"Keep on Rockin' in the Free World"

'There’s a warning sign on the road ahead,

There’s a lot of people saying we’d be better off dead

Keep on rockin’ in the free world

Keep on rockin’ in the free world.'

I'm desperate! Dan

But where is the free world, Neil ?

Is your irony lost on me?

I no longer act  -  too numb to feel.

I guess I’ll go back to bonnie Dundee

Where D.C. Thomson publishes reactionary tripe

Twixt couthy lines frae The Broons and Desperate Dan

That scramble my mind and fog up my sight
Of the devil and detail of a usurer's scam.

___________

The first stanza is taken from Neil Young's "Keep on Rockin' in the Free World" to be found on his 1989 album "Freedom."

My photo caption is extracted from the script of Alan Bleasdale's "Boys from the Black Stuff" (BBC, 1982).

The statue of Desperate Dan created in 2001 by artists Tony and Susie Morrows shows the great man striding the High Street, Dundee.



Postscript added 14th July, 2019

Just back from London after listening to and watching Neil Young and Bob Dylan. It was a great gig and both men impressed in their own way. Let's not forget, they're both in their seventies. Not that it was a competition, the two men are friends, but Young edged it. Though staying to listen to Dylan's full set paid dividends for you gradually began to understand where he's at now.
Apparently difficulties with the management teams meant they couldn't sing together on a song, though the folk who saw the show in Kilkenny were treated to a brief joint performance.
For me it was fantastic, I'd never heard or seen Bob Dylan live, and of course Neil Young is one of my heroes. It was great how he knocked Barclaycard "oot o' the game".
I'm well over seventy years old too and this was probably the last time I'll be standing on my feet for seven hours.
"Why not sit down?" you may ask. Look, if I sit on the ground these days, there is a good chance I'll never get up again. 

Sitting on the kerb between the cundie and the lamp post in Clement Park

It's no secret that I have become very agitated by the attacks on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. I have attempted to slacken the tension by speaking with or writing to friends sympathetic to my views but I am sure their patience will run out soon. It seems I find the possibility of not having influence on the future unbearable. I have come to the conclusion that in part my anxiety can be explained as an unavoidable characteristic of my journey into old age. At first I was not conscious of it but now I see that I am beginning to understand, and to confront, my limited life span. I no longer have the physical capacity to do all the things I used to enjoy nor is there the time left to say all the things I wanted to say. The span of years, months and days which remain to shape the world in my way, is inexorably diminishing. This may sound pompous but my guess is that most of us have at least a vague notion of how we would like the world to be and after all we have no reverse dimension that allows to undo those things we wish we had not done.

My desperation is reinforced by the realisation that I will fail in my aim. This awareness seems to have crept upon me stealthily and unseen, but there is a sense in which I’ve known it all along. On the night of my 40th birthday I was working in a children’s home in the north midlands of England and while I sat on the upstairs landing waiting for the children to settle, it dawned upon me that I would never have the time to do all the things I had hoped to do. This was nothing to do with my abilities but more to do with spatial and temporal limitations. I couldn’t be in two places at the same time. 

How different from the prospect I had one sunny summer's day in the mid-1950s while sitting on the kerb between the cundie and the lamp post in front of our house in Clement Park. It was about 8.30 in the morning and I was waiting for JL and FJ to finish their breakfasts, hoping their mothers would soon let them out to play. There were so many possibilities for the day. We could play fitba', or catty and batty, play Gerries and Britishers, or cowboys and indians or we could play Kerby or make a den or we could….….... The prospects for adventure were endless. The future could be thought of without fear.

_________________________

John Stein comments : Your post really struck a chord with me.  I got the anxiety, and the wish I could do more.  I have written two letters to the editor of our newspaper, one about our fascination with guns, the other about police shootings, one near here in Baton Rouge.  I did not send them.  Those who already agreed with my points, well, they don’t need to hear from me.  Those who don’t agree--their beliefs would not be influenced in the slightest.

And then your letter about Jeremy Corbyn.  Sad to see some of the same dynamics in Britain that we have here.

My wife’s favorite quote:  May you live in interesting times.  Ancient Chinese curse.

Dear fellow members, re-Jeremy Corbyn and PLP Labour MPs who abuse power.

Here is the text of a letter I sent on July 1st, 2016, to the secretary of my local constituency Labour Party in Totnes, Devon, in response to the proposed agenda for our next meeting. It may be somewhat emotional in nature but I think the message within it is a reasonable one.

Dear fellow member,

I am rather saddened there is no agenda item to discuss firstly, the behaviour of those Labour MPs who are attempting to ride roughshod over the wishes of a substantial majority of the Labour Party’s members and secondly to consider what to do about their inhumane humiliation of a decent man. Like many people I did not rejoin the Labour Party last year to be under the screw of self-important Blairite media sycophants, who take the stance that they know much more about things than us ordinary folks and who feel it is their right to bounce us into doing what they decide must happen.

I also knew when I rejoined the Labour Party that a number of Labour MPs did not like the members’ decision to elect Jeremy Corbyn. You’ll remember for instance the nuances of Ben Bradshaw's* contribution at the meeting for new members that was held around Christmas at the Royal Seven Stars Hotel, in Totnes. Certainly at the time of that meeting it was clear there were people at Westminster who would work against Jeremy whatever he did.  In my view the attack against Jeremy Corbyn has been orchestrated by a number of Labour MPs for some time and the referendum result offered them an opportunity to do this when the entire community was in disarray. The funny thing is Jeremy Corbyn had a very good referendum campaign being perhaps the only leading political figure on either side who was honest and did not manipulate figures in order to generate fear. I can’t actually remember any great contributions made by other leading members of the parliamentary party, though no doubt there were.

 I write this all because these issues are not addressed in the agenda, in a very middle class English way it seems almost to have been denied, "Let’s ignore dirty things like an attack upon a properly elected leader of the Labour Party by those who seek influence in an  undemocratic way." Meaning: let's not pull out our Blairite roots, let's cultivate them."

As for the referendum, I believe there should never have been one. It came about as a consequence of the difficulties the Prime Minister was experiencing within the Tory Party and yet such is the power of the Westminster/ politico/media clique, and some elements of the Labour Party it ends up that the person who is targeted for  humiliation by this - is, an honest man, our elected leader.

I hope to be at the meeting on July 7th.** My temperature may have come down by then!

Best wishes,

Charles Sharpe


Notes and post script.

* Ben Bradshaw, Labour Party Member of Parliament for Exeter

**  September, 2019. Since I sent this letter a motion deploring the action of the MPs of those Parliamentary Labour Party MPs who openly oppose Jeremy Corbyn has been placed on the agenda for our next constituency meeting on July 7th.

*** September, 2019, David Cameron in his memoir For the Record claims he did not call a referendum to save the Conservative from breaking up. I don't believe him, any more than I would believe that other smootho Tory Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

On my son's 50th birthday

It's my son's 50th birthday today. It was a wonderful day when he was born. I could tell you lots of stories about him but there is one which epitomises a quality, among a number of good ones he has, and that is, determination.

At about the age of 15 or 16 my son told me he intended to be a journalist. I said to him, "Och everyone wants to be a journalist when they're young, I did too. Why don't you just forget about that for a while, go to university, get a degree and then you can decide what you want to do ? Being a journalist right now is a bit of a romantic notion." He listened to me. He didn't respond. I was sure my wisdom had gotten through.

A couple of weeks later while reading the sports pages of two of our local newspapers, I found in one a report on local golf competitions and in the other a report on a local rugby match. Both publications described the author of these articles respectively as their golf and rugby correspondents. The byline of these articles had the name of my son as their author.  What a man.

Last train fae the Tay Brig Station

D'ye  mind when we rode oot some days on the tram and sailed o'er the Tay on the Fifie?
That wiz in the non-pc days when ye ca'd a woman a wifie.
Eh recall oor mulk was fae the DPM,  and oor links fae Alex Munro.
When flush,  tae the pictures at the Greens Playhouse, when skint tae the fleapit, Rialto.
Oor  hair was trimmed  by Chic Reid or R.S.Peters,
Oor favourite fae Soaves was tuppence worth o' fritters.


Ach but that's a' awa' - change is the nature of the cosmo
Nae mair Aberdeenies  fae Macdougall's , nae fags nor papers fae Kosto's.
Cox's chimney may still stand but there are nae workers in the mill -
Whit's the guid ?  jute, watches, cash registers
Nane'll come back for time has the determination
No ' tae  stick at '57 when the train left the Tay Brig Station.


Last train fae the Tay Brig station
Last train fae the Tay Brig station
Ye'll catch this yin
'n  ye'll never be coming back again
Last train fae the Tay brig station.


O'er the brig the carriages are rollin'
O'er the brig the carriages are rollin'
Doon tae England, doon tae York
whaur noo oor faither diz his work.


60 far years 'n Eh'm still oot there travelling,
60 far years oot there still unravelling,
Whit it signified, Eh couldnae master;
South o'er the brig, och, whit a disaster.

I am an anarchist : telling lies about our prisons

In the days leading up to yesterday's Queen's Speech, the UK government's pronouncements about our "failing prisons" not being "fit for purpose" (very selectively reinforced by the recently government appointed head of Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Prisons, ex-counter-terrorist policeman, Peter Clarke) left me with the impression that some uninvited, unidentified foreign body had invaded the prison system and was responsible for the devastating assault that has been made upon it in recent years. Yesterday Her Majesty, instructed by the Prime Minister, David Cameron on the advice of Michael Gove, our Minister of Justice, told us that her government is now going to make right all that is wrong in our prisons by putting into place rehabilitation and education resources which will make Nirvana of our institutes of incarceration.

Who can disagree with this ?  Well, in all this what is not mentioned in any of the headlines is that the travesty that now fills the space of our formerly good, if far from perfect prison service, was brought about by Michael Gove's predecessor, Christopher Grayling, who, with David Cameron's approval, took the decision to cut the staffing levels of our prison service, in the face of an ever-growing prisoner population, by more than 30%. Yes, 30%.  The Conservative led coalition government and the current Conservative one have, with their drastic chopping of staff during the last 6 years, destroyed the very services they  now claim to be "introducing" to the prison service.

The period the government has spent wrecking rehabilitation and education resources in prisons has seen increasingly inhumane living conditions for prisoners, as well as a dramatic downturn in the morale of the service because the growing pressures on a speedily decreasing number of officers have made it impossible for them to be as effective as they would wish in helping prisoners. Will our government give back to the prisoners these 6 years of deprivation? Will it admit liability for the way it has failed the prison service?

The spurious presentation of issues and information is a characteristic of our government and indeed many politicians.  The nature of their behaviour is accurately represented as dissembling and  disingenuousness as they deny any responsibility for their failures. People who are less prolix and less pompous than me call, this "Telling lies."

If this is government, I don't need it. I am now an anarchist.

Greatness, Andy Warhol, Andy Murray et al and my Mother.

Apart from the apogee of my well documented  rugby and footballing playing days my achievements in life have struggled to reach even a modest level. 

I may have missed out on greatness for myself, but I have taken substantial consolation  -  if in not quite touching shoulders with 'the greats' - in being in places associated with or visited by some of the great heroes. This is particularly true of hotels where I have taken a room. 

Last year I stayed at the Walcott Hotel in Manhattan in order to attend a family wedding in Central Park. Almost 60 years before I rested my head on a pillow at The Walcott, it offered lodging to Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers when they were recording at the nearby Beltones studios. A little earlier in 1904, the hotel was the New York residence of Mark Twain. 

I have not always so widely missed the target of being in the same hotel at the same time as one of the colossi of our culture. Some years ago when I stayed at the Puente Romano Hotel in Marbella where the concierge informed me I had missed Sean Connery by only a week and that Prince Charles was due the following week. (I accept I may not have universal support for counting our future king as a cultural icon).  

Apart from an event I will describe later, the closest I ever came to being  engaged in company with one of my heroes while at the same location, was when I saw Vaclav Havel in El Quijote, a Spanish restaurant in Manhattan then used by the guests at the Hotel Chelsea next door. The Hotel Chelsea, where for about a week I was once in residence, had at one time or another been a resting pad for Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan, Shirley Clarke, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, Patti Smith, Brendan Behan, Jasper Johns and many more cultural titans. I should not forget in this Chelsea list the tragic Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious.  

I am relating these arguably non-events at hotels because -  as part of my recent 70th birthday celebrations (?!) -  my children generously provided us with a night's stay including dinner and breakfast at Cromlix House, a country hotel near Dunblane. The hotel is owned by Andy Murray. The rural setting of the hotel was magnificent and though the hotel was full, the atmosphere was so relaxed and peaceful we decided to stay for an additional night.  

To be sure that we shared the ether with greatness, on our first evening we slept in the Sean Connery Room and on the second evening we slept in the Arthur Conan Doyle Room. The major disappointment of our stay for me was that Andy did not personally wait upon us at the dinner or breakfast table. Furthermore despite there being two superb tennis courts in the hotel grounds, he couldn't find time to work out with me over a couple of sets. He seems to have been too busy enjoying parenthood  as well as playing in a tournament in Miami.

Even so I don't think I'd be telling you all this if I hadn't noticed this morning in the pages of The Scotsman (a newspaper I  infrequently read) that the Cromlix House Hotel had been voted "The Most Luxurious Hotel" in Scotland. Further on in the article I read that Balbirnie House Hotel in Markinch, Fife had been voted both Wedding Hotel of the Year and also the Scottish Hotel of the Year. This is noteworthy because it was there in 1994 my sisters, my brother in law, my wife and I enjoyed a family lunch with my mother to celebrate her 70th birthday. This was an occasion upon which I truly shared with one of 'the greats'.

For all kinds of reasons my mother is a legend. More of that another time.

Happy times: my playing days with Dundee Football Club and the Scotland rugby team.

A great deal of frustration together with the exercise of tolerance comes with the lot of being a Dundee FC supporter and a Scotland rugby supporter : a few wonderful 'highs' and perhaps an excess of 'lows' and yet it's good to look back on the happier times.


I was clearing out our garden shed the other day and came across these three photographs that brought back some memories of happier days. The photos which were copies of press cuttings my grandson had collected are not as clear as they should be. They've been damaged by the damp atmosphere in the shed but I publish them here for general interest and as curios of unique events in Scottish sporting history.

You'll remember that a few seasons ago I scored a number goals for Dundee FC. You'll see below a photo of me spinning away in celebration just after I'd volleyed in a beauty for Dundee against United.

The following season I returned to playing rugby and you can see me here in action at Murrayfield. You'll note that I'd had to do a lot of work pumping iron to get my physique right for the upper body stresses of modern international rugby.

What was most extraordinary - you may recall the stir it created in the press and on the radio and TV at the time - is that both my grandsons, S and J played in the same sides with me at Dens Park and Murrayfield. It was the first time that a grandfather and his grandsons had played simultaneously at both senior football level  for Dundee FC and for the Scotland rugby side. In the photo above my grandsons can be seen playing in support of me as I begin to throw the pass that led to the winning try.

The final photo shows the three of us celebrating a goal in the victory which led to Dundee winning the Scottish Premiership.

Proud days for us.

_____________________________

Photographs  © 2015   SST

Published 1.4.16



Comments    

Noel Howard writes
Nice to see your sporting exploits on the blog and also as John Burton said, so modestly put. I see the Dandy makes an appearance on a recent blog.....in my book no education is complete for those who were not fortunate enough to have waited eagerly every week for the Beano, Dandy, Lion, Tiger et al......soap operas for kids but the difference being good triumphed (usually) over evil. If only we could be so certain today. Do you remember the 64 pagers ?

John Burton observes
I'm astounded, Charles. A sporting dynasty. An inspiration to us all. And so modest with it!

Emlyn Schiavone comments,
As Jimmy Nail once said :-  "Hang on to your dreams. It helps to get through the working week."

Our own kind of terrorism

     Following yesterday’s bombing in Brussels I find myself torn apart, facing quite determinedly in two directions. I condemn the murder of innocent human beings. Murderous terrorism should not be used to resolve issues even if it is carried out by those who claim to represent people who are being victimised and treated in one way or another unjustly.  I also condemn the military intervention of  western and Russian governments to secure by military action their own commercial interests in a region, the middle-east, where they  have no right to suzerainty. Over many years innocent people in that region have been and are being killed on a daily basis as a direct and indirect consequence of inept military and political interference by external powers   I believe this interference is a root cause of the outrageous acts of bloody and murderous terrorism we are witnessing. 

     We are right to condemn the murder of innocent people in Brussels and each of the other places where in recent decades terrorists have carried out their heinous acts,  but shouldn’t we be contrite about our own kind of terrorism towards innocent people in the middle east ? 

     Should we even at this dreadful time be talking about how to resolve differences peacefully ?  Should we examine the whole issue and not just our own interests in it ? 

     Each of us can have murderous feelings when events like those which happened in Brussels yesterday occur. We often have ambiguous feelings too. After all it is not too long ago that the United Kingdom had a very powerful and influential prime minister who considered Nelson Mandela a terrorist. 

Well, was he or wasn’t he?

Six magnificent years and six tragic years : the privatisation of the United Kingdom

For six magnificent years from  1945 to 1951, a Labour Government, advised by a Liberal thinker, William Beveridge, and a progressive Conservative, Rab Butler, created a caring state system which ensured that as a community we took responsibility to look after all of our members who struggled with poverty, and poor health. Previously people had to pay for health services and so the poor died young. A free to all National Health Service was created, unquestionably the greatest achievement in the history of the community of people we call the United Kingdom. Furthermore all children now had access to a state education system managed by elected local authorities.

From 1979 to 1997 the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major attempted to  undermine these universal services and though Margaret Thatcher's government severely damaged the power of trade unions and attacked the long fought for rights of working people we had to wait for the New Labour governments of the now multi-millionaire Tony Blair and that son of the manse Gordon Brown to see profiteering private enterprise being introduced to our welfare, health and education services. Privatisation offers rich rewards for senior directors and shareholders of companies, diminishes the rewards and rights of workers and leads to declining services, both in number and in quality, for all those who most need them.

The New Labour government of 1997 to 2010 marked the lowest ebb in the moral ethics of the Labour movement. Little wonder that in the 2010 general election many traditionally Labour Party voters switched to support the Liberal Democrat Party when the latter's leaders,  people like Nick Clegg and Vince Cable claimed the Liberal Democrats were now the centre left's  genuinely radical caring party. It was a believable claim since the New Labour had proved to be one of the most successful capitalist/conservative sympathising governments in living memory.

We were in for more political treachery. Following voting day in the 2010 General Election, the "radical" Liberal Democrats,  held the balance of power, and decided to cuddle up with the Conservatives. This was not only treachery towards former Labour Party supporters the Liberal Democrat Party had enticed to vote for them it was also  treachery towards many of its own traditional supporters.

The following six years, from 2010 to 2016 have been tragic as we have watched the ever accelerating travel towards the death of the caring community that was once the United Kingdom.

Predictably the Liberal Democrats while they were in government could not stand up to the forces of Conservatism and in last year's General Election most of the Liberal Democrat MPs were drummed out of the Westminster parliament while New Labour paying the price of taking the support of the people of Scotland for granted lost all but one of its parliamentary seats to the Scottish Nationalist Party. The result is that we have an extreme right wing Conservative government (voted in by less than 40% of the electorate) deliberately and it seems with vicious delight legislating to impoverish further those who have very little in the first place. The last six dismal years have witnessed the invasion of our public services by the profiteering force of privatisation with its concomitant loss of jobs, and the increasingly poor pay and conditions of the diminishing numbers of workers who remain in our public services. Tonight the United Kingdom government signalled its intention to close local authority schools in favour of privately backed academies.  Public services should not be run on a profit making basis but its advance has surely reached the stage of the straw which broke the camel's back.

So frustrated am I that I ask people who voted for this Conservative government, if this is what you wanted?  Are you content that those who experience poverty, disability, physical and mental health difficulties, poor employment conditions and no prospects should be further disadvantaged and punished. Do you think you are superior to these people? Weren't you proud that as a people, as a community we had a national covenant to help those of us who struggle?  Are you happy being a driving force in a sadistic United Kingdom ?

More from the poetaster : lost in plastic and the present

They're saying my potato crisp is a chip
Just as my chips were changed to French fries.
I put it on the card, never leave a tip.
This is all fact, not temporary lies.

No longer a crisp

Still a crisp

Stuck in decades not extant
Wistful for the crackle of vinyl on radiogram;
Like others I swipe plastic, peer at the iPhone in my hand
but lose the idea of who I was, ipso facto who I am.

Of this man of letters, learning and erudition,
dusty books are no longer a measure;
sneering and cursing with Luddite derision,
I hold iPad and Kindle, for new fangled treasure.


In despair to the attic, I find an old Beano or Dandy,
re-discover my comforter, my very own modus operandi.

Manual for leading a contented life 

Better watch out for the poetry : feelings after a Local Labour Party meeting

Nobody spoke the poetry,
Permission was not given.
None wished to hear it.
Beauty might commit us
and while the enemy is within
Truth becomes too ultimate a risk.

Better watch out for the poetry.

Vote, vote, vote for Mr Strachey he's the one who'll gi'e ye ham and eggs

When driving up to Scotland to spend a few days there as my wife and I do three or four times a year, we pass the big blue and white saltire sign which announces we have returned to the land of milk and honey. I usually make an uncalled for and puerile remark vaguely directed towards my wife, who is English, about the air suddenly feeling fresher. Being a woman of insight she disregards these remarks with the sigh of the resigned, bored and weary. She has heard it all before. "Water off a duck's back," is the phrase that comes to mind.

The air is fresher here

Undaunted by this dismissal I usually begin to sing a Scottish song with a line like, "And it's oh but I'm longing for my ain folk" but driving up on this January 2nd just past I found myself singing, I don't know why they came into my head, the lines of a skipping song that the girls at Liff Road School sang and skipped to in the playground during the early 1950s. The lyrics went like this,

'My lad wears a kilt and he wears it in the fashion
And every time he twirls aroond, ye cannae help fae laughing.'

The boys' and the girls' playgrounds were separated by iron palings so we couldn't join the girls but we watched. Occasionally in the summer after school we'd find a patch of rough  ground and  some of us boys would join the girls in skipping. I should point out here and now before a volley of spleenful emails and texts are directed towards me :  the boys who were the best fighters in the school never ever joined in these unisex endeavours.

One skipping game I remember had an accompanying song about the 1951 parliamentary election. For the game to proceed two people plied a long rope in continued rotation while one skipper after another would take turns at skipping to a verse of the song. The song went,

'Vote, vote for Mr Junor, he's the one who gives ye ham 'n  eggs
And if ye dinnae vote for him then we'll shove ye in the bin
And we'll vote for Mr. Strachey instead'.

One skipper leaves and the next enters.

'Vote vote for Mr Strachey, he's one who gives ye ham 'n eggs
If ye dinnae vote for him then we'll shove ye in the bin
And we'll vote for Mr Bowman instead'.

And so on.

I'm not sure at that age we kids knew much about the elections, and I don't know how we came to know the names of the candidates but recently I decided to find out who Mr Bowman, Mr Junor and Mr Strachey were. Certainly we were singing the song around the time of the 1951 general election when these three  men stood as the only candidates for the Dundee West Parliamentary constituency.

David Bowman, engine driver

David Bowman who stood for the Communist Party was an engine driver and the only candidate from Dundee. 







Sitting at the heart of the Dundee West constituency Lochee, where our school was situated, was a stronghold of the Communist Party in Dundee at that time. In fact just near Frankie Davies Cafe was a large room, almost a wee hall, where the Communist Party would hold its meetings and sometimes on Saturday afternoons Party members would show old early talkie feature films and communist propaganda films. At first we were keen to go along to these matinees because we liked the idea of watching films for free, but the trouble was that the vision and sound were so out of sync that as entertainment it was not a very satisfactory experience and it wasn't long before we stopped going.

A communist all his adult life, David Bowman had refused to stand against Strachey in the 1945 and the 1950 general elections (which Strachey had won for Labour) because he respected the latter's Marxist sympathies and so he stood instead as a candidate for the Dundee East constituency in 1950 mustering just over 1,000 votes.

By 1951 Strachey's Marxism had become sufficiently diluted by his ministerial experience at the War Office from 1950 to 1951, that David Bowman decided to stand against Strachey for the Dundee West seat in 1951. Nonetheless on election day Bowman trailed in as the last of three candidates with 1508 votes. John Strachey again won the seat for Labour, polling 29,020 votes.



There being no Unionist candidate, John Junor, standing as the Liberal candidate, amassed 25,714 votes.  Junor, who had been a losing candidate in the 1945 election when he stood for Kincardine and West Aberdeenshire, and in a by-election for Edinburgh East in 1947, never stood for parliament again following his defeat in Dundee.  He continued his career as - in my opinion -  a bombastic newspaper columnist for, and later as the editor of, the Sunday Express.

John Junor :  Liberal?

Mr Strachey, as he had been in 1945 and 1951, was the one our parents voted for to supply us with ham and eggs.  John Strachey was an an Englishman, an Etonian and a graduate of Magdalene College Oxford who had joined the Labour Party in the 1930s because he was seriously and sincerely  concerned about a fairer  distribution of wealth.  He first stood for parliament in 1945 as did a number of young men and women from privileged backgrounds who had seen the sufferings of the poor in the 1920s and 1930s, and were determined that the United Kingdom should become a fairer place. How things have changed since those halcyon days of the 1945-1951 Labour Government.

Etonian Marxist

Well,  you cannae help fae laughing. The air isn't as fresh as it was. A left wing Etonian doesn't rule Dundee West any more, but a fashion that hasn't altered is the hegemony of the old kind of patrician Etonian over the United Kingdom.