Many apologies to anyone who looks at this blog with any regularity for the long break since the last post. I'm afraid I was struck down with an infection necessitating some surgery to my right hand which is only just recovering. Trying to type with my left resulted only in a faux encrypted text. This has meant I've been unable to convey any thoughts on the Syria vote, or the Oldham by-election win for Labour and the related furore around immigration and EU labour law. What I can say after five days in hospital, is that our NHS would be quite unable to function without huge numbers of imported foreign workers at every level from cleaning wards to nursing to consultants and surgeons. I would estimate that around 70% of the staff I encountered were from abroad, and, without exception, offered high quality professional service. It's not just the health service that has to recruit from overseas. I understand that some London schools are finding it impossible to recruit staff as housing costs soar and the pressures on teachers lead to flight from the profession, and they are filling up vacant posts with qualified teachers from the Caribbean.

  The current populist campaign to drastically cut immigration and prevent EU nationals from exercising their right to reside and work in the UK (the emphasis on benefits is a complete obfuscation of reality - people overwhelmingly travel here to work) simply fails to recognise our dependency on skilled and unskilled labour to keep our essential services functioning. As well as self-interest, there is, of course, the overwhelming moral case for accepting our responsibilities as wealthy members of the global community. The European response to the still growing refugee crisis is only the worst aspect of a growing nationalist retreat from our human responsibilities.
While I've been convalescing I read Tony Judt's 'The Memory Chalet' and I was struck by this prescient passage in an essay for the New York Review of Books written in 2010 :
     "We are entering, I suspect, upon a time of troubles. It is not just the terrorists, the bankers, and the climate that are going to wreak havoc with our sense of security and stability. Globalization itself—the “flat” earth of so many irenic fantasies—will be a source of fear and uncertainty to billions of people who will turn to their leaders for protection. “Identities” will grow mean and tight, as the indigent and the uprooted beat upon the ever-rising walls of gated communities from Delhi to Dallas.
Being “Danish” or “Italian,” “American” or “European” won’t just be an identity; it will be a rebuff and a reproof to those whom it excludes. The state, far from disappearing, may be about to come into its own: the privileges of citizenship, the protections of card-holding residency rights, will be wielded as political trumps. Intolerant demagogues in established democracies will demand “tests”—of knowledge, of language, of attitude—to determine whether desperate newcomers are deserving of British or Dutch or French “identity.” They are already doing so. In this brave new century we shall miss the tolerant, the marginals: the edge people. My people."   
As the media circus has moved on from the human tragedy still building around the borders of Europe, as our fellow human beings continue to drown in the waters of the Mediterranean, children to shiver and cry in the rain and cold outside the hastily erected razor wire fences keeping 'us', the privileged, from 'them' the victims of war, famine, climate change and Western military interventions, most of us keep our eyes firmly focused on other things - it's Christmas and we, therefore, have our own pleasures to focus on.

I can't resist a quick word  on Jeremy Corbyn. My cousin emailed me recently to say that he was at his small Constituency Labour Party Christmas 'do' in North London on the Friday after the Oldham by-election result. Half way through the evening, Jeremy Corbyn turned up, having cycled from his home, to wish them well. He gave them a good speech and stayed and chatted to everyone before pedalling off home. Given that he'd been up all night, had been up to Oldham during the day and still found time to visit a small local gathering of supporters, I was impressed with his thoughtfulness and commitment. Difficult to think of Blair or Brown behaving in this way. When I told this story to a friend of mine, his response was interesting. His view was that this demonstrated that the local constituency was Corbyn's natural habitat and the demands of leadership at Westminster were way out of his comfort zone. This view had not crossed my mind, but if there's truth in it, then it reveals much more about the shortcomings of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the gulf between Westminster politicians and those they represent than it does about any shortcomings in Mr. Corbyn (and I'm aware that they certainly exist).

The constituency Labour party played a not insignificant part in my childhood life also. My maternal grandmother was ward secretary of her branch and my mother would always try to help our branch, particularly at election times. I remember being taken to the ward committee rooms on election day where a small army of mainly female volunteers would be sending out canvassers and ticking off those who had voted on the electoral role so that they would not be called on later in the day to remind them to vote. I was dispatched to the polling station at my school (the reason for my day off) to take the numbers of those who had voted and to take them back to the committee rooms when I had finished my shift. This would have been the general election of 1959, so I would have been nine years old. I found myself standing outside the polling station with representatives of the Tories and the Liberals, both retired ladies, each sporting a large rosette to indicate their respective political affiliations and who seemed not so much bemused as rather shocked to be joined by a scruffy nine year old boy in this obviously important part of the democratic process. I clutched my pad to record the numbers, but the only indication of political allegiance was my obviously proletarian dress - patched trousers held up with a snake belt, threadbare jumper and jumble sale shoes. The respectable party reps shifted their chairs away from my position and muttered to each other as they glanced over in my direction.

Most voters accepted my request for their polling number with an amused tolerance. Some - obviously Tory voters in my view - simply swept past ignoring my presence completely and a minority would seem affronted to be asked at all. These would usually complain that the very act of asking for a polling number was part of an organised plot to find out which way they had voted. They would often reinforce their beliefs with imprecations concerning my motives and the value of living in a free society. I tried, using my very best pronunciation, to politely explain that the numbers were just so that they would not be bothered later in the day to be reminded to vote and, anyway, it was highly unlikely that anyone from the committee rooms would be going to the count five miles away at midnight to try to trawl through the thousands of voting slips looking for one number in order to ascertain how they had voted. My protestations never got beyond the first few words as the voters invariably hurried away leaving me talking only to myself. Even at the age of nine, I knew this whole process was a waste of time. The Tory candidate for Bromley was Harold Macmillan, the Prime minister, with a majority so huge that holding the election at all was simply a token gesture to democracy. Like millions of people, I have lived my entire life in constituencies with, in my case, rock solid Tory majorities and my vote has never had any value whatsoever. Our 'democratic' procedures are still unfair and our parliament unrepresentative of the political beliefs of the population eighty seven years after universal suffrage. With the current government about to alter many political constituencies in a blatant act of gerrymandering to ensure a Tory majority for the foreseeable future, our claim to be a leader in the democratic process is looking increasingly threadbare. (See Owen Jones recent article in The Guardian, "Time for Decent Tories to Speak Up" on Guardian web-site).

As a nine year old political activist, I learned to take the rejections and put-downs of political argument very early. I remember calling on my friend Colin, who lived on the other side of the estate, around election time and talking to Colin's mum while I waited for him. I asked her if she was going to vote Labour and she looked at me somewhat askance, before saying that they chose not to talk about politics in their house. Coming from a home where we talked of little else, I innocently asked why? "We prefer Colin to make up his own mind when he's older" came the reply. The rebuke was clear to me and I took it to heart. I thought about this for a long time; asked myself whether all my views were simply because my mum expressed them forcefully and often. Maybe she was completely wrong - and, therefore, me as well. Eventually I came to the conclusion that this could be the case, but not to discuss politics for this reason was a mistake. How would you ever begin to take an interest in the world and how it is run if you never talked about it? As it turned out, although I've always been on the left politically, my political beliefs would be turned upside down forcing me into a fundamental re-think much later in my life when I became friendly with a French assistant teacher when I was a student. Gilles Dauve, whose activist and intellectual work can be found on the internet still, had a profound influence on me on me in my early adulthood. My nine year old self was right. We accept unthinkingly the values and attitudes of our parents or those who rear us when  we are young, but it can only be good to be encouraged to think about how society is run and for whose benefit. As those brought up in strict religious communities can also testify, it doesn't mean that we will not test these beliefs and attitudes in maturity. If we have never been encouraged to think and enquire, then it is likely that we will never cultivate the desire to look beyond ourselves. 

Just as my political views changed radically in my twenties, so my childhood life was about to change as the sixties began. Junior school was about to conclude and the 11+ would determine my destiny irrevocably. But this will be for the next post.