As a teenager, I experienced some physical bullying. Being punched and that kind of thing. For no good reason at all. So, as a direct victim of it, I came to dislike violence.
Later on, via Oasis, I got into The Beatles and their individual members. And they wrote a few anti-war songs. And i'm like 'Yeah, violence really hurts. Physically and emotionally (perhaps more so emotionally). So these are defensible sentiments'.
And I became anti-violence.
And then in 2003, the Labour Party invaded Iraq. Killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions, tacitly supported and were complicit in torture, and so on.
So i'm like 'Hmm. That's not really something I can support. Because it's just violence on a grand scale'.
And after that, I went off the Labour Party.
(They'd been a bourgeois imperialist party, complicit in all sorts of horrors, for decades anyway)
Around about the same time, my family started to be criminalised, for various reasons.
Now, i'm not saying the behaviour of some my family members was particularly defensible. Some of it was downright indefensible.
But my thoughts were, and still are, 'How come we're getting hammered by the Police and the CPS, while the people who are murdering Iraqis en masse are left to get away with it?'.
And that's when my views about the class system, about injustice and power, really started to form.
It's not justice when we are getting slaughtered for our crimes, and they are getting away scot free with theirs.
And I started to actively dislike the Blairite dominated Labour Party after that.
Then only a year later, on various MSP fan forums, I would have these run-ins with a guy who is now a Labour Party councillor in Manchester.
And he was as reactionary as they come, at least in terms of his online persona. He referred to unemployed and poor people as 'scummers' as standard, and had no aversion to using openly racist language to refer to black people (I still have all the screen shots). He would laud Tony Blair.
That just cemented my hatred of the Labour Party even more. If he's Labour - and shamefully for them, he is - then Labour can f*ck right off.
And I disliked and distrusted Labour for years after that. Bunch of Red Tory reactionary bastards that they were.
But then Corbyn came along (I say 'came along', but i've known about him for ages).
And he was anti-war, anti-austerity, anti-demonising the poor and the unemployed and the criminalised and the sick and the disabled and immigrants and refugees.
And for 3 months, I argued on various websites why he should be elected leader of the Labour Party. And then he was.
And my first thought upon his election was:
F*ck me, they're going to crush him.