Sarah Freeman: When political promises met reality

The year was 1993. The location was a block of rundown flats in East Leeds. It was the kind of place where the dogs owned the people and where the concrete walkways were steeped in the unmistakable smell of overcooked vegetables and disappointment. However, in that forgotten, paint-chipped corner of the city I fell a little bit in love with politics. It was an affair which would last just four short years.

I was there because a friend had asked if I’d help her dad hand out campaign leaflets. He was a lifelong Labour supporter and with the Conservatives apparently in meltdown under John Major there was a feeling that this was going to be their year. Local party members had been mobilised to ensure that come the General Election the Labour faithful went to the ballot box and I’d agreed to help out because, well, there was nothing much to do on Sundays back in the early 1990s.

I don’t remember how many people shut the door in our faces, but I do remember that after spending a few hours in the company of those who cared enough about a political system which had done its best to ignore them for more than a decade something changed.

I wasn’t going to be old enough to vote in that year’s General Election, but by the time I got home for tea I knew who I wanted to win.

It wasn’t much of a surprise that I ended up siding with Labour. Aside from my dad once voting for Margaret Thatcher – an event he was never allowed to forget and which my mum is still convinced was early sign of some debilitating disease – I’d always come from a Left-leaning sort of family. Both my parents had grown up in working class homes and while by the time I came along they had leap-frogged into the middle classes, their values had survived the move intact.

Back then Labour seemed to be full of people like my mum and dad, people who believed in the idea that society should be judged on how it treats its weakest.

Neil Kinnock of course never made it to Downing Street in 1993, but Labour’s failure that May only strengthened my own political stance. Partly it was fuelled by that peculiar brand of self-righteousness which comes with aligning yourself with the underdog, but I was also convinced that when those opposition MPs did finally cross the floor they would make a real difference. Britain would be a better place.

By 1997 I was at university and had swapped Leeds for Edinburgh. Old Labour had also changed. The party had begun to shed its skin to reveal sharp tailored suits beneath the donkey jackets of old, but then so had the rest of us. We were optimistic about the future, we were Cool Britannia and we knew that to have a social heart you didn’t have to look like Michael Foot.

That election night was glorious. As Conservative majorities were swept away, it felt like the end of the era and the beginning of one which would be fairer, one which wouldn’t favour those who had already been blessed with life’s advantages.

That feeling was fleeting. In my mind it lasted just 24 hours. I suspect almost 20 years on I may be guilty of compressing time, but the honeymoon didn’t last long. For me it ended when I heard the new Education Secretary David Blunkett announce plans to introduce university tuition fees. I felt like I’d been had.

Not only had there been no mention of the policy in its manifesto, but putting a price on education seemed to be against everything I believed the party stood for. Embarrassed, I went back home, apologised to my Tory-voting flatmate for all the times I’d ridiculed her in the past and wondered where it had all gone wrong.

Labour had made itself electable, overnight Tony Blair had become a world statesman, but however successful that makeover had been, it seemed to me that a chunk of the party’s soul had been washed away.

I’ve still voted in every local, general and European election ever since and I will be at the ballot box again this May. Sometimes I’ve voted Labour, sometimes I haven’t. Once I voted for the Lib Dems. But I can understand why thousands don’t bother.

Now wherever I put my cross it’s with a sense of duty rather than hope and a knowledge that, much like that block of flats in east Leeds, politics is full of broken promises.