...or "How I learned to stop loving Labour"

My love affair with Labour started from birth: I'm the daughter of a teacher and a nurse who both worked in Thatcher's Britain; my father used to belong to the British Communist Party and believed in a socialist system of government; my mother was brought up in devastatingly awful poverty, a sister of 12 siblings, living under a dictator who stole the country's wealth.

We were never going to be a Conservative Family.

In fact, I have always hated the Tories. However, I'm not entirely sure when this started. It's likely I was most influenced by my parents; I remember once, as a child, trying to find out what behaviour would really get me in trouble.

Me: "Dad, what if I got pregnant? Would you throw me out?"

Dad: "Well, it wouldn't be perfect, but we love you very much and would want to look after you."

Me: "What if I became a Jehovnah Witness?" (We were a Roman Catholic family)

Dad: "I believe in Catholicism, but every person has to make up their mind for themselves."

Me: "What if I became a Tory?"

Dad: "You're out the door."

I'm fairly sure Dad was joking, but it's hard to tell. Who can blame him? He grew up in an era where he couldn't get into university because it wasn't destined for the likes of him. He worked for the NHS at a time that nurses were getting paid sod all to take abuse from patients as well as managers. "Greed is good" was not a motto he and my mother were ever going to relate to. Even Mum's complaints about pay for nurses over the last decade always ends with, "But at least they're not as bad as the Conservatives!".

My first real memory of political opinion was when I was in primary school. We heard cheering down the corridor and, shortly after, our headmistress popped her head round the door.

"I just wanted to let you know," she said, "That Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister, has resigned." She had a small smile on her face, the quiet joy of a woman who finally sees a light at the end of the tunnel.

The classroom erupted. We cheered and clapped. Thatcher was gone! The witch was dead!

But I was maybe 8 years old, as was my whole class. What on earth did we know about complicated political matters? We just knew Mrs Thatcher was a bad lady and it was good she had gone.

However, this election has made me reflect more and more upon my hatred of the Tories. I know I will never, ever vote Conservative. I just can't do it. To me, they represent a Britain which only wants what's best for the wealthy, a party of fat cat, born-into-money idiots who know nothing of real life. Are they really? I don't know, but, like some old racist, I'm distressingly set in my ways.

I'm very middle class (painfully so - I am a woolly liberal, with a desire to decorate which can only be described as "aspirational"), but my parents' difficult upbringings have been imprinted upon me and my sister. We were taught the importance of working hard to get what you wanted (*tucks lottery ticket away*) and doing the right thing for the good of everyone. The Tories, in the 80s and 90s, seemed to us the antithesis of that idea, with their elitist schools and casual racism.

And yet...It didn't get better. John Smith was our great hope and, when he passed away, you could hear the party members weep. Then New Labour came along. And those fuckers really broke our heart.

When New Labour won, I was ecstatic. Change was coming! Puppies and rainbows for everyone! To an extent, the country was a bit more hopeful for a while. Everything was going to be better. Decades of Tory rule were going to be overturned and, finally, we would have our day.

However, I started to get a little suspicious. I had studied the Russian Revolution which had led to Lenin and Stalin's rule. I was a little familiar with their methods of government and, when similar centralisation and control by spin doctors became more and more prevalent in the late 90s, I began to question my father about this. This did not seem like the Labour Party I had grown up with.

"The ends justify the means," he said. I hope this was his attempt to delay disappointment.

That was inevitable, though. How could it be any other way? Labour was meant to be the New Hope and that's a lot to live up to (see: criticisms of Obama's first 100 days). However, it was the Iraq War which broke the camel's back. 9/11 was an apocalyptic event for the world, not just in its immediacy but also in its horrific aftermath. This carte blanche for the USA to defend itself however it saw fit led to Guantanamo and a hundred other human rights abuses. We're only just recovering from footage of American soldiers almost gleefully shooting Iraqi citizens dead.

I argued a lot with my father about the war on terror. I was of the opinion Blair was Bush's poodle, on the verge of committing horrendous acts we could not justify. Dad clung on to his belief that Blair would not go as far as invading Iraq, that the Labour Party was a party of social responsibility. The invasion of Iraq saw my father, a member for decades, resign from the party. Bear in mind, this was an organisation which had promised him a better, fairer Britain, a vision he had believed in and helped to elect. Imagine how he must have felt to have had this betrayed by a man with a manic grin and a Jesus-complex.

Blair isn't the only one to blame: he didn't act alone and the whole party is tainted because of it (Brown included). So, why is my revulsion reserved only for the Conservatives? Why is my knee-jerk reaction to Cameron's voice to shout, "Oh shut up, you auton!", yet my attitude to Brown is somewhat more benevolent?

I suppose it's because the hatred was burned in too long ago to ever be effectively removed. The Tories will always be The Bad Guys.

Yet, Labour are no longer The Good Guys, either. They were supposed to change everything and perhaps we expected more than they could deliver, but they have let us down, woefully. My mother's retort of "at least they're better than the Conservatives!" just doesn't ring true these days.

The simple truth is, I just cannot hate Labour: in the same way that my beliefs about the Conservatives were cemented years before, so were my feelings about the Labour Party. I cannot hate a party which originally stood for equality and a better world for all.

The Conservatives' poster slogan of "We can't go on like this" sounds like a sentence uttered at the end of a dying relationship. It's really very accurate, in a way. We've been in a relationship with Labour for the last 13 years and things have been going steadily downhill for some time. We've tried to plaster over the cracks, but it's not working anymore. Now we're at the end, left with a feeling that it's all over and that it could have been so much more, that they could have been the party which did so much more. Maybe we'll pick over exactly what went wrong and when, but, in the end, all that's left is not love or hate but a sense of profound sadness and overwhelming disappointment.