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.