David Graham: a Labour loyalist

The lead photograph of David Graham shows him looking left, as, of course, he does.

It’s hard to find the old left in New Labour and it would be reasonable for a man of that persuasion and the Labour candidate for Argyll and Bute in the 2010 General Election, to find loyalism a tough position to hold these days.

But this is not who David Graham is. It’s as if he is keeping to a straight road and waiting for the party to loop back and keep company with him.

Consider the elephant traps

Looking at what his party has bequeathed David Graham at this time is pretty daunting.

• The previous Labour Prime Minister, the tautly mummified Tony Blair, took the country into the continuing and unwinnable war in Afghanistan and into an illegal war with Iraq on known false premises. Then with grateful American support, Blair made and is still making a massive personal fortune on the back of the deal after he stepped down.

• He and his then Chancellor, now the unelected – even at party level – Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, together relaxed the regulation of the financial institutions. This action which Brown admits was a mistake, led directly to the collapse of the banks, with the country bailing them out and incurring an unprecedented national debt of over £1 trillion. In consequence, everyone has seen their savings and their pensions threatened and dwindle in value; and both businesses and individuals have found loans all but impossible to get.
• The constitutional arrangements of the country and its electoral system, after 13 years of opportunity to complete their reform for 21st century operations, are in the sort of mess that almost defies resolution – and discriminates indefensibly against England.
• Senior Cabinet Ministers line up for a press photocall at the unveiling of a major advertising initiative, cannot raise a smile between them, look utterly lacking in energy and conviction and are accurately dubbed ‘the Glums’.

Most candidates would be disheartened by all this. But Graham is a party loyalist of the most attractive and most infuriating kind. Not a word of criticism passes his lips, he is impervious to evidence and there is little suggestion that this is a mask concealing a different reality. What you see is what you get – a rare capacity. In our experience of him he has engaged in no negative tactics, no smearing, no tricks and no low blows. All he says is that he has lived through an 18 year Tory Government and ‘…would not want that to happen again’.

He feels and shows great affection and respect for Gordon Brown whom he regards as a very able man and who is one of his personal political benchmarks.

He sees a major electoral credit in the Labour Government’s handling of the economic crisis, with initiatives helping ordinary people come through the recession. He sets this against similar situations in the 80s and 90s, when ‘they were left to cope as best they could’.

Of the controversial Blair, he says simply that he remains a member of the Labour Party and active on the world’s political stage. Graham is ‘neither up nor down with Tony on the campaign trail’.

Graham is an archetypal example of what we all feel Labour used to be about and, at heart, has got to be about – supporting the underdog, the dispossessed, those on the fringes of society – those most in need of a champion.

His values remain the human ones most politicians shed early on and he majors on family, paying heartfelt tribute to his own legacy from strong, thinking parents and relishing his own family’s independent and exploratory nature.

These human values also connect to a sense of comradeship, of the profound enjoyment in being one of a team working together in the interests of a party in which they believe. His face lights up in remembering his first essay in politics – at local level in Dunoon in 1995, when he and three colleagues stood for election in circumstances that would beggar belief elsewhere.

Two Conservative party women, furious that they had not been consulted in the adoption of a party candidate they did not want, took it on themselves to deliver Labour party leaflets.

The candidate in question owned a pub. A fellow inn-keeper, who detested him, stood against him as an independent, with the sole purpose of getting him out – and won.

Graham remembers the sort of thing that fuelled his politics – a polling day where a major local Tory figure – who drove a car with a number plate MAX 10, just parked it in the middle of the street outside the polling station while he went in to vote.

A fellow candidate, Dick Walsh – now Leader of Argyll and Bute Council, came along in his car with his mother – who was in her nineties – and had nowhere to go. He then had to drive quite a bit away and slowly walk his elderly mother back to vote. This is not the way Graham’s world works.

What first politicised him?

While David Graham has stood in several local elections, this is his first Westminster foray. Where did it all begin.

The answer is – Drumchapel. After getting his Community Education qualification and working for a short time in the Cadder Youth Centre, he was moved to Drumchapel Youth Centre, in the deprived set of housing schemes in the west of the City of Glasgow.

Not too long after his arrival, the Warden and the Assistant Warden of the Centre both went off to Jordanhill to get their own qualifications in Community Education – leaving Graham running the Youth Centre single-handed – seven days a week.

After six months of this, he was promoted to the post of Warden, still working alone; and 15 months later the post of Assistant Warden was filled.

People who should have helped to stop this gruelling situation offered him little more than words of empty sympathy. He found the trade union supportive. He then became active as a Shop Steward and Branch Membership Secretary, two voluntary commitments that have been a rewarding part of his life ever since, across the various communities in which he has lived and worked.

He counts among his personal political reference points ‘… many Labour stalwarts in Drumchapel, Knightswood, Yoker, Scotstoun, Dunoon and other parts of Argyl and Bute’.

On an international level he looks to Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama. Within the Labour movement those that come to mind are, in his order of response: ‘Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Gordon Brown, Keir Hardie, Harriet Harman and Barbara Castle. This list and the order in which it emerged, shows respect alike for the political thinkers and the stars, with a touch of political correctness.

Harriet Harman – or as she is hilariously known amongst the mocker of dogmatic feminism, Harriet Harperson, is no star in the mould of Barbara Castle nor could she keep pace with Benn and Foot as a thinker. In fact, when Frank Field was appointed to her department in Tony Blair’s first administration, he was known unkindly among the press pack as ‘Harriet’s brain’. But she is an ardent feminist and few feel able to do other than pay knee-jerk tribute to that, leaving her particular stance uninterrogated.

And on one of  Argyll’s big issues: Trident?

Here comes a bit of  self-conscious footwork. Graham’s view – with no evidence to support it except happenstance, is that: ‘As a deterrent it has, in general, kept the world at peace’.

He says, rightly, that: ‘Trident is a complex issue and, to some extent, has become entrenched in people’s views and opinions’. This, of course, would include entrenchment in the views and opinions of his party.

More interestingly, he offers the perspective that: ‘It is a bargaining tool for the world to move towards the Nuclear Disarmament which both the Labour Government and now, President Obama, continue to negotiate in pressing for reductions in the number of nuclear missiles’. It does have to be said, though that it’s a lot to invest in a bargaining tool.

Graham does not seem entirely comfortable on this issue and, looking back, we should have asked him if he had ever been a member of CND, or gone on an anti nuclear march. He’s the sort of person who could well have done. This used to be a Labour cause, with Michael Foot, one of David Graham’s heroes, seen regularly leading marches on Aldermaston.

On the streets

David Graham says that Iraq is an issue that has never been raised with him on his campaign. This is credible as people have short memories. He says that Afghanistan, the ongoing theatre of conflict, does come up as an issue on the doorsteps.

With 3 Rifles just back to barracks in Edinburgh without 30 of those they left with, this question will keep coming up.

The electoral advantages he says he is finding on the campaign, born from his party’s record, include matters helpful to the elderly. Argyll’s population is famously skewed to the far end of the age range – and ageing. It is to be expected that, in this situation,  he will find gratitude for measures like the over 65′s tax allowance, the winter fuel allowance and free travel (although this is a devolved matter).

He says that ‘families are seeing the benefits of child tax credits, the national minimum wage, the educational maintenance allowance, paid maternity and paternity leave’ – although he does not reflect upon the impact of the latter (paid paternity leave) on small businesses.

What are his chances?

David Graham is campaigning hard, believing that face-to-face contact is crucial. He works for Argyll and Bute Council in Dunoon and has been taking Thursdays and Fridays out of his annual leave, giving him early mornings and evenings and long weekends to hit the campaign trail.

In an earlier political regime, he would have had to resign his local authority job as soon as he became a candidate. These days he would have to do it as soon as he was elected.

Back at the last General Election in 2005, Labour came third behind the Lib Dems and the Conservatives, with the SNP in fourth behind them.

Labour was unpopular then too, with Iraq a major issue, the mysterious death of Dr David Kelly relatively fresh (as yet unexplained and uninvestigated) and Blair losing his gloss and his credibility.

Since then we have had the cash for honours scandal, the public disgust at the revelations of what MPs had been creaming from the system in expenses, the continuing war of attrition in Afghanistan – and the word-wide recession in which the unregulated British banks played a major part.

Can David Graham hold third place? He cannot reasonably hope to do better.

But he is a straightforward, honest and very likeable man whose heart is manifestly where people would feel it should be. He talks easily, naturally and with genuine interest to people of all ages. He dignifies a party badly in need of such a gift.

And Argyll has its clusters of Labour sympathies in the relatively more industrialised major towns of Dunoon, Helensbugh and Campbeltown. So who knows?

The General Election result will be an interesting one. The Argyll result will be at least as fascinating. And by the time we get to the count on Friday 7th May, the overall picture will be known.

It will be a matter of local interest to see how the Argyll voting pans out – and of general interest to see where the seat fits in the pattern of distribution with which we will by then be coming to terms.

The photographs accompanying this profile show David Graham on a stop off in the village of Furnace on Loch Fyneside, in between campaigning in Inveraray and attending a meeting in Lochgilphead. He is sitting on a wall; by the Memorial to the dead of the village in the two World Wars; showing off the party’s then newly published manifesto for Scotland; and doing a quick bit of preparation in the sun for his next campaigning stop.