About

I’m a Co-operative party and Labour party member, and Lutheran Christian, living in the (depressingly Tory!) Orpington constituency.

The name “Wandering Hedgehog” – a reference to one of my favourite children’s book characters, the disreputable vagrant (with a nice line in hallucination-inducing mushroom stews) from the surprisingly subversive Little Grey Rabbit series – is a reflection of my somewhat wandering political views and affiliations over the past decade.

I’ve ended up back in the Labour party because, in the end, the values expressed in Clause Four (yes, even the modern, watered-down version) of the Labour constitution represent my basic convictions about politics:

The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few.

It’s not really the purpose of this blog to argue the case for those convictions, so please forgive me if I don’t always engage with comments that come from a fundamentally different set of political values. In those circumstances, both you and I are probably best advised to refer to this immortal XKCD cartoon…

What I do want to do on this site is to make some small contribution to discussions within the Labour movement as to how we renew our ideas and rebuild our party in opposition. Most posts are intended to relate to that theme, even if only indirectly.