Background
My childhood was spent in Chiswick, West London where I went to Chiswick Comprehensive School.
Growing up in the 1970s with the rise of the National Front, this is where I first understood racism.
I left school at 16 and moved with my family to Hertfordshire.
I worked in graphic design for many years and went back into education, studying Political Economy at Hertfordshire University, and then qualified as a teacher. I joined the Socialist Workers Party here in 1984 and have been an active member ever since.
Now with a young child, I moved to Birmingham in 1992. We lived in Erdington and I taught at a school in Castle Bromwich. In 2004, I went to Turkey for a few months teaching English and loved it so much I stayed for 15 years!
I returned to Birmingham, Kings Heath in 2020, and worked in education, retiring from University College Birmingham in 2025.
Political Activism
I became an activist at an early age, collecting money for the Aberfan disaster outside my house.
My father was Welsh and that tragedy filled our home. The injustice of it and the complete senselessness of the deaths of almost all the children of the village caused by the wilful neglect of the British Coal Board was a tragic lesson in the contempt our rulers have for working-class lives.
In the 1980s I became involved in the South Africa anti-apartheid campaign, which was my first introduction to organised action. But it was then coming across the Socialist Workers Party that helped me bring together and properly understand the connection between all the issues I felt strongly about – racism, famine, war, Palestine, poverty, the completely unnecessary lack of access to clean water for so many in the Global South that still kills 400,000 children under the age of five every single year.
Campaigns
I have been involved in many campaigns, including…- Supporting the miners’ strike
- Building community resistance to the Poll Tax
- Active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
- Campaigning against the National Front and BNP
- Organising opposition to World Debt
- Leading election campaigns for Socialist Alliance and Respect
- Active in the Campaign against Climate Change
- Building the Palestine movement in Birmingham
- Organising against the racist and fascist attacks on refugees and migrants
- Supporting the Birmingham bin workers’ strike
