David and Katherine Goodwin

When I was much younger, I was quite interested in politics - mostly the theoretical aspects of it rather than the day to day activities of politicians. At university, I indulged this interest by taking several politics modules during the first year I spent doing a history degree. (Almost half of my modules were politics or modern history modules from the International Politics department)

I've never been involved in actual politics (I don't belong to any organisations, have never campaigned about anything), mostly because I haven't felt strongly enough about anything to really get my hands dirty. I doubt that will change in the near future.

I have always, however, been fairly certain about my political leanings. I've always been theoretically left wing. I've always like socialist ideas but appreciate the difficulties in actually making them work. As such, I've always been a vague Lib-Dem voter, feeling they were the best of a bad bunch. Recently though, I've had reasons to question my political opinions, and even to question whether I actually have a decided leaning either way.

I've heard it said that young, idealistic people start of being left-wing, and gradually move further right as they get older and their concerns change. (This is essentially pegging left-wing as idealistic and right-wing as realistic, which I'm not quite sure of).

The first thing that led me to start questioning my beliefs was my experience as a trainee teacher. I saw several schools during my time training, including what was supposedly some of the best and worst in the system. The best gave me some faith in the system's ability to at least instill some discipline, but didn't make me feel any better about the testing culture in schools. The worst made me lose what little faith I had in our social system, and almost in humanity at times! Seeing the education system failing to drag even a few of the kids out of their benefit culture was extremely depressing, and made me not only not want to teach, but also seriously consider whether I want my children (if and when they come) to enter the state school system.

The next prompt to get me thinking again was when I gained a better understanding of just how much tax we pay. I've had to become interested in such things as I've got our business up and running, and learnt how to run a payroll. It has just felt to me as if we're being taxed out of every orifice. Before, I had never really thought about it - I've just worked around what was in my pay cheque.

This leads me to my second point. While, as someone who beleives that we have obligations to each other as a society, I have no problems with paying reasonably high taxes, but I don't feel like we're getting value for what we do pay. We've got a health system that I'm certainly going to "opt out of" as soon as I get round to sorting out health insurance (which shows how much faith I have in it), an education system that I dispair of and don't get me started, as a non-driver, on the public transport system. We're paying all that money and nothing works.

I feel like I'm stuck in the middle. Ideally, I want a system that works. I want to be able to contribute to the society that I live in. I don't have the skills to be able to say how we can fix public transport, or the NHS. (although I suppose I could contribute something to the education debate). We should be able to rely on the people who run our country to work on these problems, but we don't have a party that seems to offer any sensible solutions to them.

Bringing all of these thoughts to the fore lately, has been a BBC program on Tuesday nights at 9pm, called "The Amazing Mrs Pritchard" about a woman who goes from being a Supermarket manager to Prime Minister. It's a brilliantly scripted program, and to someone like me who has already been thinking about these things, is so far illustrating wonderfully so many things that are wrong with our political system. Essentially people vote for her "Purple Alliance" because they're completely dissilusioned with the alternatives, and that's how I feel.

Its very hard to reconcile my ideals with the reality of living. I'm not sure how I could participate in our political system to make things better, so the temptation is to vote for a party that will reduce taxes, and to opt out of the system as much as possible. Now here I have to say that I will never ever vote Conservative, because of various non-economic policies they have, and their general attitude that I dislike. So what choices are there for me? It's something I'll be thinking about seriously in the future, in between the rest of my ridiculously hectic life.

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