A Horse, My Kingdom for a Horse

So London burns and memories run deep.

Back to the 80's to Brixton, St Pauls and Toxteth, to Orgreave,to the mines of England and Scotland and Wales, to the streets of Belfast, to the Poll Tax riots. I've witnessed them all man and boy. Toxteth is my spiritual home, in Liverpool, and my son has a job there whilst following in my footsteps at the greatest of Red Brick Institutions. I work often in St Pauls and I lived on the edge of Brixton. I have walked with a heavy heart at the closures of communities following the power politics of the 80's. I know many a Yosser Hughes.

It was greed then, it is greed now. Will we ever learn.

Back then though the disaffected were genuinely disaffected. We didn't bury our dead because the cemeteries were closed. Back then there was a genuine fear that we could not go on if the mines closed and the ghetto's became unruly and untenable. I say ghetto's because that's what it was like in some places.

I was privileged, the middle class white boy from the top of the hill. I was so privileged that I went to a school that was 90 percent non white, that had more races than there are colours of the rainbow. A school where distrust and dislike simmered under the surface. I went to a school that epitomised England in the late 70's, early 80's. It was tough, it was dangerous, there were drugs and there were knives and even the odd gun or two yet through all that it was beautiful.

I was privileged because instead of going to Millfield, where I could have gone, I chose to stay, to have the best teachers and the best friends a person could have. Our teachers taught us how to fight, not with the weapons or our fists as most had been used to, but with our minds and our hearts and our thoughts and our words. With the sword of humanity and the shield of humility.

They taught us to open our minds, break down the walls and believe that by hard work and application we could build something better without losing sight of our basic human nature.

My maternal grandfather was a Union man, strong and proud, an engineer for 40 years till his death in 76, the worst year of my life. My father, strong and proud too, a Thatcherite till his dying day when his body could recover no more from the plague of the whisky and the vodka that brought the cancer, that brought the stroke that killed him. Opposing ideas but united in one love, me.

I think neither of the left or the right or the centre. I am independent in thought as my teachers inspired me to be and today I am shamed to be English.

I am shamed because it is my generation who lost their way. With greed and I'm all right Jack overcoming everything. If ever there was a Merchant of Venice scenario it is today. The Banks, will obviously play Shylock, the Politicians, Morocco and Arragon, the media Gratiano, the moral majority, Antonio but who out of this whole mess will play Portia. Who will have the wisdom to sort it all out.

Because this rioting is wrong, poverty is wrong, greed is not good! Put down your bricks and stones and build, not destroy, with the tools you carry. Be united in humanity and work within your communities to stop the rot.

We need to stop all this hysteria now or indeed it will be the winter of our discontent.