth was quite problematic from their point of view.

I’ve always believed very strongly in basic human rights. People’s right to have a roof over their head, enough food to eat, water to drink, the freedom to express themselves. My brother set up a big solicitor’s office in Hanoi. I don’t really know what he does out there, but I guess it involves corporations. Corporations are bound to go where the labour and the environment is cheap – which I feel very cross about. Coca-Cola, or whoever, can set up a factory in a country that doesn’t have such stringent pollution controls as we do, and they only have to obey those pollution controls. To me, that seems completely iniquitous.

The food poverty gap

The same controls that are imposed on the multinationals in England, America or Europe, should be imposed in whatever country they are setting up their businesses. At the moment, you can’t stop them. I try very hard not to buy products like Nestlé. But they’re just the ones that are in the public eye. Some activists would not go to Tesco, but it’s jolly hard when you live in the world we live in. You do what you can. We buy organic food, but we’re lucky to be able to do that. You start to think to yourself, ‘Is this another inequality – that we can afford to eat safe food?’

To take an extreme case: there was an article about some family in Albania who’d set up camp in an old pesticide factory, because they couldn’t afford to pay their rent. The stream that ran through the ground was white. The milk that the cow produced had a hundred times the dioxins that it was meant to. The children were falling ill inexplicably. But they weren’t too concerned because they didn’t have to spend any money. Bring it back to England and you think to yourself, ‘I’m very fortunate because I can afford to buy organic food.’ But if you’re poor then you go and buy your Tesco value and your sausages with who knows what’s in them?

I’m not one of those people who’ll put on a white suit and pull up the seeds, but GM food is a hugely important issue. What bothers me most is the abuse of power. Monsanto has developed those seeds with the gene in them, forcing farmers in India to buy them. But why change something that works? We have enough food in the world. It’s not the quantity that’s the problem; it’s the political systems or the enormous geographical problems – natural disasters, political problems, civil wars. We have far too much food in some respects. Far too much choice. I just see genetic modification as a development that I feel rather Luddite about. Why should we let it happen? People say the benefits are in research for humans – in being able to prevent genetic diseases. But the seeds are basically making poor people poorer, even though they claim it is making them richer.

Consumer power is very, very important. But maybe that’s because the political process isn’t as efficient as it should be. We are all hot under the collar as consumers but it doesn’t stop the research. You sort of think, ‘If only the Labour Party would say, ‘No, we don’t want genetically modified food in this country’. But that doesn’t happen and they have to kow-tow to American pressure and at least look like they’re going along with it. Bush is a loose cannon, although I guess all this GM stuff came about when Clinton was in power, and I felt reasonably happy with him.

Ideally, you’d think these issues were things that could be dealt with at the political level. If there was a referendum about whether we wanted GM food, there’d be enormous opposition to it. But it doesn’t work like that. So I suppose that’s where the pressure groups and activists come in.

New Labour: better on balance

I do feel that the government is doing far more for most people than the Conservatives did. I don’t really remember much about what happened before the Conservatives. As somebody said to me after the Labour Party had been in power a while: ‘It’s amazing to feel that you actually agree with what the government is doing.’ I’d got so used to thinking, ‘Oh no, what are they up to now?’ To actually feel genuinely encouraged is really good.

I voted Labour in 1997. Before that I voted Green. Blair made a workable party out of it. Although Kinnock’s Labour was probably as workable as John Major! It’s quite a pragmatic judgment: Labour is better than anything else. The image used to be so bad though. Somehow, it’s just a more respectable party now.

But public transport is a disgrace. They should have taken the initiative with public transport, because it is appalling. My feeling is that the railways should be completely renationalised and loads of money put into it. In European countries – Holland, Germany, France, even Portugal – public transport is very efficient and well maintained. Compared to them, Britain is like a third-world country.

Naturally, I’d be happy to pay more tax to pay for public transport. And if it was good enough, people would use it. But when you pay tax you want to know where it’s going. You don’t want it to go into some defence budget or something. I always thought that earmarked taxes were a good idea.

The government have done a lot for schools, they should get credit for that. But they need to improve hospitals – especially the maternity wards. And care for the elderly, which just isn’t a political issue.

I looked after my husband’s parents before they died. The amount of medical intervention that went on to try to keep them alive – for no particular purpose and without any real consideration for their welfare – was hugely distressing. My mother-in-law was carried in an ambulance between one hospital and another two days before she died, and then they decided against some operation and sent her back again. My family have always held that people should not be left to die in hospital. Better younger, than without peace.

The problem is that if this became a political issue it would link into euthanasia, the efficacy of living wills, this sort of thing. I guess care for the elderly is not a particularly vote-catching issue. But there are more and more elderly people, so they should beware.

I’ll vote Labour again. I’m reasonably happy. There’s a real difference between Worcester and where we used to live, which was sort of on the edge of the wilderness. People were on the edge as well. Down here it’s much more safe and predictable. I was talking to a friend of mine about it and she said, ‘Yes, smug and self-satisfied, that’s what we are in Worcester.’ And I suppose I sound smug and self-satisfied saying that I’m reasonably happy with the Labour Party.

In Lancashire they were all strong Labour supporters but were really unhappy with Tony Blair. But the point is that he has been able to get things done. He’s had enough public opinion behind him and he isn’t so radical that huge numbers of people are going to get upset. It seems to me it’s always a balancing act.

Assimilating identity

I don’t feel more British than I do English – devolution and its implications don’t infringe on my everyday life. People go on about all the negative effects of European regulations, but generally I think it’s a good thing that we are part of a bigger Europe, because it gives us more strength. There is no benefit in being isolated from Europe.

I’ve got no problems with the euro and it seems odd to me that so many people have. I guess some people are more traditional. Maybe they feel that in fighting the Second World War, they fought to keep England as England, rather than Germany. My mother is German. She was the daughter of a Jew who managed to escape, and she was brought up in England. My grandparents went back to Germany in the 1960s, so we used to go over there quite a bit. I suppose I feel European. I’ve got Dutch cousins and my grandparents and mother were German. I’ve got lots of friends over there. When I was a kid we went over to visit everyone at least once a year. I feel more European than I do British. European’s fine for me.

When they came over, my mother refused to speak German. She wanted to be completely assimilated into the English way of life. She didn’t want to feel different and would speak English to her parents. She really tried to get rid of her German identity, which isn’t that surprising given that that was when the war was going on. They came over in 1938, and settled in Leeds. And I guess that if your class-mates are fighting your nationals, then you would try to ignore your German identity, wouldn’t you?

They were suffering persecution in Germany. My grandmother was Aryan and her father was a Nazi. But then, of course, they all were. You had to be, really. She managed to get out with my mother. The only reason my grandfather got out, was because he got some letter from the head of a technical publishing company, who was Lord somebody or other, a real bigwig, who was able to say that my grandfather was the leading authority on steam storage engineering. He had very valuable expertise, which somehow persuaded the authorities to let them out. So he escaped. His sister also managed to get out, but she died in a bomb blast in London. His parents and most of his relatives were killed in concentration camps.

It makes me worry when I think about the extreme nationalism in places like Serbia and Bosnia. My feeling about immigration and asylum is that we should try to assimilate as many people as we can, if they need to be assimilated. But I wouldn’t say that’s got anything to do with my mother being an immigrant herself. That’s more to do with general compassion.

You can see where the anti-immigrant feeling comes from. People feel threatened: that their jobs are going to be taking away and that England’s a small country with only so much space and there’s a housing crisis, and where are they all going to be housed? If you’re unemployed and you haven’t got a chance of getting a job, and you see all these people coming over and getting jobs, then you can get resentful and frustrated. It’s important to see where people who think like this are coming from.

I can see both points of view. And I don’t particularly like the idea of there being jobs that no-one wants to do, so immigrants can come and do these jobs for us. It’s a very difficult issue. People say they come over and they use up all our benefits and so on. But when you go back to the basics, they are human beings, entitled to be looked after – just like you would want to be looked after if your country was torn apart by civil war, or your children were starving.

A nurturing politics

Politics should represent this human angle more, rather than just the pure economic interests of the people. It would be a very inhumane society that lost the general compassion, the sense of welfare for everyone. Because that’s what you’re trying to achieve – a better life for as many people as possible, in utilitarian terms.

Take the issue of overseas aid. You read these figures in the papers that the British government has pledged £2billion or something in aid, and it feels like figures are pulled out of the air – you don’t really know whether it’s significant or not. But look at what happened in Africa with the drugs companies backing down, allowing others to produce drugs at cheap prices. It happened virtually free from political intervention.

And that’s where the law steps in. The government are put there to set the law. But it can’t be too draconian. You can’t set up a utilitarian state, because it wouldn’t be utilitarian, it would be despotic. If you took away the power of the multinationals, then in a sense you’d be creating a despotic state, because you wouldn’t be allowing something to happen. I wouldn’t feel safe if things were entirely in public hands either.

Power will always be in the hands of a few. You can’t have a referendum on every issue. Someone has to make a decision. It’s a fine line of balancing. Allowing free trade but also protecting the rights of those who produce, like small farmers.

Most children are materialistic, but they have an instinctive awareness of other children. People say that children are very selfish, in the development of ego and the like. But I don’t think that’s right. Children need certain things. They need love. But within that context, they have quite an awareness of other children, and know that other children have been unhappy.

What amazed me about my own children when they were quite little was their completely instinctive reaction to another child doing a drawing or something like that. ‘Oh that’s very good, that’s really clever’, they’d say. Being completely generous with their praise, but entirely instinctively. They often come home from school and say, ‘So-and-so made a really good model’, things like that. This is something that can either be encouraged or discouraged by their teaching and their parents.

My children often parrot what they’ve heard. This also goes for their self-esteem. So if a teacher says, ‘Oh, you’re terribly slow’, then the next thing you know – and this actually happened with my son – they write: ‘Dear Father Christmas, I know I’m very slow, but…’ And the only reason he’d written that is because his teacher must have said to him he was very slow. That was so sad, and it made me really livid.

It’s the way the world works. Nurturing. Growing seeds, seeing how things grow, learning about life cycles, learning how things relate to other things and rely on other things. My children know about Nestlé. They know about McDonald’s. One of them loathes McDonald’s but the other one likes it. So the other day, I took them to McDonald’s and Sammy had something. But David refused to have anything at all. Not even a drink.

Advertising is just appalling. But I think my children are pretty sophisticated. They know when they are being manipulated. They think that I don’t like McDonald’s because I find the clown very spooky. And I really do. I can’t understand why he’s an advertising attraction. He peeks round the window and stuff. It’s very odd. I think children are more sophisticated than we often give them credit for.

Teetering on the edge of stability

I was born in America during the Cuban crisis, and when it comes to the future, I always think about how my parents must have felt when I was born and the world was on the brink of nuclear war – similarly, my grandparents with my mother. They must have really worried about their future and the future of their daughter. Compared with those levels of worry, I don’t worry about the future for my children.

I’ve been brought up in a period of no war, in a very stable situation, with relative economic prosperity. One can be intellectually concerned and maybe we protect ourselves by not getting involved in the activist side of things. To an extent it is about self-protection. I am expecting another child in October. I am very excited, a bit concerned. My children definitely want it to be a boy. I keep on telling them they’ve got to take what they’re given. We can’t send it back. I’m tempted to find out, but I’m not sure yet. I think it will probably be a boy. This family always has boys.

Every woman who has a baby feels that the welfare of the child and giving it a loving home comes first. When I was pregnant with my first child, my husband lost his job in London, which is why we moved up North. It was just before Christmas. 1st December 1992. My son was due to be born in February 1993. That was an enormous blight, but at the same time my main concern was my welfare because it directly affected the child. I knew that at least we had somewhere to live and that we were together and were fairly resourceful people. It becomes frightening when you feel a personal lack of ability to cope. But provided you’ve got that ability, all these other issues that might or might not infringe on your life don’t actually affect how you feel about the baby.

I feel that things are generally going in the right direction at the moment. A few years ago, for example, my brother said quite blandly and unemotionally that he felt free public education and healthcare was a finite thing, that the welfare state itself wasn’t working. Now, I find that very scary. I don’t know whether he feels that way anymore. Perhaps it was just something that the Conservatives were provoking.

I have this feeling that if something is a good thing then it will be recognised as such. For example, vegetarianism. I was vegetarian when I was fifteen, and it was fairly unusual. Not any more. There is just too much meat and people should treat meat as much more of a luxury item. I’m not against people eating it. I just can’t stand factory farming and the mass production of meat. Animals are just seen as an industrial unit.

BSE was a symptom of the ridiculous situation under the Conservatives where there was hardly any regulation. If meat was seen as a luxury item, something to be had once twice a week, there wouldn’t be so much pressure to create so much. I would prefer much more money being given to organic farmers than subsidies being given to farmers to have lots and lots of sheep on their farms. I’ve felt that for a very long time. Organic farming is so badly subsidised. With all the crises that have been happening in the farming industry, you rather feel that the chickens have come home to roost…

But my personality makes it very difficult for me to understand the type of person that is attracted to politics. I don’t know where the politicians come from. A lot of it is egotistical. They want to be significant and important. I can’t think how you would attract someone into politics who isn’t like that.

I suppose you can say that I’m as much of a Worcester Woman as there’s a man on the Clapham omnibus. I like to think of myself as free-thinking and radical – untrammeled by convention. But I’m probably extremely conventional really.