'I like to read The Sun in the loo
Its quite a lot of fun
And if a bit later
I run out of paper
I can use it to wipe my bum.'
- Steve, on a bus from London to leaflet against Tony Blair.
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A very small, elderly, wide-faced, elfin-looking man with bat-wing ears sits near the front of a bus that is heading north from London to an anti-war event. The old man looks like Mickey and Wayne Rooney. He says he is a great-nephew of Noel Coward. His name is Michael Coward. Until recently, he was a committed member of the Brentford and Isleworth branch of the Labour Party and had been for many years. He contributed a lot of money to the Labour party over the years (he was a butcher, and made a lot of money out of his successful business in West London) and he leafleted and campaigned for the party for most of his working life. He was a regular branch delegate at Labour party conferences. 'You don't have to be without money to be a socialist,' he says. 'I did make a lot of money and I can retire and travel a lot now, but I always belonged to the Labour party.'
He left the party in 2003, disgusted at Blair's decision to go to war, and New Labour's privatisation plans for schools, hospitals, lidos - the works. He couldn't imagine life without some sort of political activity, though, so he started to go to political meetings here and there. He decided to start find out a bit more about the Respect party after hearing George Galloway speak at an anti-war meeting. He isn't sure if George will be able to fill the gap properly, though.
'Leaving [the Labour party] was very hard. I was in the branch for a long time and I had a lot of friends there. I still have a lot of friends there. The problem was that I got disillusioned. There are not that many socialists there any more. It wasn't the party that I belonged to. It had been the same party for a long time and we never even thought about what we were doing there, but then in the last few years, it's all changed.' He says he's 'not disappointed with the party's economic success. I think Gordon Brown has been a good chancellor,' but he says that isn't really the point.
He says he met Noel Coward a few times when he was younger. He points this out, he says, because everyone asks when he tells them. 'He seemed like a nice person,' Coward says.
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Patrick Clifford from Queens Park was a welder for British Rail for 25 years. He was a member of the Labour party for many of those years, but he left in the end, because of Tony Blair. 'I never wanted Blair. He's worse that Thatcher. Everything that was for the working class has been taken away. Health, education, even water. Those things were for us. When Blair says he's going to go, and the leadership contest is declared, I'm going to rejoin the party, so that I can vote for John McDonnell.' He says that he'll see what happens then before he decides whether or not to leave again.
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Bob Mitchell from Battersea left home at 14 and worked in a munitions factory. Later on, he installed telephones. 'People were always very pleased to see me.' He was a shop steward, and went on strike without asking why. 'Everything Blair has handled has been bad. Schools, hospitals, power, essential services. Gordon Brown is another Tony Blair. He's the same. There's no difference. Nothing would change.'
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Louanne Tranchell was a Labour councillor at Hammersmith and Fulham from 1994 to 1998, and is probably as flamboyant as such a person can be. She has crazy grey hair and a lot of stories to tell and she tends to start somewhere the middle of them. She was a costume-designer and went on to become an architectural assistant.
She has been a member of the Labour party all of her adult life, as has her husband. Her three children were members until the recent Israel-Lebanon war. They all left then, 'because people kept asking them why they were members.' She says that she can't really imagine not being a member. She doesn't blame Blair for the party's woes, though.
'I feel very uncomfortable with all this 'Down with Tony Blair,' she says as she joins the Time to Go march on the Labour party conference in Manchester. 'So much of what has happened is about globalisation and capitalism. I find it very, very hard to look at one person and say well, that person is responsible for everything.'
She admires John McDonnell. 'He's very heartening. He has confirmed, through time, that our job is to represent labour [working people].' Like the low-paid, bullied women who walked out of the film processing plant they worked in 30 years ago at Grunwick in protest at their appalling pay and treatment? 'Yes,' Tranchell shouts, stabbing the air with a finger. 'Yes, that's it!'