Carroll Gurkha

The True Story of a Campaign for Justice
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-84954-304-0
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

The course of a life can be altered by the smallest decisions; the most innocuous events can turn out to have the greatest of consequences. On a Sunday afternoon in 2004, local politician Peter Carroll invited four men into his Folkestone home and promised to help them fight for the right to settle in the country they had served. Five years later, the Gurkhas of Nepal welcomed Peter as a national hero. A losing election battle against the Conservatives in his constituency and a local protest to save village post offices were the only campaigning experience that Peter could bring to the table. But passion, belief and sheer good fortune were on his side. The Gurkha Justice campaign was like a storm. It started slowly, gathering strength over the ensuing months and years before finally building to a crescendo, bursting into the national consciousness and overturning the policy of Her Majesty's Government in spectacular style. For anyone who has lost faith in human nature, Gurkha shows that when good people do good things, the incredible can be achieved. Too many people think that democracy and politics can't deliver, but here is one shining example of our country and its institutions at their very best.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Carroll, Peter

Leseproben

ONE

FIRST FALTERING STEPS

‘Some people say that a small group of committed citizens can change the world … in reality that’s all that ever does change the world.’ Margaret Mead

I suppose that all quotes become quotes because people see something profound in them, otherwise they’d just be a collection of words. For me, the quote above is not just true; it is fascinatingly true and is therefore in the Premier League of quotes. It’s just so piercing in its summary of how we live and how all politics and great movements get going. Think about the abolition of slavery, anti-apartheid, workers’ rights, suffrage … all these world-changing movements started somewhere, either with an individual or a small group. We live in a world where it’s easy to forget this. We think that all our great institutions – our political parties, charities and campaign groups – have always just been there. They haven’t. Somebody, somewhere, at some point in time had the burning desire to change something. It would be their efforts, almost always with the help of only a very few, that would generate the whole movement. Macmillan Cancer Support, for example, one of the UK’s leading charities, was started by just one man, Douglas Macmillan, in 1911. So it is with nearly every movement for social change.

As what became known as the Gurkha Justice campaign grew from its humble beginnings into a national campaign, overturning the policy of Her Majesty’s Government, Margaret Mead’s words continued to grow on me. Now I think that quote sums up the spirit of what we did exactly. Initially we were a very small group of people, and yet for thousands of retired Gurkha heroes what we started changed the world.

I had moved to Folkestone in 2000 to start the long process of campaigning there as the Liberal Democrat prospective parliamentary candidate for the constituency of Folkestone & Hythe. The incumbent MP was the Rt Hon. Michael Howard MP. After a very prominent career, he was now on the back benches and seen to be potentially vulnerable to ‘tactical’ voting. For those not au fait with the jargon of politics, tactical voting is where people decide on how to vote based on how best their vote can be used to beat the candidate least desirable in their eyes. Though a remarkably able and successful politician in his time, the electoral results for Folkestone & Hythe did suggest that if enough people in his constituency who would normally be classed as Labour voters could instead be persuaded to vote Liberal Democrat, then Michael Howard might be toppled.

So, after a lifelong interest in politics, I finally set my mind to fighting a serious campaign to be an MP. It was my working-class background and exposure to the healthy political divide in my own family that had brought me to this point.

I was born in Stockport in 1960. Dad was a ‘fitter’ at a local engineering factory and Mum worked as a dinner lady at St George’s Church of England primary school. Like many of their generation, my parents had never had the opportunity to take advantage of a full secondary education. Mill work beckoned for Mum and Dad also had to get out and earn a living. Mum read voraciously. For years and years she would be reading four or five books at the same time. One of my earliest memories is trooping alongside her as a small boy to the local library in Gladstone Street. She read everything – autobiographies, biographies, fiction, history, the lot. As I was emerging into adolescence, Dad also started to read. His chief interest was anything to do with modern history, politics and the war. Add to this mix of background reading the fact that both Mum and Dad were very opinionated about all things political and you can see the cauldron of ideas and debate that was my family home. Mum was essentially liberal; Dad was socialist, veering slightly towards Communism and then becoming quite right wing in his later life.

This was an era when there were striking differences between the main political parties. Labour could actually be called socialist, the Liberals were liberal and the Conservatives – well, in my neck of the woods they were referred to in language not suitable for this book. There seemed to be so much more current affairs on the television. Even trade union conferences were televised on the few major national channels. There were characters like Jo Gormley of the National Union of Miners, who could be seen taking his jacket off, rolling up his sleeves and striding down the main hall to deal with a politician who had strayed off message. Nowadays, I think they’d get a text on their Blackberry.

It would be quite normal for me and Mum and Dad to be calmly watching the news with our teas on our laps, when suddenly Mum would start heckling the person on the TV. Inevitably, Dad would join in, and before you knew where you were there was a full-blown row going on. If the chairs had been green and we had painted a red line down each side of the room, we could have been in the Commons at 58 Dial Park Road.

Grammar school and university, both in Manchester, led to my first job as a research scientist for Philips. Here I grew semiconductor slices. As the name suggests, this was not exactly riveting. I remember having to wear a white coat. Having attended a number of leaving dos where people were given a gold clock for wearing a white coat for twenty-five years, I decided that I had to spread my wings, leave my home area and see the world.

I ended up convincing myself that I should join the RAF. I like aeroplanes and had a sense that RAF officer training would be a challenge. Having completed the cut-out coupon on the ‘Join the RAF’ advert in the Daily Mail, I was duly dropped off at RAF College Cranwell to start my officer training on 5 February 1984 at 5 p.m. Why is my recollection of the date and time so precise? Because within days I realised that this was the moment I had done probably the single most stupid thing I’d ever done in my life. Let’s just say that my aspiration to find RAF officer training a challenge was met in full. In fact, the mixture of sheer physical exertion, mental stress, sleep-deprivation and downright terror of the drill instructor did at times feel life-threatening. My sisters still recoil in fits of laughter when they remember my plaintive calls for help from the little red telephone box outside the guard room of RAF College Cranwell. The trials and tribulations of this period in my life would fill a book of their own. I can probably give you a flavour by recounting just one of the many exchanges between myself and my drill instructor: ‘Student Officer Carroll, you are like a lighthouse in the desert – bright but useless.’ He could have given master classes in the cutting put down.

After a brief six-year career in the RAF, specialising in radar systems that detected Russian aircraft during the Cold War, I moved on to run a technology company for the University of Durham.

Then in 1992, my brother-in-law Colin – with whom I had always got on well, to the point that I would regard him as a brother rather than an in-law – suggested that I might want to join him and build up the successful road transport business that he had run with my sister Brenda for many years. This involved a move to Kent. By now I was thirty-two and it was at this point that I felt it was time to really set out my stall and attempt to become an MP.

So why not Labour? This was the era of ‘New Labour’. The Labour Party that I had grown up following had been utterly and completely changed by the efforts of Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair. I recall that someone once quipped, ‘Old Labour was principled but unelectable; New Labour was unprincipled but electable’. As one-liners go, it’s amusing and sharp, though I’m sure it oversimplifies the situation. That said, I had sympathy with the many Labour-leaning people who felt that in its desire to become electable, the Labour Party effectively changed itself into something more akin to the Tories; a kind of Conservative Party-lite. For me, the Labour Party at that time seemed like a child in the playground trying to change its behaviour to be liked. It just didn’t work. The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, seemed genuinely rooted in their passion for the individual. Call me idealistic, but the Lib Dems always seemed sympathetic to the underdog, with a healthy scepticism that government didn’t always know best.

It all goes back to those childhood memories: the realisation that for a great many people life is really tough, the deep understanding that there is an inherent unfairness when people like Mum and Dad were denied the chances they should have had. Even for me, going to grammar school left a curious mark on my personality. There was a feeling that somehow I was an outsider coming from the working class, an unstated undercurrent that somehow the opportunities were for the sons and daughters of doctors, dentists, the ‘professional’ classes.

At that time, and indeed for most of my time actively fighting to become an MP as a Lib Dem, I genuinely saw my party as the one that understood that standing up for the ‘have nots’ is a good thing. That fighting for fairness and equality of opportunity for people of all backgrounds was the right way forward. It may sound naive, but every time I saw young people from the east side of Folkestone, I saw myself.

Having polled a respectable 15,000 votes to gain a strong second place against Michael Howard’s 20,000 in the 2001...