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There's life yet on the radical fringe of Labour

A brief reflection on expulsion

Cycling to the Pop & Politics fringe meeting at the Labour conference in Brighton last week, I reflected briefly on my expulsion from the Labour Party after the 1997 election.

My crime? Writing a funny poem urging Labour voters in the East Worthing and Shoreham constituency to tactically vote Liberal Democrat.

It didn't work, of course - a maggot-ridden dead dog would get elected round here as long as it had a blue rosette on it.

The fact that I did the same thing in Hove the other way round back then and maybe helped a tiny little bit towards getting the first ever Labour MP for Hove elected didn't count in my favour either. I was out on my ear.

Since I'd have left anyway after a couple of months of Blairism in action I wasn't bothered at all, but all these years later I would like to apologise.

Not for disobeying the Walworth Road diktat but for believing that the Liberal Democrats were a preferable alternative to the Tories in any sense of the word.

They are enthusiastically participating in a government which has declared an unprecedented war on the poor, the sick and the vulnerable, thus proving themselves to be a bunch of power-at-any-price, brown-nosing opportunists who make Machiavelli look like Nelson Mandela. I'm sorry that I ever thought they could be anything else.

Anyway, there I was last week at the conference fringe meeting, which basically consisted of a load of people my kind of age saying how radical and political - some - music was 30 years ago and a load of people half our age confirming our basic belief that it isn't like that now.

Apart from the King Blues. And they've just split up.

Of course, the likes of Robb Johnson, Chris T-T, Tracey Curtis and myself and many more are out there doing our stuff for all we're worth but we're not The Clash, The Specials or The Redskins.

And, in the mainstream at least, the new generation equivalents of these inspirational bands are conspicuous by their absence.

Instead, as was discussed by those present at the meeting, we have mind numbingly sexist, oppressive shit like Blurred Lines. As The Stranglers' Hugh Cornwell once sang, something better change.

But it was an interesting debate, very well chaired by John Robb from Goldblade and countless TV shows I don't watch.

Amusingly, I bumped into Dunstan from the clever - and now sadly split up - rebel punks Chumbawamba just after I'd been sharing a few reminiscences of Brighton FC's battle for survival with none other than John Prescott, who played a big part in helping us get our new stadium.

I should have reintroduced them.

The last time they met was at the Brit Awards in 1998 when Chumbawamba threw a bucket of water over him.

Then, last weekend, it was off to Wales at the invitation of Jean and Martin, two long-time fans having a joint birthday celebration.

Cheers for a great time and it gave me another opportunity to meet up with my good friend Dave "Datblygu" Edwards, guru of the Welsh language alternative music scene.

From there to the Something Else in the Dean festival, the last one of the summer, where we saw the season out in style - loads of beer and a night sleeping in the car.

I'm not doing that again for a while...

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