Mark Dixey, Sheffield Socialist Party
My dad had a painting and decorating business. He read the Daily Express and supported Thatcher. He never understood how neoliberalism killed the family business by cash-starving the schools and hospitals we worked for, and shutting the local colliery.
I couldn’t understand how depriving people of their prosperity was supposed to protect it. Neither did I understand why allowing people to live in peace, comfort and security was no longer the first role of government.
I hated the deliberate policy of generating unemployment, and then calling the unemployed ‘lazy scroungers’. So, I read some books.
Later, I joined the Labour Party and worked in Bolsover as a councillor and party activist. I left Labour when Jonathan Ainsworth declared that the party had no values anymore.
There is no democratic choice when the opposition proposes no real alternative – when they cease to be a threat to the agents of inequality and injustice, and they too represent the rich capitalists.
I knew that Thatcherism did little more than enrich the powerful at our expense. A system that prioritises short-term profit over the survival of the species clearly cannot sustain. You cannot tinker with such a system, it desperately needs to go.
Though I was ready to give up on political activism, my wife took me to a Socialist Party meeting. I found a friendly, committed group who believe, as I do, in social justice and a functioning democracy.
It wasn’t an epiphany. They shared values that I had held all my life.
I remember thinking I was getting the support I needed to ‘come out’ as a socialist. I joined the following week.
