About

I’m a (sometimes rather disaffected) Labour party member and Lutheran Christian. My main blog is at Curlew River, and I tweet as @johnthelutheran. This blog is a venue for more decidedly party-political posts that don’t really belong at Curlew River (and which can’t be condensed down to a couple of tweets).

The name “Wandering Hedgehog” — a reference to 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 years.

Why am I still a member of 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.