The Confessions of Martyn Shrewsbury

"Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey
I ache in the places where I used to play “

As I prepare to attend the Wales Green party AGM I would like to share with you some reflections, explanations and observations of the political process in both my incarnations, one as the first Leader of the party in Wales and the other as my time as an activist In Neath Port Talbot Green party.

The strangest thing I have noticed is how poor those on the left are at understanding individual Psychology. Many but not all can not see how they are really frightened little children wanting to be liked, how each vote they gain, or approval they experience some how makes them feel whole. The right fails to understand the collective and often becomes harsh, uncaring and arrogant. Then there are those who lost a faith and found a faith. I mean those who raised in Catholicism all their life seek an alternative faith but never quite get there.

But enough of that ...in 2005 I stepped down as leader of the Wales Green party. I was burnt out, a frantic election cycle , the battering of the anti wind farm brigade, and a gentleman from a former Intelligence background and now Green Activist spreading rumours and seeking to discredit me. The Welsh party was much smaller it probably had only 300 members. We had contested 10 seats in the general election, contested over 35 seats in the Swansea Council elections of 2004 and built a solid party in Swansea of over 150 members. Within a couple of years the same naval figure had managed to shrink the party dramatically, and in the general, election that followed he managed to gain the lowest Green Vote in Swansea West ever recorded.

I ceased political activity and developed a company training counsellors. That fell apart and left with large debts, a declining economy, and the growing realisation of my fundamental unhappiness  I sort to bury my head in the sand. I spent and spent, the funds dried up and finally I had an affair. This crisis occurred long after my role as a Green politician...yet if you read a certain account of my bankruptcy case you would imagine it had occurred at the same time.

I even saw a Anne Greagsby post about me being “ a self confessed adulterer” how simplistic it sounds, how different it actually was. The implications and result of my bankruptcy have been repeatedly resurrected by anyone who wishes to dismiss any argument that I have raised. All I did was to keep on paying my bills that I needed to pay to maintain everyday life The large institutions, the credit card companies missed out and I was labelled a fraudster.I am almost tempted to create a Psychological Syndrome. I will call it the Shrewsbury/Bartolotti projection. Its a process by which all that is wrong , all that is hated, all that is missing in someones life is absorbed into the motivations and meanings of anothers life. Julia Kristeva called it abjection.. It can be described as “There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desires, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself “ Victor Hugo described it as

No Beast is there without glimmer of infinity, No eye so vile nor abject that brushes not Against lightning from on high, now tender, now fierce. Victor Hugo, "La Legende des siecles

What is indeed surprising is how so many people who seek to transform society, who try to understand why people do the wrong things at the wrong time find it impossible to resist beating their opponents with perceived insight into their psyche. To believe in rehabilitation but not for those they disagree with. The ad hominem argument is used with the precision of a Cruise missile. Please search the net you will find plenty of arguments using this cluster bombing approach, 

I tried a short period in Plaid Cymru . I was told that they were a Green party and yet while I found some excellent Ecosocialists there , I also heard things that made my self recoil, I heard defence of the badger cull, the expansion of aviation, the support for Nuclear power and the narrow hypocrisy of the Chapel mentality. I  left very quickly for much of the time within Plaid I had been urged to condemn the Greens, to issue a press release but I never felt happy to do that. I saw in my mind the faces of those who had supported me, campaigned with me and built the Green Party, people like John Matthews, Miranda LaVey, Owen Clerk amongst others. There is only one Green party, there are many pallid copies but the Green analysis is the only one that is valid , that thinks beyond the short term.

I returned to the Green Party in Autumn 2013. I was determined to be an ordinary member but once more I began to be involved. I became the agent in Neath for the General election of 2015 and was the agent in the Uplands by election in November 2014. it reminded me of that scene in Good Will Hunting where the Therapist is talking to Will in the Park. I will leave you to decide if there is any similarity to any political activists that you have met.

I have survived these years of turmoil because of two events. At my lowest moment when I least expected it I found someone who has been with me ever since and so I have never been cynical of love. The other reasons are three figures of Philosophy, Neitzche Heidegger and Sartre . One day the day I was declared bankrupt I watched three documentaries about them. You can find them above this paragraph.

Its good to be returning to the AGM this year, the Green party is larger, more commuted, contesting all the seats in Wales, those I struggled with in my first incarnation have gone and all is to play for. I empathise with those who will lead the party in the next six months, the candidates and wish them well. I am however very glad that I cannot join you in any of those roles. I am delighted in fact but my faith, trust and support is there for you all. As Oscar Wilde observed "Every Saint has a past, every sinner a future and Nietzsche commented that our morality is  simply our wounds. How true they both are..........

Has this been a confession?, an explanation? a justification? I dont know but I will conclude with Dylan`s quote form the Ballad of Franke Lee and Judas Priest.

Well, the moral of the story
The moral of this song
Is simply that one should never be
Where one does not belong
So when you see your neighbor carryin' somethin'
Help him with his load
And don't go mistaking Paradise
For that home across the road

And don’t go mistaking Paradise
For that home across the roadWell, the moral of this