I'm not sure who, if anyone, is reading this, but if there is anyone out there, many apologies for the absence of any updates on this blog for three weeks or so. It's difficult to continue from camp-sites in France, but now I'm returned I see that the media has, if anything, increased its concerted campaign to undermine in any possible way a Corbyn success in the Labour Party leadership campaign. The Times ran an article of such apocalyptic lunacy that any sane reader would simply cry with laughter. "Just as the Vikings and the Mayans brought about their own extinction by destroying the environment on which their cultures depended, so the Labour party is threatening its survival by....blah blah blah." Panorama tonight is running a 'special' on Corbyn which is little more than a carefully orchestrated piece of propaganda, sifting his long-standing commitment to Palestinian rights and opposition to the Iraq war as sinister signs of his real intentions of undermining democracy itself and plunging us all into the nightmare of a society where an ostensibly socialist party might actually initiate a socialist programme. Note particularly how every statement of Corbyn's is immediately undermined by the comments of the presenter. Any notion of impartial reporting simply does not exist in this shoddy little piece of propaganda. The BBC has reached a nadir of partisan 'reportage' with this, and I for one, as a long-standing supporter of public service broadcasting, can no longer defend the BBC's political coverage at a time when it needs public support more than ever. It now has a shameful recent history of reportage on both domestic and foreign policy, where representatives of right-wing think tanks are routinely presented as independent experts, and in foreign affairs, its reporting of the Israel- Palestine conflict, at the heart of so many of the problems of the region, are not just partial and inaccurate but are now little more than Israeli press-releases. It has become a disgrace to its once honourable history.

I said in my last update that my mother had connections to some key figures in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that was the thorn in the flesh of the Labour Party in the 1950's and early 60's - rather as the Corbyn campaign is now. This was as a result of the rather strange configuration of my immediate family and accounts for my sense of always having existed at a nexus of different class configurations. My mother's family were solidly 'respectable' working-class. My grand-parents on her side had five children, all living in a small rented semi. My mother was the only one to go to Grammar School, but they all ended up having successful careers in a variety of occupations (social mobility was more possible in the 50's and 60's than now). Her academic school gave her access to the young intellectuals of the area, many of whom, in the years after the second world war, gravitated to the Communist Party still enjoying the kudos of its success as  the most effective of the anti-fascist movements both during and after the war. They were also committed to the principles of equality and fairness for all and the old Soviet Union still appeared to offer the hope of a classless society.
Through this involvement, my mother met my father, who came from a bourgeois family living in a prosperous part of the town. Having said that, his father, my grandfather on my father's side was one of a large family of working-class East Enders, who managed to make a good living from being in early on the developments in radio and television broadcasting in Greater London in the 1930's. He ran a radio and then TV shop which clearly did very well in these early years of this technology. He later set up a factory manufacturing garden ornaments among other things and made enough money to buy a large, three storey Edwardian house in a very salubrious part of the town. I'll come back to his extraordinary character later. As well as being a communist entrepreneur - just one of many of his multiple contradictions - he had a rather good singing voice, and, as a young man, took an evening course at the Royal College of Music where he met my grandmother who came from a more genteel middle-class family and was a full-time piano student - and a very fine pianist.
Their eldest daughter, Dorothy, went to the local Grammar School that my mother attended, and my father was one of Dorothy's brothers. Dorothy went up to Cambridge where she - eventually - met and married her long-term husband, and my uncle by marriage, the historian and political activist, E.P.Thompson. He, of course, was to become a well known political figure over the next thirty years, and one of Britain's leading intellectuals of the left. My auntie Dorothy became a well respected historian in her own right, specialising in the history of the Chartist movement.Thus, as a scruffy little boy, I continually alternated between the daily hostilities and occasional brutalities of my South London council estate, and regular forays into a middle-class world of classical music, a pontificating grandfather convinced of his own correctness on everything, and a continuous background of political discussion and activity in which my mother tried to be as involved as possible whilst trying to keep us all together with no money whatsoever.

My life at my new school continued much as that of any working-class kid of the 1950's did. I continued to discover the unexpected and random outbreaks of violence that were a part of daily life now. Once, a boy in the playground took a dislike to me for some reason I never understood and started shoving me over towards the wall of the school. I was bigger than him, but he proved to be surprisingly strong and very resilient. He got me against the wall, then adjusted my alignment so that my head was immediately in front of a projecting brick window sill and proceeded to shake me backwards and forwards so that my head was continually cracking against the sharp sill. I still remember his face - thick bottle glasses and a ridiculous school cap stuck on his head (nobody wore caps to an infant school, but he did) - and he simply observed the effects of this battering with a kind of detached interest, showing no other emotion at all. I felt that I would soon pass out, or perhaps die, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was now in a world that I felt utterly unable to deal with. Before my worst fears were realised, he lost interest and simply walked away. I had a huge lump on the back of my head for days afterwards. More importantly, I was beginning to learn that aggression was now a part of my life and, for my own survival, I had better start to develop it.
All the teachers at the school appeared to be very ancient women whose universal dress code was dark clothing from top to toe and hair scraped back into a bun at the back and held in place with a hair net. They all wore hair nets. Clearly standard issue for female teachers past a certain age. They were all scary, but one was simply terrifying. Taller than the others and with a red-lined face that seemed to suggest a penchant for cannibalism as she eyed us coldly whenever she appeared in the corridor. Fortunately, I was never in her class, but one day I was walking alone down the corridor to get to the outside toilets when I heard the sound of fast pounding feet behind me. Running in a corridor was, of course, a punishable offence. A small boy whom I didn't know overtook me just as we reached a corner and he charged round at full pelt right into the midriff of this terrifying dragon of a woman. He hit her so hard that he bounced back off her straight to the ground, hitting his head hard on the tiles. She looked down at him saying nothing, then reached down and yanked him to his feet. She brought her red, child-devouring face right down to his and hissed, "first, what have you got to say to me?" I knew his time had come. Only seconds to live. He looked up at her and said "Ge' ou' the bloody way". I couldn't believe what I had just heard. The world stopped spinning on its axis. Monster-woman lifted the kid up off his feet and thrust him under her arm and marched off with him down the corridor. Obviously to her lair where, I knew, blood and dismemberment would follow.

to be continued.......