The reluctant radicals

Activists, old and young, feel voiceless in the new political climate, but is that a reason for not voting? Paul Vallely listens to two veterans

It is, more than ever before, the Election of the Disenfranchised. The Can't Be Bothered Party will, psephologists are predicting, make an unusually good showing this time. The turn-out at the poll, they speculate, will be poor.

In addition to the usual quota of the apathetic and disengaged, there are still those who removed themselves from the electoral register in poll tax days. Add to that those in what is pejoratively termed the "underclass", whose economic alienation spills over into the electoral sphere.

But this time there are also the radicals, those who no longer feel at home in a deracinated Labour Party, who feel that on a whole range of issues - increased taxation, law and order, the poverty gap, nuclear power, Trident and even the National Lottery - they have no vehicle for voicing their opposition to the main party consensus. Such radicalism exists at both ends of the age spectrum, as I discovered when I brought 26-year- old roads activist Jai Redman together with 87-year-old Spanish Civil War veteran Bill Alexander. Despite the age gap there are striking parallels in their background, political formation, activism and disenchantment .

Bill was born in 1910. The son of a rural carpenter, he was brought up in Hampshire by a mother whom he describes as "a free-thinker"; though they were a poor family there was always a newspaper in the house. After passing the scholarship he progressed to Reading University, where he read chemistry. It was at the height of the Depression, and when the Welsh hunger marchers came through the town, Bill and his fellow students went down and listened. After graduating he worked in a paper mill, where he joined the National Union of Printers, Bookbinders and Paperworkers and, at the age of 22, became a member of the Communist Party.

Jai was born six decades later just down the road in Southampton. After an upbringing in the "sterile environment" of a new housing estate with parents who "aspired to middle-class consumer comfort", he also went to university in Reading, to read Fine Art. But it was politics rather than his chosen subject which fired him too. "There was no real politics on the campus: just the old groups. The Tories were the biggest, opposed by the Socialist Workers' Party." But then came animal rights protests and campaigns against student loans and the poll tax. "It taught me the importance of individual action, of people taking control of their lives."

The defining moment for Jai came with the plan to cut a motorway through Twyford Down. "I had passed it every weekend as a child on the way to my grandparents and I had always thought that this totally circular hill was something romantic, other-worldly, magical." He got on the next train there and finished his degree from the protest camp, switching from sculpture to photography to document the fight against the road .

Bill Alexander's righteousness was roused by something which was more immediately menacing - fascism. "The essence of fascism is that there are superior nations, races and religions and that the superior can use power to maintain that position." Bill heard of the persecution of Jews, communists and trade unionists - and feared for the same thing in Britain if Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts triumphed. "We all turned out to stop him at the Battle of Cable Street. But when in Spain the people stood up to stem the tide, I decided the natural thing for me was to go and help stop it there before it reached my home and my family."

He fought for 18 months, becoming a Commander in the British Battalion of the International Brigade, before he was wounded and invalided out. "Franco was backed by an experienced Italian army fresh from its war in Abyssinia and by the full might of Germany, which wanted to practise its Blitzkrieg and dive-bombing techniques. The Republicans had no supply of arms and the British government pursued a policy of 'non-intervention', which meant we would not supply the arms. Bravery and conviction will take you a long way, but in the end the bomb and the bullet will win out. So all the time we were doing what we could to influence public opinion back here to change the Government's non-intervention policy. We sent postcards home and wrote to local papers hammering away and saying: 'For God's sake, change the policy'.

"There was also a big movement to collect money and medical aid. The aim was to carry public opinion. That was the big lesson we learned in Spain, and have followed ever since. You've got to combine what you do with winning more people to your point of view. That's what we did when we came home."

I t was a lesson which Jai and his contemporaries had absorbed from the start of their direct action. "Public opinion has always been the be-all-and-end-all to us. You can stage direct confrontations but in the end you have to make your point to the general population. All we can do is be an example to other people to say to them: 'This tide of tarmac and destruction goes no further than us. But you have to come in behind us'." We never felt that as a group of 20 or 30 people in a field we could affect the thing decisively. But if we were in the papers and on TV we could perhaps make a difference."

Bill's battles were at Jarama, Brunete, Aragon, Teruel, Seguro and de los Banos. Jai's were at Twyford Down, Jesmond Dene, Salisbury Hill, the M11 and the Newbury by-pass. At the end of the day, of course, in each case they failed.

"I disagree," says Bill. "In Spain we were defeated after three years, but the world learned from the resistance that fascism was not invincible or inevitable. So when the Second World War began more people were ready. We weren't defeated, we just went to fight on a different front. That's a comfort for you, Jai: you may not win every time, but you can lose the first round yet win the war."

"You can't say people like Bill lost when there are people like me fighting today," Jai responds. "Bill is absolutely right. It is about telling people that the enemy can be defeated. Environmental destruction is not inevitable. Multinational corporate fascism - with its cultural cleansing, its chemical waste, pollution, violence and the Armani suit it wears instead of jackboots - is not invincible. Individual bypasses may go through, but we believe we are winning the war and making people realise that building more and more roads is a Sixties attitude to infrastructure which offers no long- term solution. I really believe that in the future people will look back and say 'They were right' and be pleased that there were people prepared to make sacrifices - not heroics or martyrdom like Bill's generation - but sacrifices for a better future."

To such an agenda the forthcoming general election is, he insists, largely irrelevant. Bill agrees, and see the problem in terms of method as much as modern electoral style. "When I came out of the Army I stood as a Communist in 1945 in Coventry East against Dick Crossman. I went round in a clapped- out Austin Seven speaking to the people - on the streets, in the canteens, at the factory gates." That approach was partly dictated by lack of finances, but also by ideology: it was important to get to the people so that dialogue could be two-way.

"Today there is no attempt to do that," Bill laments. "There are large numbers of the unemployed, homeless, the low-paid and the poor. But there is no attempt to canvass their views." Their agenda would not sit easily with the TV soundbites. Mention of such things might frighten off the legendary Middle England voter.

New Labour's strategy to concentrate all its efforts on the views of key voters in a handful of marginal seats is, Bill believes, wrong "politically and morally". He explains: "If the aim is only to get a parliamentary majority, regardless of what you have to do to achieve it, sooner or later you'll come up against the opposition, indignation and anger of parents, patients, trade unionists, environmentalists." If the main political parties persist with such a strategy - and if New Labour continues its attempt to stultify any questioning minority with an atmosphere of dictatorship and conformity - Bill believes that politics will take on a new form with single-issues direct action, like that of Jai, as the new norm.

The young activist agrees. "Politics is defined by people. All these disenfranchised groups - that's where the real politics is, not with hollow figures wrestling with each other for power and a Prime Minister who looks like an alternative comedian impersonating a prime minister."

This is why the imperatives of real politics have so little interface with the election agenda. "Look what is happening in Central Africa today," says Bill. "Who in this election campaign has mentioned that?" He lists the other issues which have gone missing from this Marie Celeste of British politics - the increasing poverty gap, the insecurity of those in work as well as the frustration of those without it, transport issues, pensions, genetically engineered food, and sustainable development in what he calls "the majority world" in which two-thirds of the globe's population exists in serious insufficiency.

There is, responds Jai, no politics on the street now - "It all comes out of The Box." That is why he did not bother to vote last time and why he will not vote on 1 May.

Bill is unhappy at the suggestion. "I can't bring myself to canvass for Labour, as I always have in the past. I have very little heart for what's happening in the new Labour Party." But he will vote, for the lesser of evils.

"In struggle you've got to go step by step," he says, addressing Jai directly. "The old radicalism was built over generations - building trade unions, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the formation of the Labour Party. It took years to assemble. History has never been a straight upward curve, it's all ups and downs; after 17 years of Thatcherite individualism we have a lot to rebuild. So the first thing is to get Labour elected, and the next is to press for change within New Labour. Absenteeism doesn't recognise that struggle is a step-by-step process."

Jai looks momentarily chastened by the authority of age and experience. "I don't know whether my landlord has registered me," he says. "If so I may vote Green, or I may go in and spoil my paper. What we need is a box to tick which says 'None of the Above'. But I will vote if I can. You've shamed me into it."

The old radical laughs at the young one. La lucha continua. The fight goes on.