Are you sick of the news?

[DanaC]

I was disinterested in politics until I hit my late teens. Then I was a fairly active member of the left....was member of the Socialist Workers Party for a while....went on demonstrations against the conservative government of the day....Then Thatcher was gone...it was like we'd won....But then somehow the tories kept on going....So I thought ok, look how bad the country has gottn surely surely they cant win another term. And it looked like they were finished yet somehow they clung to power despite the degeneracy of their reign.....When Major won the election in the midst of a recession with business going to the wall left and right and whole streets of houses up for auction because the owners had posted the keys through the door and walked away, I was devastated. I couldnt believe it. I had been an idealist then a realist and now was just defeated.

I pretty much stayed away from politics ( apart from the anti nazi stuff) and the news I just found depressing. Then there was a sense of change in the air and found my attention dragged back there again.....Labour stood to win by an historic landslide....Things could only get better! ran the slogan. For my entire adult life and most of my childhood too, the tories had been in office. I'd marched against them, I'd watched them fuck up entire towns I loved with their devastating attacks on the manufacturing industry. They'd lined their pockets and the pockets of their friends and written the book on sleaze and finally they were being pushed aside by a desire for change and a kinder vision of Britains future....This was huge.

...........Anyway.....Some stuff got better, some stuff got worse. Then the Prime minister I voted for, the leader of my political party abandoned many of the fundamentals of his party and his manifesto, his Home Secretary turned out to be somewhere to the right of Goebbels and my country has been coupled to a Juggernaut driven by a slowthinking incompetant driver who has clearly been drinking.

I am now totally hooked on the news. Its a compulsion. I am angry at my government. I am particularly angry at Blair. I feel a certain thrill at the political game being played out in front of me. Both in local terms and international. There's a certain electricity which seems to crackle in the media when a politician is soooo under siege.