Sorry Holly Valance, but not “every one starts out a lefty and wakes up at some point” - surely the UK's Palestine Action protests showed this?

Britain and Australia are bound by history and the pair have given and taken from the other. One of the things that my own country bequeathed to the motherland that we call the Old Dart at some stage is our former Neighbours star Holly Valance. I don’t exactly know how or when this came about it was circa 2009, but I’d classify it as voluntarily and say that while Britain has a lot of things that other countries do want back (hello, British Museum), I think I can speak on behalf of my nation and say you can keep her.

If you have the misfortune of not knowing who Holly Valance is, she played Felicity “Flick” Scully on the Australian soapie. But, no disrespect to her acting skills, she’s better known for her single Kiss Kiss and these days as the former wife of Tory donor turned Reform UK treasurer and billionaire property tycoon Nick Candy, who is mentioned in the Epstein files, only we don’t hear about this in the mainstream press. (I should say that yes, this inclusion doesn’t necessarily mean one has done something bad).

Nick and Holly announced their separation in June 2025 and she now hangs out with far right figure Stephen Yaxley Lennon aka fascist Tommy Robinson who is - spoiler alert - mentioned in the Epstein files, too. They’re even rumored to be dating, according to reputable sources. This is really scraping the bottom of the barrel, even for her. Somehow, Holly appears to have been radicalised over the years. So much so that she’s also pivoted to becoming a political commentator for… GB News. In fact, she’s now such a bigot that they cut her off for making a slur about disabled people in February. You know you’re bad when even this broadcaster won’t give you air time.

She is the person who is said to have gotten the face of Brexit Nigel Farage to run as an MP, and yes she did tell GB News in 2024 “I have been whispering in his ear for a long time. I said, 'pull your finger out, give the people what they want' — he is the face of Reform” - and Neighbours was popular in the UK, people are said to have gone home at lunch to watch it and it was on twice a day at one stage. But I do wonder if we are giving her too much credit and if Farage was going to run anyway.

If Farage does end up with the keys to number 10. at the next election though, it could be extraordinary to think about the role that a soap opera, albeit a fictitious Australian one, has played in the UK’s political history.

Holly’s offered up one of her most infamous statements in February 2024, when asked where she was politically by GB News. Metaphorically speaking. Where she was physically was at the launch of Liz lettuce Truss’ new conservative movement PopCon.

She said:

“I would say that everyone starts off as a lefty and then wakes up at some point after you start either making money, working, trying to run a business, trying to buy a home, and then realize what crap ideas they all are. And then you go to the right.”

Some have viewed this as a modern spin on a saying commonly attributed to late UK prime minister and statesman Winston Churchill: "If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain." (Note that the earliest known version of the saying actually appears in an 1875 French book, attributed to a French jurist named Anselme Batbie).

By the way, when is Natalie Imbruglia coming out of semi-retirement to campaign for UK prime minister Keir Starmer? How dare she think she can just enjoy a nice life on a private island on the Thames when she should be doing her bit for democracy? Although maybe she’s also Torn? (Sorry if you didn’t listen to pop music in the late naughties and don’t get the joke).

I digress. But on the issue of whether one becomes more progressive as they age, there is some promising research. Data from the 2024 British Social Attitudes survey suggests that the country is becoming more liberal, particularly on questions of personal freedom and individual lifestyle choices. People are less likely than previous generations to believe society should dictate how others live — and this appears to be driven by generational change rather than people shifting their views as they age. Each new generation is arriving at adulthood with more progressive instincts than the one before.

On economic questions the picture is less clear, with views on tax and spending tending to fluctuate in response to circumstances rather than trending in any consistent direction.

Perhaps most tellingly, while trust in political institutions has fallen sharply, this disillusionment doesn’t appear to be pushing people rightward. The old left-right divide seems to be losing its relevance, replaced by a deeper split between those with liberal social values and those with more traditional ones.

Financial Times journalist John Burn-Murdoch in 2022 analysed decades of voting data from the UK and US and found that millennials are bucking a long-established pattern — unlike previous generations, they are not shifting toward more conservative views as they get older, and at the same point in life they are significantly less conservative than Boomers and Gen X were at the same age. (If you can’t access that link, the HuffPost UK also covered this). Burn-Murdoch’s data covered both the US and the UK.

Interestingly, young women are becoming significantly more progressive while their male counterparts are shifting in a more conservative direction, according to research published in the FT in 2024 on a “new global gender divide”. (This was summarized here in a thread).

In Australia, rather than drifting toward conservative voting as they acquire assets and age, as previous generations did, millennials appear to be moving further left, according to the Australian Election Study from the Australian National University, which has tracked voting behaviour since 1987.

So across all three countries the data points in the same direction — people are not drifting rightward as they age, earning money or acquiring assets, as our dear Holly has claimed.

But there’s also other evidence that I’d say that too contradicts her theory and that’s the recent protests that have taken place in London and across the UK against the proscription of direction action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation in July last year, and the demonstrations in reaction to a similar crack down on protests in Australia. In Britain, this move sparked outrage from people on both sides of politics. On February 13, the UK’s high court said that the ban was unlawful, although the government have announced that they will appeal.

Of course we don’t know politically where all of these protesters started off from, maybe they’ve been on the left all their lives. But less than a month after the designation of Palestine Action as terrorists in July 2025, almost half of the people arrested at one march in central London were aged 60 and above, with almost 100 in their 70s, while 15 were in their 80s, The Guardian reported.

“I’m retired so not scared of being arrested. I won’t lose a job over it, so I think it’s important actually for the old people to actually get on their back, on their hind legs and say something, because we are actually safer than the youngsters, “ said a woman with white hair and glasses at one protest in August.

As night fell, some protesters were eventually led away by police, to a round of applause from the remaining group. “I’m an OAP (old age pensioner). I’m 73-years-old. I’ve never hurt a fly in my life,” screamed a man sporting a keffiyeh, in a video posted by The Guardian in October 2025.

Ex-magistrate Deborah Hinton, 81, told the newspaper that she’d be sad to not be granted a visa for the US, to visit her niece there. But she said not only would young people have to deal with that, they’d also jeopardise their careers if they were arrested at a march.

Father John McGowan, 75, a priest from Buckinghamshire, conceded that he might get a criminal record if he supported the group. But he described the protest that he attended as an “extraordinary day” and said “I’ve never had a day like it in my life”.

At another protest in London, the eldest person was 89, the BBC reported. Those being arrested included a wheelchair-bound blind man. Of course the police were only doing their job. But God knows what they thought of being made to do this.

I think of all of these people as the ones who took a metaphorical bullet if you like, although of course going to jail wouldn’t be a walk in the park for any one, for the people in Gaza. Of course not all were prepared to do this. Last August, while getting off the Tube, I met a woman my mother’s age (so close to 80) and chatted to her on the walk to the meeting point for a Palestine rally. We discussed this new pattern that we were seeing.

“It’s middle England,” she described to me of the protesters. She explained to me that many thought that they may not have as much to lose as the younger generations. “But I can’t go to jail because I’d have to get someone to feed the cat,” she joked.

Thousands of miles away on the other side of the world, this trend of “grey activists”, if you like, was also seen during the protests in Sydney over two weeks ago as Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who has been found to have incited genocide by an UN Commission of Inquiry, was paraded around Australia. In the leadup, it was described as the most divisive state visit since the height of the Vietnam war.

The pro-Palestine cause is even bringing people together (I had wondered whether there were stories of people who had met at marches), according to an ABC story. Grandmother Jann Alhafny and Ian Payne became acquainted while being treated for injuries at a Sydney hospital, of all places, the broadcaster reported. As certain states in Australia also move towards restricting the right to protest, it will be fascinating to see what happens.

When I think of whether we are becoming more progressive as we age, I think of people from my own life.

I also think of Sister Susan Connelly, an activist and Catholic nun, now close to 80, who has stood up for a range of causes such as the treatment of asylum seekers and an independent West Papua and was arrested during a protest at the then prime minister’s office. I profiled her for The Saturday Paper in 2024.

I was introduced to Sr Susan by Stephen Langford, a retired NHS nurse from the UK and a refugee activist, close to 70, who I met in 2020 during lockdown in Australia. He’s also been arrested during protests, for sticking a piece of paper to a statue of former New South Wales (NSW) governor Lachlan Macquarie in Sydney’s Hyde Park, among other things. I wrote about him in 2021.

Then there’s Michael Balderstone, who in a former life was a London stockbroker but gave it all up when he moved to Nimbin (Australia’s version of Woodstock) and became the president of Nimbin’s Hemp Embassy, a centre set up to advocate for drug reform, and the Legalise Cannabis Australia party. (They’re an actual political party, in fact they may be the only such political party that exist in the world, and they’re rising up in Australia). Although just viewed as an old stoner by some, he’s an old school activist who has campaigned for the legalization of marijuana and on other issues for at least three decades.

I met him in the lead-up to the 2019 annual Nimbin MardiGrass Festival and then spent time with him during it. I was trying to get my human rights masters done at the time and this might seem like a more adventurous way of learning about issues like drug reform but I took away a lot from it. Michael probably makes me look like a prude.

So when it comes to Holly Valance's theory that people start off on the left until real life shows them otherwise, we have the hard data. And then there’s the other receipts - the actions of these honorable oldies, the “grey activists”, the grandmothers, vicars, military veterans, wheelchair bound protesters and others dragged away by the police, taking one for the team. Where are you Holly, because we would like to seek an apology from you?

Oh, and next time GB News needs an Neighbours star for a rent-a-quote on a political story, I suggest you defer to someone else, maybe Paul Robinson? Actually, Neighbours ended - this time for good - in December, so there may be a whole load of out of work stars available for comment.

You have to tell at least one person a week now on our favorite platform - that’s LinkedIn - “this isn’t Facebook” and only recently it was Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese who committed the faux pas of posting personal photos on the platform supposedly about work. On February 13, he uploaded some photos of his engagement and nuptials.

While it was was the eve of Valentine’s Day and he did get engaged on the day two years ago, for me this was nothing more than spin, after inviting Herzog, mentioned above and who has been photographed signing bombs to be dropped on Gaza - to Australia in a bid to facilitate “social cohesion” after the Bondi massacre. Apparently, after police in NSW even roughed up some protesters (also mentioned above) we were supposed to just move on from all of this and forget about it.

Well not me, and I suspect many others may feel the same. So while Albo has confirmed his relationship status on LinkedIn, not Facebook, for us, it might be good for us to let him know that as voters, as Australians etc we’ve broken up with him. Dumped.

Oh and more on this later, but it appears that even when LinkedIn is becoming the new Facebook - it’s actually very similar to the local Facebook page these days, only the one that’s burning down or Gumtree on steroids - coming out and saying this appears taboo. Even if the target of the joke is the prime minister who is not supposed to be above criticism. Are we living in North Korea?

When I actually joked about this on LI in fact, it was implied by one person (a man) that I must be very unkind and generally not good a human and I should explain myself. Fair enough. I mean while there is such a thing as freedom of speech (on LI and off it) I do think there was value in having a professional site dedicated to work back in the day and when I’m working as a plumber I’ll probably contemplate this more.

“LinkedIn isn’t Facebook” it appears is a very sensitive subject for some. We have the UK and Australia moving to ban “globalist the intifada” but I wonder do our politicians realise that they’re going after the wrong phrase?

Anyway if you’re thinking about going there, be prepared. Oh and I am truly sorry to people who were offended by me saying “LinkedIn isn’t Facebook”. I didn’t meant it at all. I don’t think that LinkedIn is Facebook. I think it’s X on steroids.