It was my pleasure to accompany my dad on his first trip to Manchester yesterday. Doubly so when it was also for his first political march, that of saying No to the con-trick of austerity as the Conservatives bunkered down in their nearby conference hall.
Our Unison coach left Newcastle at 7am but we missed the five to six service bus due to some bus-stop confusion. A young taxi driver was on the scene to save the day to get us to the coach on time. He asked us where we were headed and admitted to having voted Conservative in May althouguh already he's regretting it. It's ok for his mam, he said, with her mortgage almost paid off, but he's working long hours and seeing little reward for his labour. He knocked a few quid, unasked for, from the fare as he said we were taking a stand for the rest of the country.
On the coach a friend texted good luck and he told me 120,000 people were descending on Manchester and that some elements of the media were doing their best to depict us as thugs. I looked up at the lady sat in front of me with her intricately knitted cardigan as she softly commented upon how lovely the wild flowers in the grass verge we passed were and wondered to myself where the thugs were in this situation.
Really, the day for us was quite uneventful in Manchester. The Sun fully burst through as we arrived onto Oxford Road and we waited patiently at least two hours before marching through the city.
Where we were, near the rear of the multitude, the general feeling was peaceful, happy, lots of smiling, energised faces of all ages, accents and attire. Corbyn's election success has given such a boost and validates the hopes and ideas of so many people ignored by the few deluding operators holding their dim and deceiving conference. That boost doesn't necessarily have to be to Labour Party people either. I was talking to a Green Party member, an economics tutor, who spoke of the encouragement he's taking from having an anti-austerity leader in the main opposition party now.
We had four hours in the city to do what was a half hour march but there were so many people there was the danger of not getting back to our departing coach in time.
As I said to the taxi driver in the morning, one of the main reasons for making the trip way out west was to give us some heartening cheer, a fillip in these hard times. I don't doubt that the Tories see such days of masses of people enjoying a day of solidarity in the sunshine, of merely wanting the right to live a life of hope and promise rather than fear and dismay as something they'd want to put a stop to. Despite their best, most concerted efforts, days such as this show there could well be too much optimism and positivity for them to handle.
