You realised that ‘none of [the conservatives] had done anything to harm [your] father’ but because of what happened to him you will never be a conservative. Is this logical?

What do you suppose should have happened to your father’s job? Somehow, fibreglass should have been disinvented by the Tories? Or should they have banned it? Or should the wooden boat industry have received government subsidies to go on producing wooden boats when people really wanted fibreglass ones? Perhaps they could have introduced import tarriffs on fibreglass boats – but what of the jobs lost to our exporters in the inevitable retaliations?

Where does this end — with spinning jennies still spinning and no tractors in the fields?

I have great sympathy for your personal position, and that of your father, and I can understand – for personal reasons – how distressing it would have been to see a great (in your eyes, I’m sure) man brought so low. But governments and political movements cannot make law or policy based on sad individual stories.

Equally, no government can turn back the tide of progress – however much we might wish it could — and this is the great lie of socialism.

The capitalist system generally espoused by conservatives and rejected by socialists is flawed – but however flawed it is, it is not so flawed as socialism. Conservatism has given us, generally, immeasurably better lives than we would have experienced under socialism – ask those who grew up under the Soviets. That is a fact, however sad your father’s situation was.

What you wrote hit a note in my much longer life.
The medium which you are using will connect us with ideas which will sustain us.

Have only just read this post. Which moved me more than anything else I have read of what you have written. You wrote it from the heart. But it is also about all sons and fathers.

My Dad, like yours, knew his grains of wood. But he never understood why I moved away from the Conservatism of my youth and early adult years. Because trade unionists in his own factory were encouraging the men to walk out with the factory products. My father sided with bosses, and exposed his workmates, which meant he had a difficult time! But he took solace from the Daily Mail, who told him he was doing right.

That’s why I am not a Conservative. Because I could see how he had been exploited by his employers. Who never appreciated and rewarded his intelligence. Because he was paid to work with his hands, not his brain.

But my father was never a management lackey. And, from how you describe him, neither was yours.

Cheers

Bob Jones