ALBA - Unofficial Forum

I wanted to write something nice today. I get as depressed by the state of everything as everyone else and I want to feel better. So let me tell you everything I know about strength – and the person who taught me it.

The person who taught me what I know about strength was a wonderful, very close friend of mine called Pete. It was his funeral on Friday. He died far too young, even though he was a good 14 years older than me. I miss him a lot.

Pete was as working class as you could get; he died in the council house he spent his childhood in. He left school at 15. He worked where he could. He often confided to me that since he was involved in biker gangs from an early age and was an old-school actual street fighter in those days, had he not discovered marijuana in his mid-20s he would have ended up in prison for violent crime.

But he did leave the violence behind because he was sick of it. Instead he travelled. Him and a revolving group of pals would basically head off for most of the year and just go somewhere where they’d find enough work to get by until it was time to go somewhere else. Pete had stories about everywhere and everything.

I first met him about 15 years later when he came home to look after his father who was unwell. There is no point using euphemisms when talking about me and Pete – I was on acid when I first met him. Pete had dreadlocks and a small smattering of teeth randomly spread through his mouth. You wouldn’t miss the fact that he could be scary. No-one had to tell me this was a guy you wouldn’t want to get in a fight with.

Then he shook my hand and said ‘hi, I’m Pete’. It was odd. For about ten minutes we chatted and the whole time I was trying to work out if he was going to end up being one of those Scottish psychos who pretends to be sort of nice to put you off guard so they can then do something psycho. After a while it was clear he was just nice.

In fact, he was I think the most generous, kindest human I ever met. Pete never had a lot but if someone needed it, it was shared. Pete had no fear in his kindness – he was kind to everyone as a default position. I came to realise that was my first lesson in strength.

We became very close and travelled together quite a bit. We joked about who was really the ‘hardest guy in town’. He made a quip about having heard that there was someone else who mistakenly thought it was them (and to be fair he did reel off two serious contenders who’d taken a pop at him in the past and didn’t come off best). I asked him if he was serious.

That was my second lesson; ‘of course I am’. I asked ‘so you’re the hardest?’. He said ‘no idea’. I asked how these things could both be true. He explained that he didn’t walk around thinking ‘how tough am I?’ but he told me that if you didn’t believe it when you needed to, you were definitely beat.

True strength, he taught me, is the freedom never to have to demonstrate it. True strength is your state of mind, what you commit to. Of course you can use your strength to bully and victimise, but that’s not really strength, is it? Real strength is to quietly believe in yourself and so never need to be unkind to a person. His strength was the foundation for his generosity.

He taught me so much more. I remember a chat we had about violence – and me. He told me one of those things that is of such value I think of it often as a metaphor. He explained that my problem was that I was a big, strong, fast guy who would beat most people who tried it on. I asked how that was a problem. He explained ‘you’ve never had a proper kicking’.

What he was explaining was that, in violence, there is always someone above you and when you come across it it is the part-powerful who are at most risk. He explain that if I was a smaller man I would do the sensible thing and always get out the way. I asked him what his advice was. That was his advice; always get out the way.

Pete did. He could smell a fight brewing before anyone I knew. We’d sometimes sit in a pub somewhere unfamiliar and he’d say ‘let’s head’. I’d not know why and he’d explain ‘it’s about to kick off in here’. That was my next lesson about strength – it never beats discretion. If you can walk away, walk away. Every time. Early. There is no merit in letting yourself be sucked into conflict.

So we did. When we felt things happening, we left people to it. Unless… That was part of my last lesson. Unless you can’t. With some luck you will never have to be involved with violence if you just keep walking away, but if you ever do have to, you have to believe you will win and you need to act accordingly.

I saw Pete get into physical confrontation I think three or four times in the 20 years I knew him, and on every occasion it was putting himself between someone who needed help and someone they couldn’t defend themselves from. One was scary (when the brick came through a pub window and there was blood and women screaming and five guys tried to rush the place, there was nowhere to walk away to).

The others made me proud. For example, we were in an Indian restaurant at closing time getting pakora and the guy who unleashed a volley of awful racial abuse at the staff was very quickly apologising. Those were the only time Pete used his strength.

The final lesson of that kind of strength that I have realised more about since I got the phone call telling me he’d died was about our adventures. On the face of it, adventures seemed to gravitate towards Pete. I couldn’t begin to tell you the stories of the weird and wonderful things we did, the weird and wonderful people we met. In reality, I now realise the truth.

The truth is that adventure is everywhere, all the time. You just need the eyes to see it and the courage to say yes. That was easy for Pete (and pretty easy for me). We could take the interesting but perhaps slightly intimidating side road because we were confident enough that we’d make it to the other end. We always did. The scary people we met were mostly not that scary when you gave them the chance not to be.

If there is something worth knowing about strength that I didn’t learn from Pete, I don’t know what it is. It has influenced my politics enormously. I know you wouldn’t believe this, but I do everything I can to walk away from conflict or avoid it. My goal is always to win constructively without a fight. I do anything I can to not get to the fight. Win or lose, everyone in the fight will find it harder to work together the next time. It’s a shit way to do your business.

I know you read this website and may be sceptical of this – but what I write here isn’t ten per cent of my working week. The rest is the search for mutual victory, all the time. But what I write here is in part what happens when the other side decides it wants a fight. Because then I will not mess around.

I know the powerful want me to talk about ‘challenges’ and to ‘give them credit’ for their ‘values’ and all the rest of it. Sure they do – that is just the politics version of being nice to someone to put them off-guard so you can do something psycho. If I tell a politician they’re doing a good job but…, then let’s just be clear I already lost. Everything after the ‘but…’ is defeated by them tweeting ‘Robin just said I’m doing a good job’.

I will not play the game the powerful want me to play on the terms they demand I play it. I will always lose if I do. If they make me fight, I will make them fight on my terms.

This is why it is that, with a few quid we found down the back of the sofa and a stick we found in the woods, Common Weal manages to give powerful people a run for their money (they should hope they never meet me on a level playing field). Because I will avoid a fight every time I can but if you’re looking for a fight, I’m not going to hang around with you for five minutes negotiating what rules suit you best.

Pete was a wonderful man who I loved very much. I thought I knew how much he meant to me until I lost him, and then I really knew. He taught me so much about kindness and sucking the marrow out of life and never having a regret and not saying no if you think you’ll wish you didn’t and that if you take the wee pill you’ll probably be fine and if not it’ll be a story.

But above all he taught me this; if you’re strong and you’re using it for your own advantage you’re a prick. If it has made you a worse person when it gave you every chance to be a better person, you’re a prick. If you must use your strength you better be using it to help someone who has less than you. Always walk away from a fight. Always. But if you can’t walk away, fight your hardest until you’re done.

If you’re lucky you’ll have a small handful of people from whom you gain as much wisdom as I did from Pete. If you’re really lucky, one of them will be as wonderful as he was. If you’re insanely lucky, that person will bring vivid colour and constant adventure into your life.

But to have had all this and to have been gifted with such a clear, powerful way to see through the political leaders and the warmongers, the billionaires and the online misogynists, street thugs and quango bosses alike – that is special.

Everything worth knowing about power and strength I learned from one guy. I wish you could all have met him. He’d have made you a better person. If there is something more I can say about him than that, I don’t know what it is.