looking back to help seeing whats before us

No Friday post because I was through in Glasgow and a friends 50th and didn't get back home until way past my bed time!

This friend and I shared a flat nearly 30 years ago when my first political consciousness was first being raised. He and I and our other flatmate (they, by the way, played in a band called Mince, because they were, I promised I wouldn't mention it...), went on several of the big demos about cuts and unemployment at that time. We were working in youth work then and I remember trying to persuade some of the lads in the clubs to join us. One of their number, a young man who had been unemployed for 3 years said to me, "aye that's fine enough walking the streets, but will I have a job at the end of it'. It was then that I realised shouting about what was wrong was not enough. real change only comes when you get into the system and change it yourself and so began my journey into party politics.

Nearly thirty years on much has changed (including our hairlines and and waistband) but still some thing remain the same; poverty still grind folk down and change comes not by the volume of our complaint but by the willingness of those in power to have a bias to the poor and a commitment to the suffering before anything else