So, despite the best efforts of the corporate media to discredit and undermine him, Jeremy 
Corbyn has indeed been overwhelmingly elected to the leadership of the Labour Party, winning convincingly in all sections of the electoral process. Within 24 hours, almost 16000 new people had joined the Labour Party. Predictably this quite extraordinary victory, won against what appeared to be insurmountable odds, has been greeted in the press and TV with the wearyingly familiar alarm and derision.  The Sunday Times headline is not untypical: 'Corbyn sparks Labour Civil War'. Note how agency in this sentence falls entirely on Jeremy Corbyn. He is the one who has caused this 'civil war', presumably by having the temerity to win a democratic election fairly and beyond any reasonable dispute. Those who have decided to irresponsibly walk away and abandon their office because they didn't get their way have no part to play in this alleged turmoil.
 In much reporting, the passive voice is used. "It has emerged that" is one of my favourites, used on a daily basis in radio and TV news reporting, as though important events slowly crawl out from behind skirting boards and cupboards to be cunningly spotted by alert journalists, rather then occurring as a result of any causal process  to do with human agency that might be reported and analysed. Agency is usually confined to implied or overt attacks on those who in some way threaten the dominant economic order that guarantees the continued profits that the corporate media depend upon. So Mr. Corbyn can be emphatically blamed for upsetting the status quo. After all, he will clearly be no friend of the Murdoch press. I certainly don't remember the Sunday Times headline, at any time in 2008, that was as clear on blame as its Corbyn one: "Unregulated, Irresponsible and Grasping Banking Industry Causes Global Economic Collapse", or it's byline, 'Working People to Repay Banking Losses Through Years of Cuts to Wages and Benefits - Wealthy to Remain Untouched!' I just must have missed this kind of response.
 Unexpectedly, one of the most interesting pieces on Corbyn's victory appeared in The Sunday Telegraph by Dr. Martin Wright (not, of course, a Telegraph reporter) who compares Corbyn to the 1930's Labour leader, George Lansbury, and, among a number of interesting parallels, makes this point:
" He (Lansbury) connected with Labour’s core supporters and mobilised them in a way that meant the Labour Party survived when it may have perished. He reconnected a wounded, demoralised and betrayed party with its core values and beliefs..........................Perhaps the real lesson that a bit of historical perspective can teach us about Corbyn’s remarkable coup doesn’t concern his electability, or alleged lack of it. After all, those that warn that he is unelectable haven’t done too well at winning elections themselves in recent years. No, history tells us that the Labour Party is experiencing a period when it needs to be revitalised, democratised and brought back into contact with its all-too-forgotten core beliefs."
  Whether Labour under Corbyn will win elections we will have to wait and see. At least all those hundreds of thousands of people who have had nothing to vote for since the complete neo-liberal take-over of our political system can now participate in our - albeit  grossly inadequate -  democratic procedures.

A divided Labour Party could also be found back in the latter half of the 1950's when Hugh Gaitskell was party leader. Gaitskell had introduced prescription charges into the new National Health Service when chancellor in 1950, an act that split the party in two, and was a vociferous supporter of Britain's development of a nuclear bomb, the so-called 'independent nuclear deterrent.' He was opposed by those led by Aneurin Bevan on the left. The division of the party into its left and right wings is as old as the party itself. 
As I have said before, my mother was an enthusiastic supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and this issue was to dominate and divide Labour Party politics for years to come. The role of the state in taking responsibility for running all the major public utilities and its overwhelming success in providing decent, low cost housing for the post-war generation was not, at this time, considered particularly controversial, and certainly not the divisive issue it is now. Nuclear weapons certainly were.  After the terrifying power of these weapons had been demonstrated on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and now the division of Europe into two antagonistic factions , NATO, supported by the nuclear armed USA and the Warsaw Pact countries, overseen by the now nuclear armed Soviet Union in the 1950's, the threat of nuclear extinction seemed only too real. As CND grew in strength and became a major political force, the annual Aldermaston marches from the atomic weapons research centre in Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square in London became a significant part of the political landscape - and an interesting diversion for me at the age of eight through to about twelve as my mother took us with her on some of these massive demonstrations.

I remember walking at least two days of one march - I'm not at all sure which one it would be - and feeling both excitement and a little perplexity as to why I was doing this. Clearly, my mother had little option, if she were to show her support for the cause, other than to take us with her. I seem to remember my brother being there, but not my sister, so maybe she was spared the wearying trudge of around fifteen miles a day. We slept overnight in a large tent structure erected in the grounds of a school somewhere en route, and I fell asleep to the inevitable sounds of folk musicians working through their Ewan McColl repertoire (I would later possess several of his records, one excitingly entitled 'British Industrial Folk Songs' from which several lyrics are permanently and irritatingly imprinted in my memory. I have a real fear that they may be the last things I recall as I shuffle off this mortal coil.) Because my mother was related to E.P.Thompson, I walked with him - I knew him just as my uncle Edward who we stayed with in Halifax a couple of times, and often met at my grandmother's house - and who bathed me when I was a toddler without realising I was still wearing my socks - funny the things that stay in the memory. When we got into London, the road was thronged with crowds of watchers and I couldn't see a thing. One of Edward's friends swung me up onto his shoulders so that I could see the huge size of the demonstration - a breathtaking display that I would never forget. I was actually sitting on the shoulders of a young Stuart Hall, later to found the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies and to be one of the most perceptive writers on the Thatcher years, among many other things.
Rubbing shoulders - literally - with leading figures of the left meant absolutely nothing to me at the time, of course. I was still a child. But by now I had moved from infant to junior school. This simply meant moving into the much newer building built on the same site as the old infant school, but it was much bigger and overseen by an intimidating and pompous head teacher who intruded into much of the day to day running of the school. I made a group of friends here who remained friends - on and off - for my four years of primary school and most of whom lived on the same estate as me. 
One who didn't was a boy called Gary who arrived at the school in my third year of primary school. For a while he, and for reasons I never understood, tagged onto me at every playtime. Gary, I like to imagine, went on to become, firstly, a very successful purveyor of used cars, and later probably made a great deal of money selling dud endowment mortgages to the financially innocent in the 70's and 80's before retiring early to Marbella. He had a gift for persuasive fantasy that would grace any prospective writer of fiction.  Gary seemed much older than the rest of us. He would walk up to me in the playground,  put his arm around my shoulder and, with a look of real concern, enquire as to how I was doing that day. He had dark, well cut hair, was always well dressed and spoke with the slightest of American accents.  This, he told me, was because he was born in 'the States' (not just America) and had come over here as an infant. Complete bullshit, as I later discovered. He had a Gatsby-like ability to make you feel that you were of the utmost importance to him all the time he talked to you, and that he understood your every mood and problem. When he asked me about my family, and I revealed that my father had died, he rested his arm on my shoulder and looked thoughtfully into the middle distance for some considerable time. Finally he said, "I know how you feel, Tim. I lost a brother, and we were really close. Yeah, I don't ever talk about it, but he was killed in the war. Shot down over Germany. Got the medal at home. Don't say anything to anyone else, but I do know what you've been through." No other kid talked like this, like a scene from a film - or movie as Gary would undoubtedly say - and I was impressed with the mix of emotional restraint, but clearly deeply held feeling, and the heroic death so admirably concealed. He patted me on the back, sighed, and walked away.
 It was only a long time later that I realised that for his brother to have been killed in, let's say 1944, he must have been born around 1924, some 26 years before Gary and I were born. 

On another occasion, Gary once more came up behind me and eased his comforting arm around me. After the usual concerned questions about my emotional state, and the thoughtful and considerate responses, he once more looked silently into the distance, obviously pondering some intractable problem beyond my - or perhaps human - comprehension and idly muttered some sentences in a foreign language, which I recognised to be German, since my mother was teaching herself the language from a DIY language book, at home. "What did you say ?" I asked, "were you speaking German?". "Was I?" he replied. "Oh, sorry about that. I do that sometimes without realising. It's just a bit I picked up when I was over there. You know, you have to get by when you're travelling." Again, I was deeply impressed. Travelling around Germany, speaking the language. Was there no end to Gary's talent - and indeed, his mystery? The words he'd uttered, though had a slightly familiar ring to them that I couldn't quite place. Again, it took me some time to realise:

Muss i denn, muss i denn
Zum stadtele hinaus
Stadtele hinaus
Und du, mein schat, bleibst hier?

Muss i denn, muss i denn
Zum stadtele hinaus
Stadtele hinaus
Und du,

The words from the Elvis Presley song, 'Wooden Heart', released after Presley's discharge from the army having been stationed in Germany in 1960.