I grew up a Tory and it wasn’t until my mid 30s that I discovered left wing views. I’m now a somewhat notorious lefty, and wish to show my journey in the hope that some who think might follow my path. Yes, those who think. Who feel. Who have love for their brothers and sisters.
The Reverse of the Medal
I was likely a mistake after a Royal Navy officer’s party in Belfast. My dad was on a mission in Northern Ireland against the IRA – he got a medal and I was born in Portsmouth nine months later, my parents having hurriedly married a few months before…
I grew up with a very privileged lifestyle. In my first 12 years I was a Royal Navy officer’s brat on the NATO circuit. One of my excuses for being late to school was I had to fly from Bermuda via Miami to Virginia to get my stuff before literally hightailing it to Heathrow and then to school in North Devon. Poor me, I’d just crossed the Caribbean from Jamaica on the world’s largest sailing yacht…
My fall would begin aged around aged 11 when I was expelled from that school and ended up at a rough military boarding school in Suffolk. Some of that story can be found in this recent article. At that school I was one of a lot of kids there who shed a tear when Margaret Thatcher was deposed. That school taught me to hate casually. Broadly speaking, I understand firsthand how easy it is to hate those you are not when you are privileged and spoon fed nectar as a lifestyle.
Out of the Gilded Cage and Into Reality
On beginning to live in the real world in Southampton in the mid 90s, I came to earth with a crash. Smoked a lot of weed, took a lot of psychedelic drugs and drank myself stupid. I quit smoking weed and the paranoia remained. The paranoid beliefs would develop storylines and I entered a parallel reality.
Getting a Third Class degree at a second rate university (Southampton Institute for Higher Education wasn’t exactly Oxford), and having to face the real world, I was clueless. Add in life in a dual reality with severe depression, with a background that no one could relate to?
The Mental Health System Safety Net
My father first learned of my distress when I phoned him from a phone box on the way home from the Clifton Suspension Bridge where I’d changed my mind about jumping to my death.
In the late 90s, though the NHS still wanted more resources, I still view it as a golden age of sorts for the mental health system. One of the many suicides I have known was because of later cuts where a guy who used to check in as a voluntary patient to an acute hospital was refused access for the first time in around 2005. He was used to checking in – almost anyone could. Never mind not having a bed to check in should I be mildly unwell, as of 2022 there are now no psychiatric inpatient beds in Weymouth
One of the first things my psychiatrist said in 1999 was he would put me in with a social worker who would get me disability benefits. I ended up on £192 a week + Housing Benefit. I was rapidly housed in shared, social housing for people with mental health problems.
Life was good. Mum felt that I was adrift though – I’d soon stabilised and could move on. I’d begun a City & Guilds in Journalism for Print and Radio and my tutor suggested I apply for what would become a Masters Degree in broadcast journalism at Falmouth College of Arts. The adult education route was later subjected to the same cuts as the NHS as we will see later.
Losing My Religion
Thanks to rules on Income Support and Disability Living Allowance, because of the amount of time I’d been on those benefits I was entitled to do my MA on full benefits. The theory went, with a professional skill I would come off benefits. Another bridge burned behind me since – that’s no longer possible.
During the course, it was the era of Islamist terrorism. Taught sectarian hatred between Irish Protestants and Catholics by my family, I’d had difficulty with Christianity that taught love and practiced hate. Learning that Prophet Mohammed had said that those of all Abrahamic Faiths were all ‘people of the Book’ and therefore should be allowed to practice their lives as they chose, I was set free. Where else would my freed mind take me? To one of love from hate.
The Bodies Pile Up
Blair morphed into Brown and the Labour Party lost the plot. Welfare Reform became a thing, with all sorts of myths promoted in the media that people on the dole would have widescreen TVs, smoked 20 fags a day and were going on luxury cruises. The media invented a problem that the government would ‘solve’ by screwing the vulnerable.
Come the financial crash around 2007 the bankers generally bought bigger yachts with the money thrown at them by governments to keep their businesses afloat. Due to the vast debts incurred in buying bankers new yachts, suddenly those governments had ‘no money to pay for’ welfare benefits or keep the mental health system in the manner to which it was accustomed. The bankers had done a successful heist against the government and the poor would pay.
Like a good unthinking Tory (who had also supported the Iraq War) I initially believed the rubbish. I was however a successful mental health and social affairs journalist at the time and got to dig under the veneer of the so-called truths of the media outlets (some of which I was working with as a freelance journalist).
My first major step to the left was when I joined the South Dorset Liberal Democrats. I ran for office at Weymouth and Portland Borough Council, but got a bollocking for taking the piss out of then Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg at the doorstep while canvassing. Finding I wasn’t allowed to oppose Austerity in the party, I soon got out and helped found the Dorset People’s Assembly Against Austerity.
Perhaps being so deeply confronted by the reality on the ground – knowing people who attended 20+ funerals a year – I’d finally woken up.
A Mind Game – Would I Survive If I Was a 25 Year Old Schizophrenic Today?
In this section I will show the bridges I crossed that have been blown up behind me.
Mental health: in 1999 I was seen two weeks after referral by the GP. I was put on disability benefits. Today I may have waited upwards of six months to see a psychiatrist. The welfare system has been destroyed and instead of taking 3-4 months to get any uplift in income, to even get Personal Independence Payment (PIP) it takes at least a year. Where there was a Severe Disability Premium on Income Support, this has been abolished for Universal Credit. With PIP I might be on around £600 a month + rent payments.
With recent inflation I would have been living out of a food bank, bullied and sanctioned by the DWP while waiting for a diagnosis for six months. If I hadn’t taken my own life by that stage, then wouldn’t get enough money to live in dignity. Would I have died of starvation like a guy I knew in Bristol in 2021?
The resources of the mental health system are so thin on the ground that I wouldn’t have had the care and support I had to genuinely recover. Speak to most mental health professionals today and you’ll soon hear the term ‘firefighting’ – they are too busy stopping suicides to help people properly recover. One suicide I was close to died, in the coroner jury’s view, because of a reorganisation of the local mental health system due to lack of resources. All the staff went from home direct to their patients at their homes and no one went to the office where they would have heard a voicemail telling them of his crisis.
Even if I had broken out of the limbo (perhaps with parental support), it would be unlikely I would have been able to do an adult education course like the City & Guilds I did due to swingeing cuts to adult education.
Would I be alive even a year after a psychotic breakdown? As a born survivor and deep optimist, I might. Would I have thrived? Would I have been a social affairs journalist for a national tabloid, known by the editor for getting ‘real people’? No. If I had survived the system I am almost certain I wouldn’t have made it to Falmouth.
I had an alcohol problem and for many years was living in bedsits. With the lack of support from the mental health system, would I have been the guy I knew who died of alcohol abuse in Melcombe Regis in January this year?
What if I’d Developed Covid Complications?
This is a tale you personally could fall foul of as it is mercifully unlikely that you’ll be one of the 1% who get paranoid schizophrenia like me. In March 2023 I was just about getting by as a copywriter when I fell sick with covid. I was out for the count for a week before my finances got so stretched I had to move my computer downstairs and work from my armchair. It was exhausting, but after around three weeks I started to get my strength back. With the help of credit cards I just about survived.
Let’s put that into the parallel reality where I’d been diagnosed with my mental illness in 2020. Perhaps I might have been bullied into a gig economy job like a Deliveroo driver by the DWP. You don’t work, you don’t earn. Even if you do work you earn just enough to break even every day, let alone put money aside. Then you catch covid? You’re out for a second week? Can’t work with a positive test. Too exhausted to do more than the basic things around the home, yet you’re in rental accommodation and the landlord wants his rent. Nothing in the bank account?
That welfare safety net I encountered in 1999 is gone. You fall now, and like the fictitious Deliveroo driver you’re facing homelessness simply because someone breathed on you. You’re never more than a step away from illness or disability. Why then hate those who fall?
A Final Word – Racism
Earlier on in this article I wrote of the 2007 Financial Crisis in the way I would describe the Cost of Living Crisis today – the rich screwing the poor. Yet somehow, there is a belief system out there that people come to the UK not for safety, but to live the high life on welfare.
If you don’t get PIP you’ll get about £350 a month on Universal Credit to live on as well as a sum to cover your rent. Rents have gone up faster than inflation and, as well as the sum for rent, much of that £350 for living on will go on rent, bills and if you’re lucky some food.
In Sudan before the nutters started shooting each other, people worked to live. Often lived quite good lives. Now they’ll likely get shot if they venture out to find water and food because of a tiff between warlords. Why then come to the UK to live on an income that’s below the level required to subsist? Oh hang on – to starve on Universal Credit
not to dodge bullets, I understand.
As you can see through this piece, it’s easy to blame the man or woman you can’t see who is a step below you. The desperate person due to war or famine. Why do you believe it? You hear the BBC counting people on boats every day and our supposed leaders referring to them as ‘swarms’ and ‘invasions’.
At the same time, those pushing those stories are dodging tax themselves. Those supporting the Labour Party and the Conservative Party are doing so to maintain the tax system as it is. Where someone like me pays 30% of their profit but Labour Party MP Margaret Hodge hides her income in tax havens. Never mind Ms Hodge Tax Dodge, how much tax is Mr Drax paying?
They are happy to let you believe a desperate young man escaping war or famine is costing taxpayers a fortune. We live in a world where truths taught us in newspapers and on TV are lies spun by those who don’t want a world where if you fall you’ll be saved. Why? They would have to pay for it. They make you believe that a desperate person on a rubber raft is the reason you’re getting dreadful treatment by the NHS, when if they paid their taxes at the same rate as you, the NHS wouldn’t be firefighting.
As I learned over the years, we all need to reframe our understanding of the world – there is an us and them, but we are the majority and they are the minority who are wealthy. See that and you too might come to an awakening.
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