Growing up in the shadow of the 1970s miners’ strikes, with a dad who ripped coal from the earth for a living, I learned early that politics isn’t abstract. It’s hunger, dignity, and survival. That’s why I vote every single time, because I’ve seen what happens when working people are ignored, and I refuse to sit it out.
Raised in a Strike, Stuck With a Ballot
We’re coming up to elections in the United Kingdom on 7th May and people ask whether I vote, as if voting were a hobby or a passing interest, something you pick up when the mood takes you.
For me, the answer goes back to the 1970s, to the long shadow of the miners’ strikes, 1972 and 1974, when the UK convulsed and working‑class communities like my own were pushed to the edge. I grew up in a house where politics wasn’t an abstract idea. Politics were involved with heat and cold, food and hunger, dignity and social humiliation.
My dad was a coal miner, one of the men who worked the seams with nothing but muscle, grit, and the tools in their hands in the days before machinery. He was what they called a ripper, the men who tore the coal from the earth with picks and shovels, the ones who did the brutal, dangerous work that kept the lights on for everyone else. These were real men, not in the macho sense, but in the sense of endurance. Men who came home, exhausted, and still went back the next day because their families depended on it.
I never wanted to be a miner myself because I saw what working in the industry did to bodies, to lungs, to backs and to spirits. I also saw what the strikes did, the poverty, the real hunger for ordinary people.
I also remember the way teachers at school looked down on the children of coal miners as if we were somehow less. That contempt, that casual cruelty politicised me beyond belief.
The strikes taught me that politics wasn’t a cerebral game played in Westminster. It’s something that reaches into your home, schools, your stomach and your future. When you can’t sleep because of hunger, then that’s political.
That’s why I believe in the power of voting. Not in some sentimental or artistic way, but in a hard, lived way. I’ve no patience whatsoever for people who shrug and say they don’t vote because “nothing ever changes.” Maybe things don’t change as fast as we want, maybe they don’t change enough, but I despise that weedy fatalism because I know what happened to the coal miners. I know what they suffered under a political regime that saw them as an enemy to be broken, not a workforce to be respected. When you’ve watched your community punished for existing, you don’t get to pretend politics doesn’t matter.
So yes, I vote every single time. I use my postal vote now, because it’s reliable and a postal vote means I never miss an election. Sometimes I’ve delivered leaflets for a party I believed in, because voting isn’t just a right, it’s a Citizens responsibility, a way of honouring the people who fought, starved, and stood on picket lines so that working people could have a voice at all.
I’ve never voted Conservative, not once, and I never will. That’s my choice, shaped by my history, my family, and the scars left on the mining communities by that political party.
You have your own choices, your own stories, and your own reasons, but for me, the answer to “Do you vote?” is simple. I vote because I remember and I vote because people like my dad deserved better, and because the only way to demand better is to show up.
Further Reading
The Shape of Now: Meta Hub – This article is part of the Shape of Now Meta Hub, a curated collection exploring culture, politics, identity, and the present moment.