Will Self no longer loves Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism and its vision of a perfect society. But, despite Blair, he hasn’t abandoned the faith – or his hatred of vested interests. Which is why he’ll be voting Labour for the first time since 1997
I remember Martin Amis saying in an interview a couple of years before Tony Blair became prime minister, “We’re all Labour now.” I think by “all” he meant all right-thinking people, and by “Labour” he meant opposed to the Tory government of the day. At the time I bridled a little at Amis’s crazed inclusiveness – I wasn’t sure I wanted to belong to a club that apparently accepted everyone as a member. Not, I hasten to add, that I could claim to be “tribal Labour”. True, I’d voted for them in every election since I’d reached my majority, while my parents were vociferous, if not especially active, leftwingers.
My father, Peter Self, who was, oxymoronically, a “political scientist”, wrote numerous books, which, while often technical in character, were nonetheless informed by his own rather gentle and utopian socialism. My mother, whose given name was Rosenbloom, grew up in New York in the 1920s and 30s and had run with a fairly racy crowd – one including a fair number of Communist party members. In the 1960s the family home in North London offered refuge for the draft-dodging children of her American friends, and I well remember her breathless account of the tumultuous 1968 demonstration against the Vietnam war in Grosvenor Square. A feminist before the term was in general use, in the 1970s she joined consciousness-raising groups and campaigns, and in the early 1980s she took part in the women’s camp at Greenham Common.
I sometimes wonder when I stopped thinking of myself as a socialist – as with so much else, I’d like to blame Blair
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