I'm not an overtly political person. Naturally, I have my opinions on the right order of things and it would be fair to say that this is informed by an upbringing supervised by working class, Labour Party activist parents. I did not follow their dogma slavishly, but I respected the fact that they knew of what they spoke.
Maggie Thatcher and her governments loomed over my sweetest years and coloured my world. It was not a colour that matched anything I wore - and in an environment that celebrated excess, small people with no financial clout became increasingly disenfranchised. In this poem set to music, the at times quite breathtakingly good John Cooper-Clarke, "The Bard of Salford", captures perfectly the loss of pride and increasing social exclusion that a "greed is good" culture promoted.
I'm lucky - I am not one of the people of whom he speaks, but I'm still made angry, even now, by this perfectly formed (in my opinion) Kodak moment for the non-camera owning people of Britain's Beasley Streets.
