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