I was brought up in a communist household where the daily reading fare was the Guardian and the Daily Worker so I’ve been reading the Guardian for over half a century now. Politics has always been a huge part of my life. There was the Aldermaston march in 1959, the Guildford School of Art sit-in in 1968, anti-apartheid, Greenham Common, and many other causes along the way to the desperately important campaign against TTIP now.
I was in the Labour party for about 25 years – 12 of which I served as a Labour councillor in Haringey. During that time, I was often in trouble with the Labour whip for voting for what I thought was right rather than for the party line. I was expelled from the party after the 2005 general election for writing a letter urging people to vote tactically in order to return a Labour government with a much smaller majority, which I hoped would force the arrogant Blair government to listen to backbenchers, party members and public opinion. The letter appeared in the Guardian the day before the election.
After a few years of feeling lost politically, I belatedly discovered that the Greens were not just a bunch of sandal-wearing tree-huggers but rather a party with a broad range of progressive policies – most of them far more progressive than Labour’s. It depresses me that the Guardian chooses not to give the radical policies of the Greens more coverage – especially in the run-up to elections. Also, I find it very difficult to understand how people like George Monbiot and Owen Jones can write such wonderful opinion pieces – almost always consistent with the broad thrust of Green party policy – and then turn around and tell their readers to vote Labour at the general election.
Things that irritate me about the Guardian are the amount of coverage given to food, fashion, cars and the glorification of consumption more generally. Things that I really enjoy include the letters page and the obituaries.
Nowadays I’m a Guardian Partner and my husband and I attend many of the Guardian Live events which are almost without exception entertaining, interesting and informative. Both of my kids poke fun at me by classifying me as a Guardian-reading this-or-that. Then I discover that one or the other of them – or sometimes both – knows what’s been in the Guardian almost every day.
I thought it was brilliant that the Guardian was instrumental in bringing about, and giving so much coverage to, the Snowden revelations. Indeed, if you still have the bits from the computer that was sledged-hammered in the basement of Kings Place, you could probably raise quite a lot of money by auctioning them off at the Green party annual conference.
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