There’s been an interesting set of posts across various blogs on personal ends of history – the point at which politics entered your life and became a part of your world, so that as you look back now it is more memory than history. Here’s my take.

The first time I can remember really being engaged by an issue was during the nuclear arms race in the mid 1980s and the debate we had in the UK between those who favoured unilateral disarmament and those in favour of retaining our nuclear arms as a deterrent. I remember during one of the general elections in the 1980s being very strongly in the pro-deterrent camp, and feeling afraid of a Labour victory due to their disarmament policies. As a child I was deeply scared of nuclear war, unsurprising really given the arms race and the scary post-apocalyptic fiction I was given to reading, and to my mind this policy seemed incredibly stupid – after all, without our nukes, what was there to stop the Commies flattening us? (I don’t claim to have been in possession of a particularly sophisticated world view at the time.) I remember desperately wanting the Conservatives to win. (Oh, the shame it causes me to admit that now! I was a pre-teen Tory! Uncle Alan would be proud.) I arrived at this position independently from my parents – I seem to remember that during the eighties they claimed to support the Liberal/SDP parties – who expressed a sceptical dislike of Thatcher and co that I wasn’t to cultivate myself for a few more years. Looking back, I wonder why my fear pushed me towards this position rather than a more pacifist one, but there you go.

I can remember events prior to that, but they didn’t really engage me. What I remember of the Falklands doesn’t really stir any emotional response – I see it more as a historical event than something I have clear memories of. Earlier elections generally passed me by and certainly events overseas don’t really figure very highly.

After that I remember paying more attention to what was going on in the wider world. The fall of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries, the Gulf War and then the protests over the Criminal Justice Bill of the early nineties were the next events that figured highly in my political life. The anti-party/dance music measures in the CJA were one thing that really got me riled up – it felt as though we were to be criminalised for dancing round in empty warehouses and listening to certain types of music, and this made me feel deeply disillusioned with conventional politics. Most of the people I knew who were into this sort of thing were neither criminals nor prolific drug users but normal young people, and the measures seemed to showcase just how out of touch the mainstream was with our generation. It just left me feeling disenfranchised and powerless, not to mention the utter contempt for Michael Howard that resulted and is still with me to this day. In fact, I’ve had a bit of a knee-jerk ever since against whoever it is that occupies the Home Secretary’s seat – there’s something about this job that seems to turn even the most mild-mannered politician into a dribbling loon who appears to do nothing but pander to the worst of the Daily Mail reading public’s prejudices.

(I can also remember writing speeches about human rights and freedom of speech for my English classes during either my first or second year at secondary school, so that’s something that’s been with me now for a long time. At least there’s some sort of consistency…)