Since starting writing the column, commentators, often in a pejorative manner, have described me as a ‘Marxist’, communist or left winger (they are a few of the nice terms!)
However, it’s all left me a bit confused because when I stood for the job of official for the TGWU everyone predicted I would not get the job because I wasn’t left-wing enough!
The office clerk, Renee, who had been there since Arthur Quinney’s day, was almost funereal when she told me days before the appointment interview: ‘It’s your politics. You’re a nationalist they will definitely appoint someone from the (Manx) Labour Party. You’re not left-wing.’
I remember being mildly amused at the idea that anyone in the MLP was left wing. However, I was mortified really as I’d even gone and bought a suit from M&S! So no one was more surprised when the panel appointed me. However I still didn’t feel left-wing and one of the first things I did was opt out of the union’s political levy.
When I was interviewed by Terry Cringle some months later he asked about my political affiliations outside of nationalism. I recounted: ‘I’m not a lefty. In some ways I’m a conservative with a small c. I have supported a lot of right wing ideas. You could call me a social democrat, but not a pacifist or a moderate when I see social injustice.’
The island had just gone through yet another ‘winter of discontent’, and Terry, who was every bit as canny then as he is today, pressed me to square the image with the reality. So I said, rather naively in hindsight: ‘What Manx workers want is a change of attitude by business interests. When attitudes change, the situation will change. It must happen. But there is no time to lose.’
I went on, in a sign that I was even a bit ‘off message’ from my nationalist chums: ‘If the island is to seize the opportunity to become a successful offshore finance centre it cannot afford to have a disgruntled workforce.’
Well governments came and went and they never ‘seized the opportunity’. My attitude hardened so that several years later I was writing the foreword to the pamphlet ‘On Whose Terms – The Betrayal of the Manx Working Class’. However, I have never really read any left-wing writings other than Peter Ellis’s ‘History of The Irish Working Class’ and that was because I knew Peter personally.
My aversion to ‘the left’ and communism actually manifested itself earlier still in a more practical way when, in the early 1960s, I joined the Royal Observer Corps (a sort of auxiliary of the RAF – which effectively administered it) because at that time the threat was from ‘the Reds’ and it was very real. The Soviets even published, in the military newspaper Red Star, a map of targets ‘in the UK’ and included Ronaldsway and Jurby!
I started attending meetings before my 16th birthday because I was so keen to meet Khrushchev and the communist hordes head on!
We busied ourselves training comfortably in the front room of the Whitehouse Hotel on a Monday in the winter months, in front of a roaring fire, and on exercise in our uncompleted post (bunker) under Peel headland on long weekends in spring through to autumn and when even in summer at the depth of night the post was freezing!
The Russians never came and I left the Corps in 1966. Following the fall of Khrushchev things quietened down – although ‘the Corps’ carried on, being ‘stood down’ in 1991 and disbanded some years later.
My early union years are now a fading memory and the ROC service is even more a distant memory. Anyway, at least I’m no longer naive politically. I’m firmly wedded to Marxist Leninist dogma – I read as much in the comments of iomtoday.co.im recently! But although I am satisfied now that I am now ‘a die-hard left winger’ I still send Christmas cards because even Marxists are nice at Christmas!