Twelve Wasted Years and why it matters. A note to Curtis and Becca

Last year when my grandson Curtis and his girlfriend Becca arrived in Nottingham, where he had come to do an MA at Nottingham-Trent University, Susan and I took the opportunity to pass on most of our Labour and Post-war Reconstruction library. Both Labour Party members and active, it seemed only natural that these books should go to them. One was a thick paperback titled Twelve Wasted Years. You can see the cover below and somewhere in my text, a brief explanation as to its content but when Curtis sent me the image last night he made the fatal mistake of asking 'What do you need it for?' Below the cover is the reply I sent him:

Being an oldie does have its advantages. At times I feel like a walking archive and this is one of them! All the web searches in the world could not tell me what I know or the significance of Twelve Wasted Years, starting in 1951 and continuing until 1964.

In 1963 I was 19, a Young Socialist, an active trade unionist, just changed jobs and not long engaged engaged when Twelve Wasted Years was thrown into my hands by a wonderful old guy called Ray Dent, then Treasurer of Wembley South Constituency Labour Party and a world-weary ‘Labour man’, who had seen it all. He always wore a suit and ash from the cigarette half hanging of his lips always covered the front of his waistcoat.

I remember saying to him ‘Don’t you want it?’ It was as if he had given me a first edition of the New Testament. I read it with a sense of excitement over the following days and quoted from it on endless occasions thereafter. It was a work of reference: how we had got to where we were and where we were going. It was all there in one thick paperback. Read the section on housing and weep.

Ray Dent’s reply to me was ‘No need. I know what it says. It’s as if we scared to cross the finishing line, we always throw it away and one day they’re going to give up on us if your lot don’t make it happen’. The ‘they’, of course, was the working class and ‘my lot’ was the YS, then a bunch of working teenagers, a few would find their way to university, but most, like me, married young, bought houses, had their first baby and were on the way to finishing their apprenticeships, becoming  managers, civil servants, skilled workers and even young Labour Party councillors like myself, and one of our lot is now a peer. 

That, at 76, three of my ‘comrades’ from those days are still good friends I find amazing. Three of us still in the Party, one of us Green, and we all still talk politics, still believe and I have the great joy of having had Susan to listen to my rants and put me right for the past 46 years and now I have you and Becca to listen to and watch, proud to busting that you are, in so many ways, taking on a far harder fight than the one I took on from Ray Dent, your Uncle Dave and Auntie Nannie, now sadly gone but both Labour Party councillors in Harlow. How I wish you could meet them.

Uncle Dave (Howard). I took this photo in Harlow in 1960. He was a plumber and Secretary of the Plumbers Trade Union in Harlow. He became a Labour councillor for Brays Grove, where he lived in 1972. When he stood down, 16 years later, my Auntie Nannie replaced him. I spent many of my school holidays with them and my cousins until I started work in 1959 aged 15.

All this prompted by the hearing Keir Starmer a couple of days ago set out his vision and thinking is that really the best you can do? Harold Wilson became Leader of the Party in 1963, twelve years after Labour lost the 1951 General Election and with him came Twelve Wasted Years. A brave thing to do at the time and unimaginable now.

Make of all this what you will. As for myself, I fear Ray Dent’s prophecy has come to be and that the Labour Party is lost as presently constituted, but I will go to my grave a libertarian socialist and a community activist committed to localism, glad that I have had local history to guide me; that I got to ride on trolleybuses and that I have a Nottingham bus named after me. At my age I have the right to see the world a little differently and to share my vision, but that’s for next time...

All I will say is that the word 'coalescence' looms large in my future vision.