Many apologies to anyone who looks at this blog with any regularity for the long break since the last post. I'm afraid I was struck down with an infection necessitating some surgery to my right hand which is only just recovering. Trying to type with my left resulted only in a faux encrypted text. This has meant I've been unable to convey any thoughts on the Syria vote, or the Oldham by-election win for Labour and the related furore around immigration and EU labour law. What I can say after five days in hospital, is that our NHS would be quite unable to function without huge numbers of imported foreign workers at every level from cleaning wards to nursing to consultants and surgeons. I would estimate that around 70% of the staff I encountered were from abroad, and, without exception, offered high quality professional service. It's not just the health service that has to recruit from overseas. I understand that some London schools are finding it impossible to recruit staff as housing costs soar and the pressures on teachers lead to flight from the profession, and they are filling up vacant posts with qualified teachers from the Caribbean.

  The current populist campaign to drastically cut immigration and prevent EU nationals from exercising their right to reside and work in the UK (the emphasis on benefits is a complete obfuscation of reality - people overwhelmingly travel here to work) simply fails to recognise our dependency on skilled and unskilled labour to keep our essential services functioning. As well as self-interest, there is, of course, the overwhelming moral case for accepting our responsibilities as wealthy members of the global community. The European response to the still growing refugee crisis is only the worst aspect of a growing nationalist retreat from our human responsibilities.
While I've been convalescing I read Tony Judt's 'The Memory Chalet' and I was struck by this prescient passage in an essay for the New York Review of Books written in 2010 :
     "We are entering, I suspect, upon a time of troubles. It is not just the terrorists, the bankers, and the climate that are going to wreak havoc with our sense of security and stability. Globalization itself—the “flat” earth of so many irenic fantasies—will be a source of fear and uncertainty to billions of people who will turn to their leaders for protection. “Identities” will grow mean and tight, as the indigent and the uprooted beat upon the ever-rising walls of gated communities from Delhi to Dallas.
Being “Danish” or “Italian,” “American” or “European” won’t just be an identity; it will be a rebuff and a reproof to those whom it excludes. The state, far from disappearing, may be about to come into its own: the privileges of citizenship, the protections of card-holding residency rights, will be wielded as political trumps. Intolerant demagogues in established democracies will demand “tests”—of knowledge, of language, of attitude—to determine whether desperate newcomers are deserving of British or Dutch or French “identity.” They are already doing so. In this brave new century we shall miss the tolerant, the marginals: the edge people. My people."   
As the media circus has moved on from the human tragedy still building around the borders of Europe, as our fellow human beings continue to drown in the waters of the Mediterranean, children to shiver and cry in the rain and cold outside the hastily erected razor wire fences keeping 'us', the privileged, from 'them' the victims of war, famine, climate change and Western military interventions, most of us keep our eyes firmly focused on other things - it's Christmas and we, therefore, have our own pleasures to focus on.

I can't resist a quick word  on Jeremy Corbyn. My cousin emailed me recently to say that he was at his small Constituency Labour Party Christmas 'do' in North London on the Friday after the Oldham by-election result. Half way through the evening, Jeremy Corbyn turned up, having cycled from his home, to wish them well. He gave them a good speech and stayed and chatted to everyone before pedalling off home. Given that he'd been up all night, had been up to Oldham during the day and still found time to visit a small local gathering of supporters, I was impressed with his thoughtfulness and commitment. Difficult to think of Blair or Brown behaving in this way. When I told this story to a friend of mine, his response was interesting. His view was that this demonstrated that the local constituency was Corbyn's natural habitat and the demands of leadership at Westminster were way out of his comfort zone. This view had not crossed my mind, but if there's truth in it, then it reveals much more about the shortcomings of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the gulf between Westminster politicians and those they represent than it does about any shortcomings in Mr. Corbyn (and I'm aware that they certainly exist).

The constituency Labour party played a not insignificant part in my childhood life also. My maternal grandmother was ward secretary of her branch and my mother would always try to help our branch, particularly at election times. I remember being taken to the ward committee rooms on election day where a small army of mainly female volunteers would be sending out canvassers and ticking off those who had voted on the electoral role so that they would not be called on later in the day to remind them to vote. I was dispatched to the polling station at my school (the reason for my day off) to take the numbers of those who had voted and to take them back to the committee rooms when I had finished my shift. This would have been the general election of 1959, so I would have been nine years old. I found myself standing outside the polling station with representatives of the Tories and the Liberals, both retired ladies, each sporting a large rosette to indicate their respective political affiliations and who seemed not so much bemused as rather shocked to be joined by a scruffy nine year old boy in this obviously important part of the democratic process. I clutched my pad to record the numbers, but the only indication of political allegiance was my obviously proletarian dress - patched trousers held up with a snake belt, threadbare jumper and jumble sale shoes. The respectable party reps shifted their chairs away from my position and muttered to each other as they glanced over in my direction.

Most voters accepted my request for their polling number with an amused tolerance. Some - obviously Tory voters in my view - simply swept past ignoring my presence completely and a minority would seem affronted to be asked at all. These would usually complain that the very act of asking for a polling number was part of an organised plot to find out which way they had voted. They would often reinforce their beliefs with imprecations concerning my motives and the value of living in a free society. I tried, using my very best pronunciation, to politely explain that the numbers were just so that they would not be bothered later in the day to be reminded to vote and, anyway, it was highly unlikely that anyone from the committee rooms would be going to the count five miles away at midnight to try to trawl through the thousands of voting slips looking for one number in order to ascertain how they had voted. My protestations never got beyond the first few words as the voters invariably hurried away leaving me talking only to myself. Even at the age of nine, I knew this whole process was a waste of time. The Tory candidate for Bromley was Harold Macmillan, the Prime minister, with a majority so huge that holding the election at all was simply a token gesture to democracy. Like millions of people, I have lived my entire life in constituencies with, in my case, rock solid Tory majorities and my vote has never had any value whatsoever. Our 'democratic' procedures are still unfair and our parliament unrepresentative of the political beliefs of the population eighty seven years after universal suffrage. With the current government about to alter many political constituencies in a blatant act of gerrymandering to ensure a Tory majority for the foreseeable future, our claim to be a leader in the democratic process is looking increasingly threadbare. (See Owen Jones recent article in The Guardian, "Time for Decent Tories to Speak Up" on Guardian web-site).

As a nine year old political activist, I learned to take the rejections and put-downs of political argument very early. I remember calling on my friend Colin, who lived on the other side of the estate, around election time and talking to Colin's mum while I waited for him. I asked her if she was going to vote Labour and she looked at me somewhat askance, before saying that they chose not to talk about politics in their house. Coming from a home where we talked of little else, I innocently asked why? "We prefer Colin to make up his own mind when he's older" came the reply. The rebuke was clear to me and I took it to heart. I thought about this for a long time; asked myself whether all my views were simply because my mum expressed them forcefully and often. Maybe she was completely wrong - and, therefore, me as well. Eventually I came to the conclusion that this could be the case, but not to discuss politics for this reason was a mistake. How would you ever begin to take an interest in the world and how it is run if you never talked about it? As it turned out, although I've always been on the left politically, my political beliefs would be turned upside down forcing me into a fundamental re-think much later in my life when I became friendly with a French assistant teacher when I was a student. Gilles Dauve, whose activist and intellectual work can be found on the internet still, had a profound influence on me on me in my early adulthood. My nine year old self was right. We accept unthinkingly the values and attitudes of our parents or those who rear us when  we are young, but it can only be good to be encouraged to think about how society is run and for whose benefit. As those brought up in strict religious communities can also testify, it doesn't mean that we will not test these beliefs and attitudes in maturity. If we have never been encouraged to think and enquire, then it is likely that we will never cultivate the desire to look beyond ourselves. 

Just as my political views changed radically in my twenties, so my childhood life was about to change as the sixties began. Junior school was about to conclude and the 11+ would determine my destiny irrevocably. But this will be for the next post.    

The brutal, and utterly pointless, killings in Paris have once again brought the current chaos of the Middle East and its consequences - the huge migration of dispossessed peoples to Europe and safer Middle Eastern countries, the growing number of calls for further bombings of Isis in Iraq and Syria, the increasing power of Isis affiliate, Boko Haram in Nigeria and bordering countries and, of course, fear to the streets of Europe - to the fore once more in the form of a cacophany of political and media demands for immediate tough responses. These responses have ranged from the absurd (that British Muslims should organise mass protests against Isis terrorism, as 'The Sun' demanded, to clearly demonstrate their opposition to Isis, the group that has been systematically murdering Muslims throughout their occupied territories),  the contradictory, (Cameron et al charging that Russian air strikes are fuelling terrorism - the downing of aircraft over Sinai - whilst simultaneously demanding that we should begin air strikes in Syria to combat terrorist attacks) and the dangerous (that Britain should substantially increase its military intervention in the Syrian conflict, specifically against Isis forces). 
The day after the Paris killings I phoned a good friend of mine who has lived in France, on the Paris outskirts, for forty years. He is married to a woman from Senegal, who is a Muslim, although my friend has no religious faith, and I was interested to hear his take on this terrible event. He sighed, and reiterated a view I had often heard him give: that France has an enormous Muslim population (over 6 million) who have for years experienced deeply entrenched prejudice and systemic discrimination in almost all areas of public and social life. They mainly live in poor, ghettoised housing, have little chance of rising in French society and experience overt discrimination in their daily lives. This has given rise to alienated young people, experiencing unemployment rates of over 25%, living in the banlieues around Paris and other cities, with high crime rates and with little sense of being fully integrated, or even welcome, in French society. He has experienced racist comments himself in France when out with his wife, and feels that overt racism in France is more pronounced than in the UK. He is not surprised that France has had the highest number of people travelling to Syria to join the ranks of Isis than any other European country, or that a number of recent atrocities have included home-grown terrorists from the banlieues, many of whom have petty criminal histories and low educational achievement. Isis can offer status and empowerment to those who feel alienation and disaffection from their society. None of this excuses such barbarism, but it must be understood. And France has made little effort to get to grips with the problem, not even collecting data on ethnic or religious background when analysing social conditions. At government level, the problem has not been properly acknowledged, let alone addressed.  
The ratcheting up of military engagement in Syria will increase the threat of terrorism on European streets. There is a clear causal connection between military action and terrorism at home, between Western foreign policy and deaths in clubs and restaurants at home. To deny this is folly. It must be accepted as a likely consequence of a military interventionist policy. This is not to say the policy is necessarily wrong, but it is to say, clearly, that such policies increase the possibility of terror attacks. 
What we have not seen in recent months is any concerted effort to push for a diplomatic initiative to generate something positive in the deteriorating Syrian situation. With Russia now an active participant, and a victim of Isis terrorism, there is an opportunity to get a UN brokered gathering of the various groups active in the civil war in Syria to try to find an interim coalition government which will have to include a resurgent Assad at this moment, as a preliminary to a more permanent resolution of a complex and seemingly intractable situation. This may seem absurdly optimistic, but at some point a political solution will have to be found, and concerted efforts to get this started are infinitely preferable to calling for increased air strikes. At the moment in Britain, the only use to be made of the UN seems to be to legitimise Cameron's demand for British air strikes. The demand must be for UN mandated talks, including Russia, France, the USA, representatives of the Assad regime and the leaders of the opposition groups fighting him, now exhausted and losing their initiative. An interim government has to be formed, which will inevitably include Assad at the moment, with a clear programme of political reform to be overseen by the UN. Such a government would then have the legitimate backing of the West and Russia to take on Isis as a clear threat to the integrity of the Syrian state and to the region. Any military action against Isis must have the leadership of relevant states in the region, with Western support if asked for, but not initiated by the Western powers themselves. Turkey, with a huge army, although more preoccupied with its dispute with the Kurds, could be a key player in such an initiative. Another coalition of Western superpowers causing further swathes of "collateral damage" in the region will only serve to add recruits to Isis and generate further terror threats in Europe. Pressure must also be put on our chief weapons importer, and regional 'ally',  Saudi Arabia, to curtail its funding and arming of Sunni insurgent groups, whose weapons make their way to Isis. Not the only irony of this crisis is that our huge armaments sales to Saudi Arabia are helping to prolong and exacerbate the very tragedy we proclaim to be wishing to resolve. 

Back in 1960, my council estate was far removed from anything resembling a Parisian banlieue. Most people were employed, and some in white collar jobs, many owned cars and several played golf on the local council golf course nearby.The only family of foreign extraction I can remember were Belgian and lived on the third floor of my block of flats. Their only child, Francis, a little younger than me and never allowed out to mix with the likes of us kids on the estate (probably very wisely, looking back) would look down on us from his balcony eyrie and shout various insults at us. These were both touchingly outdated and also almost incomprehensible due to his accent and unfortunate speech impediments. "you're weally thilly and thtupid" he would shout in a strongly accented voice. "Sorry Francis, can't hear what you're saying " we would reply. "You're weally weally thtupid then" he would scream . "Sorry Francis, can't understand you. Try it in English", we would respond. " I am thpeakin' English. You're just thtupid and weally weally thilly." "Sorry Francis. Can't understand a word you're saying son. We don't know any Belgian here." Now he would scream in a fury, "I'm going to thwow a bwick at you and I've got lots of bwicks up here, and I'll thwow them wight down you're thwoats". "Sowwy Fwancis, didn't quite get that. Did you say you'd thwow bwicks down our thwoats? What are bwicks, Fwancis and what are thwoats?" we'd shout back, and simultaneously hurl a round of stones upwards to his balcony as he ducked for cover, screaming and crying in impotent frustration. At this point, his dad, always wearing a caricature French beret for some reason, would appear and hurl further insults and threats at us as we departed. Francis' performances on his balcony were always a treat for us, and thinking of new ways to humiliate and torment him always added some spice to the day.
I mentioned the local golf course, and this also played a not insignificant part in my council estate life. Money was always in short supply, and one way of making some was to climb under the wire fences surrounding the golf course and make your way, surreptitiously, to the shrubs and trees that lined most of the fairways. From these, if you kept yourself reasonably well hidden, you could observe the progress of the golfers from hole to hole. What we were looking for was, of course, lost golf balls. These could be gathered, spit and polished, and sold back to the golfers, the price depending on their condition. We would wander through the camouflage offered by the golf course flora along the periphery of the course, bashing the undergrowth with sticks, searching for the prize of a good condition lost ball. Actually, they were surprisingly easy to find. The golfers, generally, must have been of pretty poor quality, since I usually retrieved five or six balls in an afternoon of searching. 
The next stage, and the most difficult, was to initiate a possible sale. This involved approaching a group of golfers and getting a sense of whether they might be interested or not. Most were at least willing to appraise what you'd found, and some would then offer a price, usually a few pennies. Some, however, were hostile to your very presence on the hallowed green. They would tell you, in very forceful language, not only to get out of their sight, but to get out of the course entirely and not come back. This would sometimes be backed up with vivid descriptions of what could be done to you with a golf club - usually a number seven iron, but I know not why. This kind of golfer would sometimes literally chase you away, and this would necessitate our last resort, but also our 'piece de resistance', emphasis on resistance. ( We would also, if the golfer was particularly obnoxious, find a hiding place way down the fairway, wait until he had teed off, and then run out, take his ball, and run as fast as we could to get out of the course, laughing hilariously at his impotent fury way back in the distance.)
 The golf course was criss-crossed with very long, and quite large, drainage tunnels. We all knew exactly where they were, and how long most of them were. We would all dash for the nearest entrances to this underground maze of escape routes and crawl into the tunnels where no golfer would follow. You had to keep your head right down to your knees and try to crawl forward on your feet since there was always a few inches of water at the bottom of the tunnel. They were very dark, but most of them straight enough for you to see the light at the far end. Slowly, and in some pain, you would place one heavily weighted foot in front of the other, and carefully waddle your way down toward the light. When you finally emerged, you were in another part of the golf course entirely, and a new group of golfers were there to do business with.
Only once was I forced to enter a tunnel I'd never tried before, only to find that it curved, and so there was no light to see at the far end. I couldn't go back, since the thought of a golf club being thrust somewhere unmentionable about my being, as had been threatened, was more worrying than negotiating the seemingly endless darkness. I painfully manoeuvred my body forward into the black space ahead, and just kept on going, hoping to round a bend and see light ahead. This didn't happen. I began to have fears of sudden onrushes of water coming up behind me and drowning me helplessly underground. Or encountering fierce underground animals that would tear me apart. I looked back, but only blackness. Ahead, the same. On I carried, until, finally, I did indeed negotiate a bend in the tunnel, and was able to perceive, a long way ahead, a glimmer of daylight. On I crawled, finally emerging, blinking and terrified into the daylight, still clutching my cherished haul of golf balls. I was rewarded by a friendly golfer offering me a shilling - a whole shilling (and a lot of sweets could be bought with this) - for my best golf ball. More than I'd ever got for one ball before. (For younger readers, a shilling was twelve pennies and there were two hundred and forty pennies in a pound. Base twelve. Such a simple monetary system, so much lamented).
The four years of my Junior School era were passing quickly, and Secondary school was on the horizon. This meant, THE ELEVEN PLUS!!! was looming. I could sense there was to be no light at the end of this particular tunnel, but only darkness unending.

Two weeks ago a letter appeared in The Guardian criticising the growing movement in the world of arts and culture calling for a boycott of all cultural activity that is either financed by, or supportive of, the government of the state of Israel. This call is not directed at individual Israeli artists and workers in the cultural area, but those who are clearly using their activities to advance the interests of the Israeli state by accepting state endorsement and / or finance. The signatories of this letter opposing such a boycott included many politicians from both the main parliamentary parties, most of them long-standing members of the 'Friends of Israel' groups in parliament. Others have a history of uncritical support for a state that has broken or ignored over 60 United Nations resolutions relating to Israel's illegal annexation of Palestinian land; has continued to build illegal 'settlements' of Jewish occupiers on this seized territory; protects these by the most heavily armed force in the Middle East, even as these illegal occupiers harass, assault and sometimes kill Palestinian residents of the West Bank; systematically destroys any hope of a two state solution through these 'settlements',  and continues its periodic murderous assaults on the defenceless citizens of Gaza.

 Among those who signed this letter were several well known writers who are now, in effect, defending and aiding the systematic and widespread persecution of  Palestinian citizens of Israel itself and those living under illegal occupation; giving support to the continued Israeli assaults on Palestinian villages and the subsequent bull-dozing of their homes, now an almost daily occurrence in illegally occupied East Jerusalem, but also common elsewhere; the arrest and imprisonment of children against all international agreements (between 500 and 700 children are arrested and prosecuted through Israeli military courts each year, most for throwing stones at heavily armed military vehicles and many are then transferred and imprisoned within Israel rather than their homeland, the occupied territories, against the UN convention on the Rights of the Child); the use of the world's most sophisticated weaponry upon unarmed and defenceless civilian men, women and children in Gaza (over 300 children killed in 2014 and 1200 adults); the continued effective imprisonment of a whole population in Gaza who cannot do anything without Israeli permission and the unrelenting West Bank occupation that has now effectively scuppered any hope of a two state solution, the very aim the signatories of the letter claim to be their solution to this one-sided and seemingly intractable situation. They appear to be completely unaware of the attempts over the last seventy years to change Israeli attitudes towards the persecution of the Palestinians  through dialogue and engagement and the implacable resistance of successive Israeli governments to change their policies in any way. The idea that this government, perhaps the most virulently anti-Palestinian regime yet elected in Israel, might in some way modify their attitudes toward Palestinian aspirations through cultural dialogue shows a breathtaking naivete.  
Signatories to this letter include: Hilary Mantel, J.K.Rowling, Melvyn Bragg, Wendy Cope, Fay Weldon and Zoe Wannamaker. Most of the others are long-standing defenders of the indefensible, but one, who has received little attention, is Danny Cohen, the Head of all four BBC television channels, its web-site and a member of the BBC executive board. The naivety or ignorance of reality shown by some of the signatories is concerning, but that someone who works at the most senior level of our most prestigious broadcasting service, a service with a duty to impartiality in all news and current affairs, can publicly give support to one side in one of the most contentious and potentially catastrophic political disputes currently unresolved, and receive no criticism or censure from the BBC Trust, is revealing of the increasingly partisan nature of BBC news coverage. The BBC is under very real threat from our current government and it seems to be protecting itself by steering its coverage of news and current affairs in a clearly right-wing direction, not only through the increasingly prevalent 'analysis' of political affairs by its own correspondents, who present any viewpoint that lies outside of the narrow boundaries of the neo-liberal orthodoxy as beyond reasonable discussion but also the continual use of 'experts' from right wing think tanks, often funded by the vested interests of the city and big business. I'm sure I'm not alone in finding it increasingly difficult to defend the BBC in its current phase of well-founded fear for its future, and it will not retain its traditional supporters - those who would instinctively defend publicly owned services and resist the incursions of profit and commercialism into the structures of the BBC - by its current approach of being little more than the mouthpiece of the powerful.

Back in my childhood years of the the 1950's and early 60's, discussions of the Israeli state were occasionally picked up on my juvenile radar as they arose in the many political discussions that took place in our flat between my mother and her political colleagues (she was, by now, working at Labour Party headquarters in Smith Square in London, editing a small magazine called Labour Woman). These discussions usually centred on the enthusiasm of youthful members of various socialist groups for spending time in Kibbutzim in Israel. There was a romantic idea that the Kibbutz was a small socialist cooperative founded on egalitarian principles. This was often allied to another romantic myth that has been carefully cultivated by the Israeli state that theirs was a country heroically defending itself against overwhelming odds, trying to bring civilisation to a largely empty desert whilst all the time being threatened by the surrounding hostile Arab territories. The long association of the Jewish working class with socialist movements in pre-war Europe and the terrible European genocide suffered by the Jews in Europe all served to support the founding myth of the state of Israel and many young socialists in Britain and other European countries travelled to do voluntary work in Israeli kibbutzim. Many returned somewhat disillusioned. The influence of the 1960 novel and film, 'Exodus' in planting the state's creation myth in the popular imagination cannot be overemphasised.
The reality of the founding of Israel has now been incontrovertibly shown to be the very opposite of this persuasive myth. Work by Israeli historians including Benny Morris and, most significantly, Ilan Pappe have shown that mandated Palestine was, of course, heavily populated with Palestinian farmers and artisans. That the Zionist forces were heavily armed and considerably better organised and prepared than the Palestinian population and their Arab neighbours, and that it was largely through carefully planned terrorist action - the destruction and complete eradication of Palestinian villages, sometimes with the massacres of their citizens (February 1948 the village of Qisarya where 1500 residents were violently expelled and their homes destroyed, Barrat Qisarya where 1000 more were similarly treated, Kirbut Al-Burj and Atlit followed and the order to "blow up 20 houses and kill as many villagers as possible" saw an end to the village of Sa,sa where in fact over 30 houses were blown up and about 80 villagers killed*) that the forced ethnic cleansing of Palestine was initiated - what Palestinians call the Nakba or catastrophe. This was part of a detailed plan drawn up by Israeli forces known as Plan Dalet. This outlined an explicit strategy for taking over Palestinian communities and expelling the Palestinian population: "operations can be divided into the following categories: destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines and debris), especially those population centres which are difficult to control continuously; mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it.  In the event of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.” 
The systematic attack by Zionist forces on largely unarmed and undefended Palestinian villages led to the flight of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland and to permanent exclusion from their ancestral homes. There are now some 2 million Palestinians still living in refugee camps in Jordan, 760,000 in the occupied West Bank, 460,000 in Syria and 420,000 in Lebanon. All are denied any right of return to the places where they or their ancestors once lived. Indeed, the towns and villages from which they were expelled have been erased from Israeli maps and the villages themselves razed to the ground and built over with Israeli replacements. Palestinian history has been eradicated from the landscape. There is, of course, a terrible irony in a largely European Jewish military force expelling, through systematic violence, another ethnic group and creating an Arab diaspora, while Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories are subject still to appalling discrimination by the Israeli state. It is, though, heartening to see the growing number of Jews throughout the world who courageously take on the ideology of terror and discrimination now entrenched within Israeli politics and who are supporting the policy of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions that is now beginning to trouble the state of Israel. Groups like Jewish Voices for Peace in the United States and growing numbers of affiliates to the movement throughout the world are trying to replicate the success of the similar campaign against apartheid era South Africa.(Worth remembering that there was a very close, but secret, relationship between Israel and apartheid South Africa who gave each other material support in the period when the rest of the world was isolating the racist regime in S. Africa). It is, of course, the growing success of the BDS movement that has given rise to the desperate nature of the letter that initiated this post.
* Source: Ilan Pappe - "the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine"

I see I have neglected to come back to my grandfather on my father's side as promised in the last post. He always professed to being a communist, although I don't think he ever joined the communist party. He could never bear to have to listen to what someone else may think let alone be instructed by anyone else. Not sure the communist party would wear that attitude. He did, though, in the years after the war, volunteer to go to help - not Israeli kibbutzniks - but to rebuild destroyed roads in communist Yugoslavia, and I remember him showing me photos of him in vest and cord trousers pushing laden wheelbarrows up large mounds of rubble. This was no surprise to me, since he seemed to be permanently dressed in a vest and cord trousers; it was his default mode of attire for all occasions. He was proud of being the oldest volunteer in his group, just as he was inordinately proud of his general physical state - hence the permanent singlets to display his toned upper body. Yes, he was a vain and self-important man, opinionated and domineering to my put-upon grandmother. They lived in a very large detached Edwardian house and my grandfather had turned one of the downstairs rooms into a small gymnasium with weights and a rowing machine. Here he 'worked out' as we say now, but then, took his exercise. He also had a couple of young men who came to use his equipment in the evening and he would give them advice on their fitness regime. He was able to give advice to anybody on anything, as it happened, and freely delivered this all the time. Such philanthropy. He was what some would call eccentric, others a megalomaniac.
 In the room next to his gym was a room whose only function seemed to be to house the telephone (at this time, a clear sign of the well-to-do). Around the walls of the room were stacked orange boxes, all of them filled with stacked magazines. These were divided into three categories. The largest housed hundreds of copies of a magazine called 'Soviet Life' to which he subscribed so that he could regale us all at meal times with the latest developments enriching the lives of those in the soviet union - those not in the gulags, on the whole. The next group of boxes held the more esoteric 'China Reconstructs' - the very title promising so much excitement. This usually had full size pictures of Chairman Mao on the front, or ecstatic Chinese workers. Both these magazines were large format and printed in colour and both entirely baffling to a child under the age of ten. The third magazine was smaller and was devoted to body building and featured pictures of flexing young males, liberally covered in body oil and wearing only thongs. Had I been older, these might have aroused a few suspicions  - whether they aroused anything in him, I know not. Hidden among these particular magazines, though, were surreptitious copies of 'Health and Efficiency', featuring many tasteful pictures of young bare-breasted women playing volleyball with the ball always strategically placed.I couldn't help but notice that the magazine featured women almost exclusively. Even at this young age, I could relate 'health' to the images - but 'efficiency'? I'm still puzzled today.
The house had a large front room that housed, not only chairs, table etc. but also one of my grandmother's two grand pianos. She was an accomplished pianist and music teacher. Behind this room was my grandfather's workroom. This had to be seen to be believed. When you entered you were confined to a central narrow passageway that led between two floor to ceiling mountains of what can only be called junk, piled haphazardly and precariously to what seemed an enormous height. The passage led to a work bench with large drills, clamps and turning machines. Once, my brother and I climbed through the huge pile of discarded boxes and assorted debris on the left hand side, and underneath everything we found two pre-war motor bikes propped against the far wall. My grandfather was a hoarder of epic proportions. The work-bench was part of his entrepreneurial activities. He had owned a factory in a nearby town that produced plaster garden ornaments, among other things. He had once tried to develop a new kind of model from a new material and he set up the prototype in the kitchen - my grandmother's province entirely, normally - and left it working overnight. Part of this equipment was a large glass jar that, at some point in the process, exploded showering the kitchen with glass and embedding many large shards deep into the wall. Had my grandmother been there she would have been torn to shreds. His only comment - "humph, someone must have tampered with it".
One of his - many - unacknowledged weaknesses was severe deafness. He would spend large parts of the day watching test matches on television when they were on, always 'Grandstand' on Saturday afternoons, and anything else that interested him the rest of the time. To get around his deafness, he would plug a joined series of twisted light flex wires attached to what looked like second world war pilot headphones that would be clamped to his head and he would sit, in his vest and cords, for hours plugged in to the black and white set. The headphones, of course, had the effect of cutting off the sound to anyone else who might have wanted to watch, not that this concerned him in the slightest. However, he would have a habit, when something particularly annoyed him of suddenly turning round and shouting at anyone who happened to be in the room "Did you hear that! What nonsense! Did you hear the rubbish he just spouted?" Well, no we didn't, we haven't heard anything for the last three hours. But of course, he was oblivious to anyone else.
One of my favourite memories of him was when some builders were re-tiling part of the roof. This was a large, three storied house with a high, front-facing gable and they had scaffolding and a ladder running from ground to roof. The two builders were carrying hod-loads of tiles laboriously up this seemingly endless ladder. My grandfather, who knew everything about everything, imperiously stopped them before they had got a few rungs off the ground. "No, no, no. Come back down here now. You're moving all wrong here. Now then " he instructed, "watch me. Right, keep your back straight - really straight. Lift hod like so, right to left shoulder. Adjust for comfort. Now, move your legs from the hips - got that? From the hips (I was trying to think of how else you might move your legs, but I was stumped). Now, with back straight, up we go one leg at a time moving only from the hips." And up he went with loaded hod right to the roof. Back down he came having unloaded the tiles. "now, you see what I mean. The way you were moving you're likely to do your back.Okay?" 
"No, not really. I didn't quite get that" was the response "do you think you could show me again?"
"Righto young man" came my grandfather's reply, now, load up the hod and watch carefully". 
It took five attempts before they'd got it and finally let him go.  

All has gone rather quiet on the Corbyn front. The rather shambolic beginning to his leadership, as demonstrated by the u-turn on Labour's attitude towards the Tories' ludicrous bill to make it obligatory to run a surplus "in normal times" (who is going to prosecute a government that refuses to do this?), immediately raises the question of why the Labour party ever even considered supporting it in the first place. The change of policy at least suggests a recognition that the opposition's job is to oppose. It's a happy coincidence that only a few days later the Canadian general election has returned a government with a healthy majority committed to running a deficit as its main financial policy in order to stimulate growth through infrastructure spending. And when interest rates are around zero, this makes perfect sense. I have a feeling that if Mr. Corbyn can begin to assert his own beliefs more purposefully as a leader with an overwhelming mandate for change, there is a growing groundswell of opinion in the country at large that will respond positively to his unorthodox leadership style. We can see that informed opposition to the austerity programme - really just an ideological drive to reduce the size of the state and increase the growth of privatisation - is gathering visible global support.  If Mr. Corbyn continues to try to lead through consensus within the PLP, he will look ineffectual. The gulf between the Blairites and the constituency that the Labour Party traditionally represented, but abandoned under Blair, cannot be bridged. There is an excellent analysis of the media's representation of Mr. Corbyn in the current 'London Review of Books' which takes to task not just the obvious culprits of the right -wing press, but the appallingly partisan approach of the BBC. At a time when the BBC needs all the friends it can get, its news coverage has become little more than the mouthpiece of the establishment. Anything critical of the neo-liberal orthodoxy is treated as a kind of madness by BBC reporters and interviewers.They remain uncritical apologists for the West's continuing imperial policies abroad ( witness the unquestioning acceptance in its reporting of the American explanation for its bombing of a Medecins sans Frontieres hospital in Kanduz, Afghanistan, killing twelve medical staff and ten patients, three being children. This attack lasted for over an hour and was described by the Americans as an 'accident', 'unfortunate collateral damage', 'allied forces under fire from Taliban gunmen' etc. Even though the explanation changed four times in three days, all were unquestioningly accepted by BBC journalists with no hint that the American version is a hotly disputed view, both by MSF itself, who regard the attack as quite deliberate, and the many witnesses to this massacre). BBC news coverage, in its bulletins and 'analysis' programmes, is now a national disgrace. The LRB article can be found here, though you may have to copy and paste: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n20/paul-myerscough/corbyn-in-the-media

Imperial powers have, of course, always used terror to advance their national / strategic interests and, had I not been a young child, I could have found examples of British atrocities inflicted on indigenous peoples in many of its 1950's colonies - Malaya and Kenya being two obvious examples. I would also have found the media of the day equally supine before authority and equally as anxious to represent the world according to the version authorised by the Imperial powers as the media is today. But I was a child, and, like most children, my memories are bound by the familiar parameters of my council estate, my school and my family. Some memories are still very potent, though I could not place them accurately in time beyond belonging in the period I was at Junior School.
 One was being very cold in the front room of our flat during a particularly bitter Winter. We had no coal or wood for a fire and, of course, central heating did not exist. My mother suddenly said, "Oh, I'm fed up with this" and she got up, went into the kitchen and returned with one of our kitchen chairs. She proceeded to break this into pieces (it already had a weakened back due to me falling backwards on it when tipping it at the table), put paper and bits of the chair into the fire, and set it alight. After a moment of uncertainty, the dry, painted wood of the chair began to spring into bright yellow flames. More wood was thrown on top; it died down momentarily, then once more sprang into life. Soon we felt the fierce heat of a fire burning with an almost frightening intensity. We were warm - no hot - and I was caught up in its brilliant beauty, holding out my hands as close as I could get them to the flames. It lasted only a few minutes. The chair was all too quickly consumed and we were soon back to smouldering cinders, and more cold than we had been before.

Another was the sight I chanced upon when looking out of the window of our front room one afternoon of two grown women physically fighting on the pavement outside. Street fights were a commonplace for us kids, but adults seldom figured, though on one occasion when Georgie Burton - yes, it was him again - was in the midst of a fierce fight with another boy on the green his dad emerged from their flat, not to break the fight up, but to stand on the side-lines offering Georgie useful instructions on where to hit his opponent to do most damage. "In 'is face, Georgie, NOW! Now kick 'im 'ard where it 'urts" and so on. Another victory to what was now team GB. The sight of two women fighting was immediately fascinating. They weren't just playing at it either. They were grabbing each other by the throat, the hair and the arms each trying to wrestle the other to the ground. I was transfixed. One of the opponents I didn't know, but the other was immediately recognisable and very familiar to me. Yes, you guessed it - Georgie's mum! She was an amazing sight at all times. She was tall, always wore a leather pencil skirt so tight that she walked like a duck out of water, black blouses with plunging neck-lines that revealed a great deal of breasts that Marilyn Monroe would have envied and a mass of brown hair that would either be bouffaned up several feet above her head, or flung down her back and wrapped around her waist. The effect was completed with stiletto heels that seemed to defy the laws of physics in keeping her upright, if not steady. However, now, in this conflict situation, the stilettos came into their own. While one arm was wrapped around her opponent's neck, the other whipped off a shoe, raised it high, and brought the sharp point down on her opponent's head. She had clearly absorbed, with admirable diligence, every aspect of the Burton strategies for dealing with hostile situations. The other woman collapsed to the floor, struggled to her feet with blood trickling from a small wound on her head and slowly made her way back to the next block of flats. What the fight was about, I never found out, but as entertainment value for small boys, this was hard to beat.  

I said in an earlier post that I would come back to my grandfather on my father's side - Bromley's only entrepreneurial communist who had seen how a capitalist system could bring him clear benefits if he simply totally ignored his core beliefs. (This was fairly typical of his whole approach to life. I have never forgotten him pointing a fork at me when I was a child, a fork with a large sausage impaled  on the end, and solemnly telling me that being a vegetarian was the only healthy way to live). I'm away for a few days in an internet free zone, so shall come back to this curious character next post.

to be continued.......   

I always try to avoid any news of Tory party conferences if at all possible. The serried ranks of the self-righteous defenders of privilege is a sight that fills me with a kind of despair for humanity and I have to constantly remind myself that decency does proliferate elsewhere. However, even I was taken aback by Teresa May's rant on immigration that seemed more suited to an EDL rally than from a Home Secretary representing the party of government and with a duty of care towards asylum seekers and refugees. Even the Daily Telegraph was shocked and took her to task! Today, the sheer nastiness of this administration was reinforced by the PM's smear tactics in relation to Jeremy Corbyn. I really didn't want to write about poor old Jeremy again, but as I said in an earlier post, he is going to have to deal with the ruthless distortion of his back catalogue of political commitment for a long time to come.
 According to the PM, the Leader of the Opposition is a terrorist sympathiser, a threat to national security and someone who hates Britain (echoes of the Mail's smear of Ed Milliband's father here). He quotes Corbyn as saying that the death of bin Laden was a 'tragedy'. Anyone who watches the interview in which this phrase occurred (freely available online) will see how Cameron has selected from, and then wilfully distorted Corbyn's actual remarks. Mr. Corbyn makes it clear that he regarded the World Trade Centre attack as a tragedy, the war in Iraq as a tragedy and the lack of willingness to bring bin Laden to proper trial as a tragedy. He reiterates his opposition to the death penalty under any circumstances and objects to the use of extra-judicial killing by states of any political hue. They are thoughtful and considered responses unlike Mr. Cameron's cynical distortion of what was said. And this from a man who voted for the Iraq war,  has defended that position ever since, and tried to take us into a war in Syria.  While Corbyn has spent over thirty years as an MP working hard for the poorest, least advantaged and politically disenfranchised groups in society, Cameron has worked equally tirelessly to further advantage the wealthy, the privileged, and the powerful accumulators of capital from across the globe. Put more succinctly, he has relentlessly waged class war. The inexorable increase of wealth at the top has been at the expense of working people who have only their ability to earn an ever-diminishing wage - many also reliant on state benefits that are now being withdrawn - to make their lives bearable. The hard won rights of working people to decent working conditions and the ability to defend them through collective action, have been systematically dismantled. Who really is the patriot? 

The role of the media in fashioning public opinion to accept neo-liberal free market dogma as the only conceivable means of organising society cannot be over-estimated. Anyone who presents any kind of threat to the status quo will be the subject of unscrupulous and coordinated attack from across the corporate media outlets (and I include the BBC here). They all, after all, have a strong interest in maintaining this status quo, since it is the means by which they fund themselves. But ideology works not just in the overtly political sphere of news dissemination, but in our consumption of popular culture generally. The latest mass shooting in America is not just due to ready access to guns, but also a deeply entrenched culture, reinforced in all elements of American entertainment, that violence is the ultimate solution to most problems. This cultural initiation begins at a very early age. 

In our council flat in the late fifties and early sixties, since we couldn't afford a TV, we, as children, read voraciously. It is the only thing I truly value about being impoverished. Actually, that's not wholly true. It is useful to have some idea of what deprivation means, since it is a growing feature of our society but now without even the degree of state back-up that was available in the fifties. I wouldn't, of course, wish it on anyone. What we did have were books, free from the local library,and books that my mother had at home. All the 'William' books were favourites and we read them to each other at home. I still find them funny now. Curiously, I also liked all those children's stories set in English public schools -Billy Bunter and Tom Merry as well as endless stories in children's anthologies. These stories were far removed from anything to do with my own experience. The only fag I knew was smoked, I never had a clue what 'the Remove' was; the dormitories, the house system, the games of rugger and cricket, the chapel, the suits these children seemed to wear to school, some even with top hats!  But these were stories about children outwitting teachers, (who were either ridiculous or sinisterly foreign looking) and showing solidarity with each other, and I loved them. They were, of course, wholly redolent of the class and cultural attitudes of the pre-war years. 
We read comics, of course, that were swapped with friends on a daily basis and a real treat were the comic annuals, sometimes received on birthdays or for Christmas. I loved the Beano, the Dandy, The Beezer, the Topper - even my sister's Bunty. I also liked the ubiquitous second world war booklets that were more expensive and always featured granite-jawed Brits outwitting Jerry or, still, the Hun! This sat rather uneasily with my mother's wholehearted commitment to the peace movement, but just as she vainly tried to prevent us ever playing with toy guns, the power of the media, particularly the excitement of war stories and western films, was too seductive for a child to resist. 
The obsession with the second world war which ended five years before I was born, nonetheless permeated almost every aspect of popular culture at this time. The Germans in the comics I devoured were forever snarling "son of an Englander pig-dog" to their English foe, but being reduced to "donner und blitzen" as they were once again outwitted by our plucky Brit tommies. I also have a memory, though I can find nothing on-line about this - of a character in one of my sister's comics called Pogo Polly. This was an almost surreal strip concerning a young girl in Europe in world war two who travelled everywhere on a pogo stick. She too outmanoeuvered those stupid Jerries, often outwitting whole German platoons and making her escape on her trusty pogo stick. She was usually able to find a useful ravine nearby where she would gather momentum on her pogo on the edge of the chasm and then make her leap to safety, once again leaving the Hun exasperated and only able to impotently yell "donner und blitzen" (clearly "son of an Englander pig-dog" would not have worked). 
 I made no distinction between 'high' and 'low' culture, of course. I just read what I found. When I was ill and off school, I stayed at my grandparent's house (my mother's side). There I found, on the top shelf of their bookcase, a whole set of Robert Louis Stephenson novels. I liked the sound of 'Kidnapped' and was sucked into this gripping tale that took me to a completely different time and place. I read it all in one day. I quickly worked my way through them all - 'David Balfour', 'The Master of Ballantrae' and, of course, 'Treasure Island'. These were transformative experiences for me; I had discovered the power of the written word, and they led me on to other, similar, novels. I devoured the whole of the 'Hornblower' novels of C.S.Forester that I got from the local library - all twelve of them - and I've never forgotten the bitter feeling I experienced when I'd read the last one. But then I discovered that he'd written lots more novels, so on I moved to 'The Gun', 'The Ship', 'The African Queen' - anything I could find by him and never once disappointed. The experience of being totally immersed in another world that reading can conjure, being in the grip of a spell you don't want to break and completely escaping the reality of your own experience - is something unique to childhood. We become more sophisticated readers as adults, more self-aware and rightly more demanding - but that early experience is never forgotten and I feel a sadness for those children who never experience it.

I described in an earlier post how my mother was a committed supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. As a child, I became familiar with the notion of mutually assured destruction, or MAD, for short, the theory that underpinned and justified these weapons. No-one would dare use them because they would ensure their own destruction - as long as their opponent had them as well. This made them, so the theory went, an effective way of ensuring peace between powerful nations.
 The first part of the proposition could legitimately be argued on the basis that, since 1945, they haven't been used (though some would say that the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 came uncomfortably close. I certainly still remember the palpable fear that was widespread at the time). The second proposition is clearly untrue, since what happened was that the two superpowers - as well as dividing Europe into two hostile and isolated camps - simply moved their conflict into proxy wars in S. America, Africa, the far East - well actually any part of the globe where they could exert influence and gain an advantage over the other. Millions of people have died in these wars and their consequences. The cold war has now changed with the fall of the soviet bloc, but the West - or the USA, since they determine most aspects of Western policy - is still in conflict with Russia in the Ukraine, and in Eastern Europe generally as NATO tries to woo the old Soviet states into its sphere of influence, and, of course, in Syria. There have also been conflicts between the two states in Georgia (2008), over NATO anti-missile systems being placed in Poland and the Czech Republic, and over Russian military cooperation with Venezuela.
The first part of the proposition is also open to challenge. Simply because it hasn't yet happened doesn't make it impossible, and the consequence would be the end of humanity. If MAD is an acceptable defence position, then it's open to all. We now have nine nuclear armed states with a combined arsenal of around 16,000 nuclear warheads, some of these states existing in extremely unstable regions. The use of these weapons would, of course, break every conceivable aspect of both agreed rules of conflict and any understanding of morality. The immediate and indiscriminate incineration of potentially millions of men, women and children is an extraordinary basis on which to build a defence policy. It is questionable whether any state would be the first to resort to such weaponry knowing that all it would bring would be a conquered wasteland and the fallout threatening its own existence ( remember the Chernobyl power station disaster - minuscule compared to nuclear war - deposited nuclear waste across much of Western Europe). Clearly the negotiated destruction of these weapons is a sensible policy, but how can it be argued by states who both maintain and upgrade their own nuclear arsenals? How can Britain be serious about nuclear non-proliferation when it is planning to significantly increase its own missile strength with the controversial Trident missile policy? And what does it do to a culture, to us all as human beings to live permanently in the shadow of inhuman threats to destroy us all to secure an illusory peace. William Blake understood this well when he wrote, around 1794 :

The Human Abstract

PITY  would be no more If we did not make somebody poor; And Mercy no more could be If all were as happy as we.   And mutual fear brings peace,         5 Till the selfish loves increase; Then Cruelty knits a snare, And spreads his baits with care.   He sits down with holy fears, And waters the ground with tears;         10 Then Humility takes its root Underneath his foot.   Soon spreads the dismal shade Of Mystery over his head; And the caterpillar and fly         15 Feed on the Mystery.   And it bears the fruit of Deceit, Ruddy and sweet to eat; And the raven his nest has made In its thickest shade.         20   The Gods of the earth and sea Sought thro’ Nature to find this tree; But their search was all in vain: There grows one in the Human brain.

I mention all this because the debate outlined above is back with us again, hardly changed after over forty years. This has been pushed to the forefront of the news because Jeremy Corbyn (yes, it is he again!) has stated that he would not press the nuclear button. How, splutters our outraged media, can he make any claim to be Prime Minister if he plays himself into the hands of our nuclear enemies in this naive manner? Anyone wanting the top job must make it clear that they are at least prepared to annihilate millions of people if they absolutely have to. Or at least pretend they would. Corbyn finds himself in a difficult position - one he will find himself in again and again. As a long term opponent of Britain's so-called independent nuclear deterrent (it is, of course, entirely under NATO's, that is US control) he knows that his position will not be supported by the largely right wing  Parliamentary party. To persuade the party to ditch its commitment to upgrading Trident would seem impossible under the present policy-making arrangements. So what does he do? He will try every means possible to get the policy changed, but I, for one, admire his willingness to say, I might not win on this policy, but let me make it quite clear, I will not agree to mass murder, or pretend that I would. There is a moral basis to my political beliefs. If he were ever to become PM it is clear that the 100 billion pound bill (probably 130 billion over the 30 year lifetime of Trident according to 'The Guardian') would immediately become completely unnecessary for as long as he is in power. What better reason to vote for Jeremy? 

Although CND and the Labour Party were both part of the backdrop to my childhood years, I was, of course, largely taken up with surviving life on the estate. Our flat was small and our finances dire, but at least we had a place to live provided by the welfare state at an affordable rent. There was a consensus across all political parties at the time that the state had an important part to play in guaranteeing the necessities of life to all its citizens if possible, and that taxation -the sharing of costs as fairly as possible across all social classes - was the most effective way of doing this. The 1945-50 government of Clement Attlee had, from the basis of an economy devastated by war, managed to create the National Health Service, a nationwide council housebuilding programme, universal state pensions, sick-pay, child benefits a national investment strategy based on nationalisation - while our own government, with an economy devastated by the greed of the banks, can only look at cutting every state entitlement still left while lowering the living standards of the working poor. This post-war massive state investment led to a decade of sustained economic growth, while our own era stagnates as the real value of wages declines inexorably and our economy is reliant on financial and service 'industries' for any sign of recovery.

Our flat was getting too small for three growing children. My brother, myself and my sister all shared one bedroom, sleeping in bunk beds and this must have been particularly hard for my sister. This wasn't the only hardship she had to endure. She too suffered at the hands of the menacing Georgie Burton. He saw her playing with his younger sister at the back of the block of flats where the sheds belonging to each flat were situated. In Georgie's dad's shed there was a lot of building material stored, and Georgie thought it would be diverting to load up a large plank of wood with the contents of an open sack stored there, creep up and tip it over my sister's head. This was a sack of lime, which can cause skin burns and blindness. My sister's eyes were badly affected and she had to be rushed to hospital for immediate treatment which, fortunately, was successful. Georgie, of course, thought this whole episode was hugely entertaining. A not dissimilar incident happened to me not long afterwards, though this time - surprisingly -Georgie Burton was not involved. 
I don't know if they're still around, but a favourite kid's sweet of the period was a 'Jamboree Bag'. This was a sealed paper bag with a range of sweets inside - always some chews and at least one sherbet filled 'flying saucer' - and a small toy of some kind. One week the manufacturers decided (maybe Georgie Burton was an adviser) to include a small, but effective, metal catapult as the toy of the moment. Difficult to imagine a sweet manufacturer today thinking a toy that projected solid missiles at great speed would be just the thing for young children. Pretty soon, the kids on the estate were firing small stones at each other from behind walls, parked cars or their own windows. I rarely had money to spend, so could not join in the mayhem, but as I was walking home, someone suddenly leaped out from behind a car and let fly at me from short range. He got me straight in the right eye which immediately filled with blood rendering me temporarily blinded. Slowly my left eye came back to vision and I was able to get home. My mother took one look at me and begged our immediate neighbour to drive me to hospital, which, seeing me, he readily agreed to do. I was taken to a theatre for examination and it was found that a main vein to the eye had severed and my mother was told that my chances of seeing again from that eye were slim. My eye was bandaged up and I was consigned to a bed and, once more, found myself alone in a hospital children's ward.
I stayed about a week in this ward as my eye was left to - hopefully - heal and as the days went by, I started to read through with my functioning eye some of the books and comic annuals kept in a cupboard near my bed. It was here I discovered Rupert the Bear. This had a strange effect on me. Maybe it was the medication, but I found these stories both compelling and seriously scary. There was something about the way that the strip had both speech balloons and rhymed text underneath, a pug, an elephant, a badger and a pig all dressed like English aristocrats. The sudden appearance of several Chinese, or maybe Japanese characters - why? where from? The strangely empty, dream-like landscapes, but, most scarily for me - Rupert himself. Those startling check clothes and bright red top contrasting with that huge, blank white head with just two black pin-pricks for eyes and no expression - he gave me the creeps and frighteningly entered my dreams at night. He is a character I still find strangely unnerving. 
My eye healed and I regained sight in my right eye. This time I knew exactly what to expect at home. In a later post I will come back to bloodied eyes when I get to an early encounter with a young David Jones - later Bowie. But all in good time

Just as the first wave of Corbyn hysteria has settled down in the British press, the Italian Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi has - extraordinarily - stepped into domestic British politics to lambast those who voted in Corbyn as Labour leader in an all too obvious attempt to boost his own fight with the Italian Trade Union movement as he attempts to move Italy firmly into the current neo-liberal orthodoxy of austerity and privatisation. Just think how many times a British PM could have stepped in to condemn the Italian electorate for voting in Berlusconi. What next? All those voting for Corbyn to be denied entry to the USA on grounds of harbouring unAmerican ideas?
The refugee crisis, however, continues to shame the European Union as it reveals itself to be utterly incapable of rising to the humanitarian disaster growing outside and within its borders. The full refugee death toll is not really known, since there has been no desire to fully understand what is happening on the part of the EU, but the total deaths since 2013 is, as a minimum, in excess of 6000 men, women and children (UNHCR figures). Some 600,000 people  have so far undertaken the unimaginably terrifying journey to find a safer place to live and there is little sign of this stopping. 1.2 million are predicted by the end of the year. This mass movement of people has simply overwhelmed the European Union's capacity to act in any kind of coordinated or remotely effective manner. The colossal failure of government or  effective organisation by the EU in this continuing disaster is only outdone by the British government's own woeful efforts to respond to the still developing situation as it desperately seeks to avoid doing anything that might actually involve accepting a meaningful number of living, breathing, frightened and desperate fellow human beings.

It's worth remembering the Cameron government's responses to the developing catastrophe so far. Initially - leave it to the Italians and Greeks to sort out. It serves them right for being in the nicest part of the Mediterranean rather than the bleak Atlantic where we are. Greece may be bankrupt and Italy in dire economic straits, but we'll leave it to them to shoulder the entire responsibility. Oh dear, the Italians and Greeks are saving the wretches from drowning. This will only encourage them to come. We should not be rescuing people from the water, it's an open invitation. Ah,this policy doesn't seem to be going very well at home. Look, we'll send a boat, to show willing, but it can stay out of the way for the most part. Not good to get involved. Hmmm, people seem strangely moved by the image of a small child's body washed up on the shore. Maybe we need to do something pro-active. Okay we'll take 4000 a year for five years. That's, let me see, 0.03% of the population - should do it. I know Germany has agreed to take 800,000 now (1.00% of their population), but we're really  showing kindness. I'm sure they don't really want to cross water again. The proper thing to do is to keep them in camps in Lebanon and Jordan so that they don't have to make that awful journey. It's true that this denies them any hope of a better life, but, hey, I've been camping myself. It's not so bad. 
The government might consider what consigning hundreds of thousands of people to refugee camps in the Middle East actually means: after all, there is a huge amount of experience to draw upon. The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 led to the forced dispersal of some 8-900,000 Palestinians (the most authoritative account of this can be found in the Israeli historian IIlan Pappe's book 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine') to camps in Lebanon and Jordan and to the West Bank, Syria and Gaza (now itself a vast camp with its 1.2 million citizens imprisoned by Israeli forces). In 1967, after the Arab / Israeli war, another 300,000 were displaced to Jordan. Many are still in these camps sixty-five years later - In 2010 UNRWA recorded 1,400,000 Palestinians living in these camps. Lebanon is a tiny country (about the size of Cornwall) with weak infrastructure having been devastated by civil war itself and then dominated by Syrian forces when Assad was still in power and desperately short of funding. It has already received 1,760,000 refugees from the Syrian civil war - about 20% of its population. (Remember, - we are agreeing 20,000 over five years). Jordan has taken around 700,000 - about 13% of its population. Over 7 million Syrians have been displaced by the violence and around 4 million are, effectively, refugees. If all 4 million were to come, it would amount to 0.8% of the EU population. And Cameron's brilliant response is to consign desperate people to the wretched life they will endure in refugee camps in perpetuity. Leave it to the weakest to deal with and forget all about both our humanitarian and political responsibilities.Our colonial history in this part of the world, from the mandate in Palestine, to Suez and British 'interventions' in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan have all played a part in the current disaster. Our huge arms sales to despotic regimes, some now involved in the Syrian conflict and thus armed partly by us, means we are deeply implicated in what is happening. But we will walk away with a small financial contribution to those actually trying to grapple with a conflict not of their making, to  salve whatever part of a UK government conscience remains.

Back in the late 50's at my primary school, the profound effects of post-war migration to Britain had made no impact at all. Although around 2.3 million non-UK immigrants came to Britain between 1945 and 1960, the majority of these were Irish and European. Commonwealth citizens, who, for the most part had a legal right to residence, initially mainly from the West Indies and the Asian sub-continent, did not exceed the million mark until the late 60's. Britain desperately needed these migrants to fulfil the labour needs of post-war reconstruction and the expanding economy. Not for nothing could Prime Minister Harold MacMillan crow "You've never had it so good" to the British people as he was re-elected with an increased majority in 1959. In my school, on the fringes of greater London, there was not a black face to be seen. My best friends, Bruce, and two Colins, did what kids of a certain class and age used to do. We built camps in the woods and lit fires for no real reason other than fires were fun; we made unroadworthy bikes from scrap parts found at local dumps and we cycled into Bromley on these to try to shoplift sweets from the enticingly open counters at Woolworths. Bruce was the expert here. He wore brightly coloured knitted jumpers that the female shop assistants would always admire, and while he engaged them in conversation about his mother's knitting techniques, he would snaffle Mars bars from right under their noses.
 The bikes were terrifying affairs with no brakes and fixed wheels, thus the only way to stop them was to try to peddle backwards - difficult at any speed. My brother found this to his cost as we descended Chislehurst hill and, back-pedalling as best he could to slow down, his chain caught on the pedal stopping the bike instantly and sending him flying over the handlebars into a brick wall. Blood poured from his head and he expressed a rather self-regarding concern that he might die. This panicked me into trying to gain assistance from houses on the road, but all were empty of occupants.I tried waving at passing traffic for help, but all I got were cheerful waves back. Eventually I found a garage, and the owner, taking a look at my brother's condition, kindly drove us both to the local A&E where he was stitched up. This also meant that my grandfather was phoned to come and collect us in his pre-war van, much to his obvious annoyance. It was in hospital on another occasion when I encountered my first black person. A doctor, of course. I had been butchered by the local school dentist, who removed four teeth at one go. When I was still pouring blood at midnight from the open wound of my gums, an ambulance had to be called to take me to hospital where, now, I was stitched up. The doctor, from the West Indies, was scathing about the levels of dentistry in this country and I have a vivid memory of looking up at his strikingly handsome face as he stitched up my gum and watching the knot he tied in the thread gradually slide down the silky line emanating from my mouth and disappearing into it.

The main activity that Bruce, Colin, Colin and I would indulge in was playing football at the nearby 'rec'. I will freely admit that I was always hopeless at the game and was usually placed in goal. At school, in games sessions, I was always among the last to be picked for a team, but, then as now, all us boys wanted to play and to be good. I went along to the after-school sessions, hoping I might get a call to join the school team. Never a chance. In my defence, I would call as chief witness, my football boots. All the other kids had the neat, new, soft leather boots, black with plastic soles and plastic studs. They looked slick and seemed to make you a great player simply by putting them on. My mother could not, of course, afford such things. My boots were retrieved - I can't believe bought - from a jumble sale. They were simply enormous, at least three sizes too large. My friends could lace their boots together and transport them to school around their necks. Had I tried this with mine, my neck would have been thrust downwards forcing my face to the ground. If I'd swung round there would have been the very real danger of actually knocking someone out. They were probably manufactured some time in the 1930's from something like elephant hide. They were certainly a dull greyish colour. Where my friends boots came to a slick pointed end, my boots ended with a separately welded enormous leather shell, rather similar in style to the air raid shelters that could still be found in back gardens. They were completely unyielding. No part of them would flex. I might as well have been playing in hand-carved wooden clogs. Slick, they weren't. Hob-nailed boots they were. Indeed, the studs, made of wood - yes wood - were nailed into the soles, but were now so old and worn down that all the nails came through into my feet, leaving me crippled after each game. These boots alone destroyed my otherwise undoubtedly great career as a professional footballer. 

My four years in Junior school were perhaps the best years of my school days, though I never grew to actually like any part of it. But it was endurable. I would often gaze out of the classroom window to the green playing field and the freedom beyond the wire fencing and wish I was anywhere but where I was - struggling with sums and escaping into the world of my own imagination. These years were lightened by the fact of having, of the four teachers I had, two who were kind and enlightened. Mr Stephens encouraged me in English and seemed to see that if I had any talent at all it was for writing stories and he let me do this as often as possible. Mr Shepherd ( yes, amazingly, of the four teachers I had in the junior years, three were male ) was also kind, with a quiet and gentle manner. He never lost his temper and also praised my reading and writing skills. I should add that praise was not considered good for children at this time, so it was a rare quality. He used to get the same bus as my sister and myself on occasion and he would walk with us to our grandparents house which was in the same direction as his house. He took a genuine interest in our childish world, spoke to us as equals and I remember his kindness to this day. These two teachers were in marked contrast to the headteacher who was a pompous and autocratic figure. I remember him storming into our classroom once, angry that some of us boys had been doing something against the rules in the playground - I can't remember exactly what, but undoubtedly some trivial infringement. At that time a murder had been in the news concerning some youths -the feared 'teddy boys', the defining youth cult of the period -  who had got in a fight and had punched and kicked another to death on a towpath along a canal. The crime was reported as 'The Towpath Murder.' Our headteacher worked himself up into a fury at whatever indiscretions we had been perpetrating and finished his belicose rant by waving his forefinger at us all and shouting "You'll all end up towpath murderers if you carry on like this!" With that, he stormed out. Even at the age of ten, this seemed a little over the top and I noticed that our teacher, Mr Hoddy, was gazing at the closing door open-mouthed. The silence afterwards seemed interminable.


to be continued.......

Once more the press is awash with Corbyn hysteria. Almost every media outlet is full of ringing declarations of pompous outrage that the new Leader of the Opposition - a long-time republican, like many people in our society, and, I would guess, almost certainly  an atheist -could not bring himself to sing "God save our gracious queen, God save our noble queen etc, etc". As an internationalist, Corbyn would probably find the whole idea of an anthem celebrating the uniqueness of the English problematic.  It would have been an obvious hypocrisy for him to have sung merrily along, though actually there is nothing merry about our national dirge, and, of course, he would have been lambasted for this had he done so. This is a problem that all those of us who have the same opinions face on many occasions, but we are not in the media spotlight in the way that Mr. Corbyn is, and there is an argument that he might have been wiser to play by the rules and avoid the childish outcry that now consumes the corporate media. But, as I have said, that too would have provoked similar spurious outrage, and to stick to one's principles, in the long run, is the more courageous option. 
 One of the problems here is the nature of our national anthem. We only ever sing the first verse which has nothing to say about the specific qualities of Britain as a nation, identifies nothing that all can agree upon as something to celebrate, but is simply a eulogy to the monarchy, an institution that divides as much as unites. If you are not a monarchist, then how can you possibly sing it ? Best to remain silent, with dignity, as Corbyn did. To be anti-monarchist is not the same as being unpatriotic. One of the ways in which patriotism can be shown is in the demand for a more fair, equal and just society. 
 A later verse in our anthem proclaims: 
"Not in this land alone,
But be God's mercies known, 
From shore to shore! 
Lord make the nations see, 
That men should brothers be, 
And form one family, 
The wide world ov'er  
This is never sung, but there may be something here that is less troubling to the democratic republican mind as long as the 'family' referred to is not a euphemism for empire.
 Compare our anthem to the Welsh 'Land of my Fathers', which, unusually, largely celebrates the beauty of the Welsh landscape and Welsh culture expressed through the language. More conventionally, there is the Scottish 'Flower of Scotland', celebrating a decisive moment in Scottish history - victory over the English. And, of course, The Marseillaise, the French anthem, a stirring tune from the Revolutionary  period, but full of images of violence and bloodshed and, originally,  a rallying cry for war against the Austrians. The problem with all anthems is that they demand an abandonment of thought, questioning and nuance in the bullying requirement to capitulate to an emotive and unproblematic patriotism. If you are reluctant to do this, you will be abused, condemned and even threatened, a response more associated with fascism than a tolerant democracy.

Back in the late 1950's, there was also a problem with our national dirge. Although we still lived in what can only be described as poverty, if my mother ever had enough money to do so, she would take us to the cinema in Bromley on a Friday evening. These were rare treats that I still remember as the highlights of my childhood. I loved the cinema and have continued to do so throughout my life. In those days you often had to queue for some time to get in, and this only added to the excitement. The art-deco interiors of cinemas were luxurious gateways to exotic and fantastic alternative worlds. My mother, fortunately for me, liked westerns, and I have retained a life-long love of this genre, probably starting with being taken to see 'Shane' with Alan Ladd and the chilling Jack Palance as the black gloved killer. She also liked Marilyn Monroe ( it's often forgotten that she was as much liked by women as men, though for different reasons) and seeing 'Some Like it Hot' is a childhood moment I've never forgotten. To get completely lost in the world depicted on the screen, to escape entirely from mundane reality, was a feeling only otherwise encountered in reading, but the exciting merging  of the individual and collective experience of cinema, made it unique. There is one film that stays in my mind more than any other, and remains on my list of favourite films still. 
The pleasure of film for me then was that it took you to worlds quite apart from your own reality, but some time in my junior school years - either 1959 or 60 - we went to see 'The 400 Blows'. This is a French film (Les Quatre Cents Coups), shot in black and white on a very low budget by Francois Truffaut, and, of course, with sub-titles. My first foreign language film. I had never seen anything like it. This wasn't escape from my world. It was more of an encounter with it. Though shot in Paris, it featured boys I could recognise. Boys who skipped school, got in trouble, had difficult home lives and, finally, were sent to detention centres (borstal as we knew it). And a stunning image of doomed freedom at the end that always stayed in my mind. It had never occurred to me that film could be truthful in this way. The sub-titles didn't matter in the slightest. I was mesmerised from start to finish. Still love this film.
 But back to anthems. People my age will remember that cinemas always finished their last show of the day with a recording of the National Dirge. If you didn't get out in time, you were supposed to stand still right through to the end. To get out before that awful drum roll signalled its beginning was the main aim of most people in the cinema, but, as they were usually packed, it was difficult and you were likely to get stuck mid-row unable to get past those similarly caught, but not liking to show disrespect. Well, this film was so powerful, I was unable to move a as the credits rolled. I was still stunned by what I'd been watching. As we finally got up to leave, the spirit-deadening drum roll began. Most people stopped still where they stood, as did I. My mother, of course, being fiercely anti-monarchist, took absolutely no notice of the niceties expected and dragged us forcibly past the observant customers respectfully standing still. There were frequent comments as we shoved our way through, but my mother pressed on regardless muttering "absolute bloody nonsense" as she went. Corbyn would have approved, I think.