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.