Once more the media is filled with dire warnings of the imminent extinction of the Labour Party, and, indeed, by implication, human society as we know it should Jeremy Corbyn emerge as the - unlikely - winner of the leadership election. The Labour Party was founded as a means for the largely industrial working class to further its interests through the established democratic procedures rather than through the Marxist revolutionary approach. The organisational means was through the now established Trade Unions, who funded and organised its electoral advance. We live in an age when the industrial working-class has all but disappeared and the very idea of a working class has lost all solidity. On many social surveys, people who have very high incomes and substantial holdings of capital will define themselves as 'working-class' simply by virtue of the fact that they do, or have, worked for a living. As the defining qualities of what 'working-class' means have dissolved, so the term, and, as a consequence, the Labour Party, have become what the political philosopher Ernesto Laclau might call an 'empty signifier'. The Conservative Party has managed to retain much more of its fixed identity by continuing to unashamedly represent a particular class (though its rhetoric will deny this) and to proclaim this as in the interests of all. In contrast, the relationship between the term Labour Party, or, indeed, 'working-class', and their respective significations, has been lost. It floats and becomes a site of struggle in which competing oppositional voices find unity in what they oppose, which does indeed, give it some significance because new hegemonic forces must come to the fore. An empty signifier must be filled with new significations that will cohere around what they oppose, and a new force has the capacity to emerge.

During the Blair years, the party finally shed its original clear connection to an industrial, largely male, social group. This had much more to do with the historical evolution of British society than Blair's own doing. He was simply well placed historically to take full advantage of this change but when Peter (now Lord Mandelson!) declared that the party was  "perfectly relaxed about people getting filthy rich" it was a defining statement of the hegemonic rise of the neo-liberal economic programme to the heart of the Labour Party.
 We are now witnessing a challenge to this. The party has become a site of struggle now, between a traditional reformist socialist programme offered by Jeremy Corbyn, tailored to some extent to present realities, but complicated by the increasingly desperate tactics of foregrounding a range of contemporary oppositional movements - feminist, sexual, ethnic as well as class identities - by those opposing Corbyn, all claiming that this is where contemporay radicalism really lies. All of these aspects of self-identification are important, and how they may be incorporated within a new configuration of oppositional voices sufficient to unite an effective challenge to the status quo  and perhaps yet create a rejuvinated Labour Party in the manner of Podemos in Spain or Syriza in Greece, will be interesting to see. I somehow doubt it will happen within what is now a moribund institution. But perhaps a new uniting force of the left will emerge.

Back on my council estate in 1956, my mother had taken the pragmatic view that it was possible to support the left wing of the party and to hope that this significant group could eventually exercise real power. The dominant issue that motivated her, and was to activate millions of supporters, was that of nuclear weapons and the terrifying implications of the arms race and the cold war. Not that any other residents of the estate seemed to share her apocalyptic concerns. My mother was, by dint of connections I will come to later, involved with some of the key members of those who were to form the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament a year or so later. 
The only arms race that seriously impinged on me was the threat posed by Georgie Burton up the street, who I had observed from the windows of our flat passing by carrying variously a golf club, a cricket bat and, more sinisterly, a broken chair leg. I was dying to get outside of our still bleak flat - sparsely furnished and with a single rug in the middle of the living-room floor -  from which I could only gaze upon what seemed an enormous green tantalisingly just across the road from our flat with lots of local kids playing around on it. But any move beyond the safety of our threshold might lead to another run-in with my new nemesis and I had no desire to repeat the painful humiliation of the previous encounter.
As it turned out, I had nothing to fear at this particular moment. Georgie Burton took beating up younger kids as simply all part of a normal day, and when I next saw him he looked through me as though I wasn't there, in fact didn't register my existence at all. As I learned, he had a habit of knocking golf balls around on the green using one of his dad's clubs (his dad was in the army catering corps and was away for weeks at a time), the cricket bat was to do with his playing the game on the green (he had 'commandeered' one from some younger kids on the other side of the green) - the chair leg I'm still not sure about, but may have been a family resource. A bit later on in my time on the estate, his younger brother Jimmy wandered up to me, thumb firmly in mouth, and said "you know tha' girl wha' I was wiv this mornin?" I didn't, but I said yes. "I pu' er in ospi'al" he said, "'i' er wiv a chair leg". Clearly the chair leg was handed round the family as occasion demanded.
Our new home meant that we were now better housed, physically, but in a worse place socially. Also, our material circumstances were still dire.Money wasn't simply tight, it was non-existent.I began my new school life at the local Primary, in the last year of Infant's school. The school had two entrances, one that led primarily to and from the council estate to the West and the other from the more  salubrious middle-class homes to the East. One of the unassailable truths of comprehensive education is that different social groups mingle and learn together. The different social classes represented in my classroom, and the necessary negotiations of very different social identities, has stood me in good stead for the whole of my life. Any government truly concerned about social integration would shut down the public schools as their first act.
 All three of us attended the same school and our day would begin with our staple breakfast, bread torn into pieces, soaked in warm milk and sprinkled with sugar.We would then set off for school and my mother to the bus stop to get to work. We would walk through the estate and out onto the road that led down to the school, about a fifteen minute journey. In winter, when it was often bitterly cold, my mother would put socks on our hands since we would rarely have gloves. What kept us all going - well me at any rate - was school dinners. Ours were free. This was drummed into me every Monday morning when my class teacher collected the dinner money from the class, and, when all the coins were collected , all those on free dinners had to raise their hands. Just me. Not that I cared. The dinner was the most important part of my school day.
I would eat anything the schools dinner service put in front of me, with one exception - liver. This grey, rubbery, foul smelling object would fill me with revulsion. Yet, we were made to eat it, one teacher on dinner duty reminding me that mine was free and would certainly not, therefore, be wasted. Not being able to bring myself to put this disgusting object in my mouth, I was detained for the whole of dinner time with the contentious delicacy congealing in front of me. A classmate - Gillian I think her name was - found herself in the same position. We sat sulkily as the minutes ticked away. Eventually, I saw that Gillian had miraculously cleared her plate and was now allowed to go out to play, leaving me completely alone. As she climbed off the bench, I looked down and saw that she had simply scraped the entire contents of her plate onto the floor, but she made a quick exit and got away. I was dumbstruck with admiration. I would never have dared. I still remember her rebellion with real admiration.
Occasionally we were allowed seconds of pudding (dessert? What's that?) if there was some left over. I always put my hand up for more. Once we had a cherry tart and I was piling up the cherry stones to do 'tinker, tailor , soldier, sailor' but it would never come out on 'rich man'. I decided to swallow some of the stones and so fix the result. This worked, but at this point the teacher on duty clapped her hands and announced that, whatever we do, we should not swallow any of the stones. If we did, she explained, stones are seeds and a cherry tree would almost certainly start to grow inside us. Such was the quality of teaching in the 1950's. For at least a month afterwards I was checking for signs of internal horticultural developments. Would leaves start to appear from my nose, my mouth, my ears? Would roots start protruding from my bum? I lived in real fear, but a fear I kept completely to myself since I certainly didn't want to return to any kind of hospital. The menace of Georgie Burton had nothing on this.  

to be continued.......... but with a hiatus. I'm away on holiday in a wi-fi free zone for three weeks, so updates will be unpredictable.

I awoke this morning to the news that Tony Blair has announced that the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader would lead to the 'annihilation of the Labour Party at the polls'. This pronouncement is headline news in every news outlet today, from the rabid right tabloids to the quisling 'liberal' press and broadcasters.
 Now, when Blair speaks of annihilation, I think he should be taken very seriously. He, after all, knows quite a lot about this particular subject. There are the annihilated civilians in Iraq - 123,000 up to 2012 according to Iraq Bodycount, but in total much more likely to be around 500,000. When Blair colluded with Bush to unleash the world's most sophisticated high explosives on the city of Baghdad, did he simply close his eyes to the inevitable annihilation of thousands of ordinary Iraqi families cowering in their unprotected homes? Has he shrugged off the countless civilian deaths in Lybia, Syria, Palestine (where he is deeply implicated in his partisan role, since 2007, as an EU 'peace envoy' in the massacre of 1,500 civilians including over 300 children, when Israel invaded Gaza) and now Tunisia and Egypt as the influence of IS continues to grow -  all connected to the fall-out from the 2003 disaster?
In domestic politics, the Blair years saw the annihilation of Labour Party membership as it fell by over 100,000  (now rising at its fastest rate for decades with the prospect of a Corbyn win). And, of course, the total annihilation of Labour in Scotland, ludicrously dismissed by the Blairites as simply a sudden surge in nationalism, even though a referendum on independence was convincingly lost by the nationalists only a few months previously. Apparently the SNP's political programme - surprisingly similar to that espoused by Corbyn - had nothing to do with Labour's Scottish humiliation and the SNP's overwhelming victory.
And the final annihilation, now almost a Pavlovian response whenever Blair's name is mentioned, is the annihilation of any sense of  personal morality. As Blair - like many of his ilk - has used his public office to further his vast private fortune, he has rightly earned the almost universal contempt in which he is now held by those who retain a sense of human decency. Jeremy Corbyn has always lived entirely on his parliamentary salary and has set an exemplary example of public service and personal integrity, whether you agree with his politics or not.

Back in 1956 and my arrival on the estate where I would spend my formative years, the Labour Party still had a firm base in the industrial working-class and was clearly seen as being the natural agency for the improvement of the life chances of working people. The state was, from a traditional Labour perspective, the prime means of wealth redistribution to achieve improved schools, health services, housing, welfare benefits and investment for the collective good in the nationalised industries. The belief was that greater social cohesion was good for everyone, even for those who were better off and who paid a higher share of their wealth to achieve it.
 By now, my mother had transferred her political allegiance from the CP to the Labour Party, but even then, the party was divided into its left and right, though the left was much stronger than now. Accusations of entryism, then from the communist left, were also just as common as now. Gaitskell was generally despised by the left of the party, who looked to Bevan and Foot for inspiration. The Labour Party tradition of its leadership (Gaitskell at this time) betraying its founding priciples and selling its soul to the powerful was vigorously being made then, as now. It was the issue of unilateral nuclear disarmament and the rise of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament which was to be the focal point of long and very acrimonious division in the party this time and my mother was, of course, fully behind, and active within, the CND movement.

All this made only a passing impression on my six year old self. My initiation into council estate life was to come a few days after moving there in the form of one who would torment and dominate almost the whole of my six year stay - Georgie Burton. Georgie Burton (never George) was a bit older than me and the eldest of three children who lived in the next block of flats along from where we lived, though both blocks were joined by connected small garden plots. It was on one of these plots that he first approached me. He was taller than me with a wiry build, blonde hair, very blue eyes and a habit, like his younger brother, Jimmy, of speaking to you with his thumb, childishly, in his mouth. Childish, he wasn't.  Objectively, he looked quite angelic, and this was what made his demeanour so threatening. He simply oozed menace. He began with a series of questions concerning my right to be there, my right to be on this particular path, my right to be within his sight, in fact, my right to exist at all. This could, apparently, only be determined through immediate physical combat, to take place on the grass plot in front of the flats, now, this minute. Amazingly, the grass plot was already filling up with enthusiastic spectators who must have sensed in some estate driven intuitive manner, that an entertaining punch-up was imminent. A crowd of local kids rapidly assembled, not particularly excited, more simply accepting this ritual as a normal part of daily existence. How true this was, I was to find out over the coming years.
The fight began with the traditional opening gambit of simply grabbing each other in an attempt to wrestle the other to the ground, or, failing at this, kicking the legs away from under your opponent. This continued for some time until I found, to my surprise, that I was slowly getting the upper hand. Although smaller than Georgie, I was stocky and had a lower centre of gravity and I found that, with one swift swipe at his legs, he was suddenly on the ground and I was sitting on top of him, right on his chest and able to hold both his arms on the ground. There was a momentary impasse - he couldn't move because I held his arms tight and pressed down on his chest, but I couldn't press home my advantage because I would have to let go of one of his wrists, allowing him back into the fight. Since this was the case, and I was on top of him, I began to feel that, well, I had won. Any reasonable person would have to admit that. I was on top, he was underneath and there was nothing he could do. Obviously, victory was mine. I began to feel pleased and looked around the onlookers hoping for some acknowledgement of my victory. None was obviously there, but, nonetheless, I relented my grip and began to ease my weight off him. As soon as I did this, he simply hit me with his right fist hard in the side of my head. I had never been punched like this before. A serious, hard thwack that went right through me. I now found myself on my back with Georgie now on top of me from where he continued to punch me hard in the face. This was not just a pain I had never felt before, but seemed to contravene every aspect of acceptable behaviour I had ever encountered before in my - admittedly brief - life. I was more shocked than hurt. No, not true, I was shocked, but also very hurt. He didn't even stop, just continued punching. My nose was now pouring blood and my lip was cut. I could do nothing but wait for him to finish. Which eventually he did, and walked nonchalantly away as though nothing of consequence had taken place at all. For me, it was a sudden and profound awareness of something of very great consequence. My life was about to change once more, and the change did not look good.

After the recent general election, and the resulting freeing up of the Conservative government to follow their preferred agenda unfettered by being a parliamentary minority reliant upon Lib-Dem support, we are beginning to see what was wholly predictable beforehand. The government is systematically abandoning its manifesto commitments that might have alleviated some of the worst effects of the austerity programme, and are pushing through all those parts of their neo-liberal economic agenda as quickly as possible before they start losing some of their slim majority in the inevitable by-elections to come. Thus we are seeing the rapid increase in removal of state benefits to those who are struggling to survive; the selling off of state assets to the capital owning class at knock-down prices to reduce the size of the state and to concentrate power and profits in the hands of this group; the further deregulation of the market by removing even those small remaining controls on the worst excesses of capital accumulation - increased poverty and environmental degradation - and the outright assault on the Trade Unions, already a diminished force in our society, and now ready to be effectively eliminated. There will be no allowable opposition to the complete transfer of power and wealth to a single class, the same class that has already received the biggest transfer of wealth from the poor to the super-rich in the history of capitalism in order to prevent the economic system from collapsing completely as a result of their own corrupt pursuit of yet greater wealth in the 2008 banking crisis. Indeed, this whole government programme of state reduction and its consequent ideological shift away from collective provision to that of 'individual responsibility', the erasure of any notion of the 'common good' is all part of the price we will continue to pay for years to come from the profligacy of the very group of people who created the crisis in the first place. That is, if it is not resisted. We are already witnessing the derision and condemnation being heaped on the utterly inoffensive Jeremy Corbyn for having the temerity to challenge this neo-liberal orthodoxy and for having some initial success in doing so. When the top dogs in the Labour Party turn their wrath on one who is offering a pretty orthodox critique of neo-liberalism and its disastrous consequences for ordinary people, you know the party has become a complete irrelevance to addressing the realities of the age. If Alastair Campbell says Labour members should vote for anyone but Corbyn, you should be reassured that,of those on offer, Corbyn's your man.

I have started this section with my view of what has happened recently and over the last thirty-five years for at least one very good reason. My generation is deeply implicated in this profound ideological shift and it affects us all economically, but also psychologically in very profound ways. Just as it seems to me to be foolish to play the generational blame game, the generation during which a seismic ideological change has taken place - a change that is leading toward economic, environmental and human disaster for the vast majority who do not have the economic resources to deflect the worst excesses of this process - has some answering to do.

Our family unit of four continued to live on the ground floor of the council run property until I was around five or maybe six years old. It was a hand to mouth existence with my mother relying on the support of friends and her own mother for support while she worked. I remember that for a time we would meet together at the house after school and then get a bus to my grandmother's house about three miles away to be looked after by her until my mother came home from work and we would all get a bus back home again. Our home - cold, damp, poorly furnished - was all we knew. We children all slept in the same bedroom and were permanently short of clothes and food. Our home was also a place of political activity. As I have said in an earlier section, my mother was a member of the communist party and fellow activists were often at our house for meetings and discussion. This background meant that politics became a completely natural part of my life and political engagement was as natural as breathing. I was taken aback when I found my friend's families, a bit later in my life, either had no interest in politics or felt it was an inappropriate area of discussion, particularly with children.

 Being grammar school educated, my mother was well read and encouraged us to read. Of course, there was no television to distract us and I don't remember us even having a radio at this time, so reading was our main source of entertainment. She would read to us in the evenings, later we would read to each other and I found out the profound joy of being lost in a story on my own at this early phase of my life. I still strongly believe that the emotional and psychological benefits of an early literary education cannot be overestimated and that no other medium can compete for developing insights into understanding the complexities of human behaviour. I still think a familiarity with the works of Shakespeare will stand you in better stead to deal with the vagaries of human behaviour than any degree in Psychology.

As I've said before, I don't remember much of my first year at the local Infant School. I remember I didn't like it, and this was to remain a constant in my life in relation to every school I attended. How ironic that I should end up as a teacher for the whole of my working life. I think my unhappiness at school -all of them - had more to do with a deep fear of institutions than with schools per se (though some I attended were pretty bad) and this may well have its roots in my experience of the isolation hospital. Anyway, around this time my mother was allocated a proper council flat in a relatively new block a few miles from where we were living. I must have been about six, because once we had moved, I found myself in the Infant section of a new Primary School.

 I remember us visiting the flat together for the first time to see what it was like. The block, though only three stories high with two flats on each floor, seemed enormous to me. I looked up at the balconies of the first and second floor flats, disorientingly high it seemed to me -  and down to the large swing doors of the entrance hall, and the building seemed to fulfil all the descriptions I had read of fabulous palaces, And I was to live here. My mother, sister and brother had disappeared through the door of our portion of this wonder while I was gazing upward and when I entered the building I was faced with a door to the left, another to the right and a huge staircase leading upward. Of course, this was the route I took, thrillingly climbing upward to find another two doors and a further set of stairs. Up I climbed to the top floor where yet another two doors, all of an identical dark maroon colour were to be found. So this was to be our new home. All of it. I noticed that each door had  white bell-pushes. So up I marched and pushed each of the bells on the top floor, then down to the bells on the second, where I did the same and finally down to the ground floor again where my mother finally appeared from the left hand door looking for me, only to find me pushing the bell of the flat opposite. She pulled me quickly through this left-hand door as I heard the various doors above being opened and voices calling to each other. I asked my mother who these other people were in our house, and she had to explain to me that just the rooms through the one left-hand door were ours and I must never touch the other doors at all.

Our new home had a dark corridor as you entered, and then a room to the left which was to become, once more, a bedroom for the three of us. Beyond this, a living room with windows on each side looking out on to grass that surrounded the block of flats.The windows had wide, tiled sills which I was later to find perfect for sitting and reading on. There was a small hall area outside this room with an airing cupboard and another bedroom (my mother's) leading off it. A bathroom, with bath and sink, and a separate toilet next to it were also off this space, and to the left , a kitchen that had, to my delight, a hatch opening into the living room. This was, clearly, a big improvement on our current living space, but it was, of course, completely unfurnished and uncarpeted and looked rather bleak. All the floors were bumpy, dark and shiny having been rendered with some institutional coating. All the walls were cream with the kitchen having a painted line running around the centre in an equally institutional dark green. We were, at least, relatively decently housed in an era when local authority housing was not only subject to effective minimum standards, but was seen as a necessity to decent social life, unlike today when it is privatised and, increasingly, non-existent. However, It was also located on a fairly large council estate, and, as I was to discover over the next six years or so, this was to be a learning experience as profound as any I have had in my life.

The experience of being in the isolation hospital had the effect of almost totally erasing any memories I might have had of my life as a very young child. Everything I have mentioned that I directly remember took place during and after this event. When our first child was born in the late 1970's, we owned our house - a small, two up two down end of terrace that cost us £9,500. We had both entered a professional occupation because universal secondary education was available allowing access to Higher Education, a degree and the possibility of breaking out of the entrapment of class. Our first child thus began life in a family now ensconced in the lower reaches of the middle-class with the firm possibility of cementing this status more firmly as the years passed. Childhood illnesses were dealt with humanely and thoroughly thanks to universal health care paid for through taxation, which distributed the costs reasonably fairly through the redistributive tax system. These transformative social changes were not granted through the beneficence of the powerful, but through the demands and organised activity of working people. If these hard-won advances are now in retreat, it behoves all of us to look carefully at the reasons why rather than taking the simplistic route of simply blaming the previous generation, many of whom organised and acted to defend what the immediate post-war generation had achieved.

Back in the precarious family home, my mother must have known that the only way we could survive as a family was to get work. Until I had reached school age, this was clearly impossible. My brother had started school while we were still living in my grandmother's house, but my sister and I were too young and full-time child-care was not on any political or social agenda in the early 1950's. Mothers stayed at home and reared children, men went to work to support their families and single-parent families didn't exist. Only happy, two-parent families of two to three children were acknowledged as the standard social unit of society.
 As soon as it was feasible, my mother got a job (very unusual at this time for a woman with children) and we entered a new routine. In the morning my mother would sit us in front of the clock on the mantlepiece and showed us the point at which the big hand would allow us to make our way to school. She must have assumed that my eight year old brother would make sure we would all arrive at school in one piece. In reality, as soon as she had left for work, my brother would be off and my sister and myself would be left stoically watching the big hand ( or for myself, becoming almost hypnotised by a tiny golden arrow that whirred round in a small hole in the clock face) until the big hand permitted us to leave. We would then make the fifteen minute walk to school across a large council estate, together. I remember very little of this school, but I do remember that when we left to walk home, the children in the Junior part of the school would still be working, and I would watch them trapped behind the cast iron frames of their heavy twinned desks and feel sure that I would never be able to do that kind of work and felt very fearful of the future.
When we got home from school, a very kind lady who was known to my grandfather on my mother's side, came in to look after us, unpaid, until my mother came home from work. My mother's first job was short lived. She was employed to do the accounts in a local laundry, but being much more a literary than a mathematics person, she soon found the work out of her skill zone - and her employers found likewise - and so they parted. Fortunately, she had been sending articles to the local newspaper for some time, and several had been published. A vacancy as a junior reporter arose which they offered to her, and thus began her career working in the newspaper industry and a way out of the poverty that single-parenthood placed upon us (and continues to do to so many women today) - though this would take many years to occur. For a long time we continued to live on the precipice of civilised existence, at any moment liable to topple over into an abyss of local authority care and familial disintegration. My mother's determination kept us, somehow, safe on the ledge. Of course, as a child, you don't judge your circumstances in relation to the social norm. Your life is as it is and you don't question it. It was only on rare occasions that I was suddenly aware that we were not quite like most other families, usually when someone at school would ask me what my dad did and the momentary incomprehension when I said I didn't have one. One of the most important aspects of now being at school was that we were all entitled to free school meals. A cooked dinner every day in term time was vital to our young development. It's scandalous to be aware that today, children are once again going hungry and losing weight in the school holidays as the divide between the haves and have nots increases in one of the world's richest societies. Why Victorian levels of inequality and poverty are once more with us must be analysed in a more sophisticated way than blaming the baby boomers.

to be continued......