Where I'm Calling From: 2016

Saturday, 19 November 2016

So now we have president elect Donald Trump. The next president of the USA is to be Donald Trump. Over 60,000,000 people, many of whom have presumably had some form of education, voted for Donald Trump. The person leading the so-called 'free world' will be Donald Trump. The Commander-in-chief of the most powerful armed force on Earth will be Donald Trump. The majority parties in both the Senate and House of Representatives will be led by Donald Trump. The most powerful person on the planet will be Donald Trump. It is surely wholly appropriate that it is only in the fantasy world of a cartoon series some fifteen years ago that such an outcome could have been imagined. Fantasy and reality are now indistinguishable.

How can this have happened? Well, there's certainly been a lot of analysis in the media, ranging from the simplistic, 'what do you expect from Americans? They're mainly morons drip-fed by Fox news' to the, at least more sophisticated, 'it's the inevitable fall-out from thirty years of neo-liberal economic policies that have denuded the American working-class of jobs and security.' Other explanations focus on a resurgent white racism, citing the approval of Trump by a number of white supremacists, including David Duke, ex leader of the Ku Klux Klan. They argue that Trump's comments on minority groups have given a license to a barely concealed racism that has always been there and now has a freedom to express itself more openly, particularly among working-class white males. Others have focused on gender, seeing Hillary Clinton as a victim of entrenched misogyny that is so widespread in American culture that she never really had a chance. Then there are the idiosyncrasies of the voting system that allows someone with a minority overall vote, albeit by a slender margin, win the top prize. There is certainly some truth in all these explanations, but we are still left with the mystery of how someone so odious to most people with a modicum of education and human feeling could find himself - it seems to his own surprise - elected to the most powerful role in world politics. Most people like this who achieve power do so by military coups in impoverished countries often, of course, with the decisive backing of the CIA. So far, no-one seems to have suggested a role for them in this debacle.

What is really surprising is that so many people were utterly and genuinely, surprised. This is, of course, an understatement. They were dumbfounded and devastated. Even after Trump had rampaged through the Primaries and come out on top, even after the attacks upon Latinos and Muslims had only increased support for him, even after his advocacy of sexual assaults on women did nothing to impede his progress, even after twelve women came forward with accounts of his actual assaults on them made no dent in his ratings, still people were amazed that he was the winner. Any one of these could have sunk a candidate in most elections, but Trump brazened it out and was swept to victory on a populist tide of rejection of the status quo and admiration for bigotry dressed up as straight talking. How can we explain this?

Well, as I said earlier, there is some truth in all the explanations popularised in the mainstream media. The idea that many, or most, Americans are simply stupid is clearly a stupid position to take. It is true that, in most senses of the word, America is a deeply conservative society, both politically and culturally, despite the many radical movements that have sprung from there, but in a different manner from the conservatism of British society. Since 1982, Gallup has polled Americans on whether they believed in Creationism (that mankind was created by God,more or less as it is now, within the last 10,000 years) or evolution (that man has evolved over millions of years from earlier life forms). 46% of respondents held the creationist view. This statistic has been supported, but with more sophisticated analysis,and some qualifications, in the General Social Survey polls in the same period. The belief in Creationism is generally stronger among those with no higher education and the elder age group. It is inconceivable that such a statistic could be replicated in any other developed Western society. Religion is more deeply embedded in American society than other Western countries and the conservative attitudes, particularly on social issues, that flow from this, - patriarchy, hostility to women's rights, particularly over their own bodies and negative attitudes to other faiths and cultures. It also suggests that public education in the USA has some way to go in encouraging critical thinking and an evidence base for core attitudes and beliefs. It was not long ago that Theresa May was seriously suggesting we should look to the USA for someone to oversee our education system!

Donald Trump made no overt religious appeal, other than to ban Muslims, in his erratic electoral addresses, but he did offer a number of policies that would appeal to the conservative mind-set: economic protectionism, withdrawal from military conflict areas, attacks on immigration and the deportation of illegal immigrants, repression of Muslims and other minority groups, rejection of the overwhelming evidence on climate change as a 'Chinese con' and economic regeneration through infrastructure renewal providing working-class employment (not, interestingly, through reviving manufacturing, which Trump is shrewd enough to know would be a non-starter). How this was to be financed was left somewhat vague. In fact, how any of these policies would be paid for was never made clear except the famous wall (now maybe a fence) which would apparently be financed by the very people it was designed to suppress! He would also make extreme conservative appointments to the Supreme Court which could have a devastating impact on progressive politics.

It is undoubtedly true that the destruction of working-class jobs, initiated through the globalised economy that found cheaper production in parts of the world where labour was cheap and unorganised, has taken a severe toll on millions of American blue-collar workers. Equally true that unscrupulous politicians like Trump can make easy capital out of this by blaming immigrants as they reap the financial dividends of their own outsourcing of labour intensive work, and/or using these same immigrants as cheap labour in their own industries as Trump has done in his property speculations. We must be wary of ascribing the success of maverick politicians in the developed world simply to 'populism'. Millions of people are experiencing very real hardship and see no relief or future for themselves or their families from conventional politics.
James Fallows, in an interesting podcast for the American Fresh Air Public Radio service (http://www.npr.org/podcasts/381444908/fresh-air) travelled throughout small town America in the months preceding the election, and points out that, among many other pertinent observations, manufacturing jobs are now being decimated, not by cheaper outsourced labour, but by automation. The old manufacturing / industrial economy will not return to advanced countries like the USA. The traditional blue-collar worker, once the foundation of American prosperity, is now a dispensable commodity and knows it.

To me there is no doubt that another major factor in Trump's triumph was the Democratic choice of Hillary Clinton as candidate. She was hailed as the most qualified candidate ever to stand for President in terms of political experience in stark contrast to Trump's total lack of any electoral political experience at all. The Democratic machine seemed completely unable to see that, in an era of profound disaffection for mainstream politics, this would not be seen as an asset by many ordinary people - witness our own Brexit debacle - but a serious disadvantage. Not only did she have a long history at the top of American politics but, because of this history, she was not trusted either by those on the left or the right.

As First Lady during her husband's tenure in the White House, Hillary Clinton was deeply disliked by those on the right politically, tainted by association, though admired by some on the liberal side of Democratic politics, especially women who sympathised with her personal travails. As Secretary of State under Obama she pursued traditional American Foreign policies, which has always been to fix the world, as far as possible, in the interests of the USA. One incident in particular, when she was Secretary of State, tells us what kind of candidate she really was.
The 2009 coup in Honduras that removed a democratically elected left-wing President, Manuel Zelaya, and replaced him with a right-wing military regime was directly supported by Clinton, and the USA, under her direction, duly backed the new government. Clinton has since admitted she used her power to prevent the return of Zelaya - she certainly didn't want another socialist leader in S. America since the recent election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. She subsequently lied about her reasons for supporting the overthrow of an elected president. It would have been impossible for Zelaya to extend his term of office, as Clinton well knew. Honduras quickly descended into a nightmare of drug cartels, political killings and dire poverty resulting in huge numbers of desperate child refugees at the USA borders. Add to this the support for the Iraq war, the war in Afghanistan, intervention in Libya (demonstrating she had learned nothing from the Iraq catastrophe) and Obama's drone killings in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan which have killed, at a conservative estimate at least 1500 civilians including around 300 children. Not, of course, that these deaths would trouble many Trump supporters, but the overseas operations would. Hillary Clinton was not undone by misogyny but by her own tainted history and being seen, truthfully, as 'politics as usual'. In James Fallows' view, and he knows the heartlands of America well, Bernie Sanders would have had a much better chance of taking on Trump than Clinton.

We are left with a position of such uncertainty - a man both unstable and completely unpredictable in the White House - that the future is simply unknowable. I am indebted to James Fallows' political blog for reminding me of a poem by the great W.B. Yeats:

To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing

Thursday, 3 November 2016

I watched 'Question Time' on TV last week because one of the participants was the film director Ken Loach whose films have consistently, though variably, offered a powerful critique of the dominant ideological forces that have directed our, and other countries', political culture over the last fifty years or so. There was a time when Loach was the kind of director that the BBC was proud to employ. Now that pride resides in 'Strictly Come Dancing', innumerable celebrity based mind-sapping shows and 'edgy' (time for a moratorium on this word) dramas featuring serial killers, British and Scandinavian, graphically mutilating young women. These are often, mysteriously, lauded by women reviewers in the liberal bourgeois press.
Question Time perfectly reflects the BBC's woeful idea of political 'impartiality' by being primarily focused on representatives of the three main political parties, thus defining the parameters of acceptable political debate. A 'celebrity' or controversialist of some description will also be allowed in to add a dash of populism to the proceedings. This role is usually filled with cartoonish figures from the right -Peter Hitchens, David Starkey, Melanie Phillips et al - so Loach was an uncharacteristically perceptive voice who was unlikely to fulfil the usual demands of the brief. That is, he is thoughtful, intelligent and has been a thorn in the side of establishment figures for decades.
His answers, though not given too much space in the proceedings, cut through the usual blather that passes for political debate in our mass media, and placed issues in a wider and more comprehensible historical framework than the other panellists could manage. He also showed his customary deep understanding of the lives of ordinary people and the difficulties they face. He was, interestingly, warmly applauded when urging the Parliamentary Labour Party to get behind Jeremy Corbyn rather than continually undermining him.
The final question asked whether Britain had become less compassionate since the making of 'Cathy Come Home', Loach's powerful 1963 drama, made for the BBC, about the housing crisis and its human consequences. Someone called Dia Chakravarty, representing a group called the Taxpayer's Alliance, whoever they are, (I've paid taxes all my life and I have never 'allied' with them and I object to being yoked into this appalling little clique) began the answers with such a wilful misunderstanding of Loach's film that even he, the epitome of politeness, felt constrained to intervene and take apart the fatuity of her answer. Ms. Chakravarty could easily be mistaken for the gauche head girl of a 1950's public school a little too eager to win a sixth-form debating competition, her every intervention (and there were many) showing a spectacular unfamiliarity with the lives of most people in the 21st. century.
Ken Loach began his answer with the simple observation that he felt that Britain had become less compassionate, and that this change began with the destruction of the idea of the 'common good' during the 1980's and its replacement with the selfish individualism that now dominates our culture. I'm sure he's right, but it set me thinking about what the purpose of compassion is and what or who should be the object of our compassion. Should compassion be our response to injustice? When all the forces of the state are organised to defend the rich and powerful and the relatively powerless are made to suffer in order to maintain the status quo, should our response be compassion or anger?

This train of thought led me to a poem I have mentioned in an earlier post, 'The Human Abstract' by William Blake, written in the 1790's, but as relevant now as then. The poem begins:

"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.

It's a brilliantly confrontational opening seething with a deep moral anger contained in its challenge to traditional thinking and succinctly and powerfully states the hypocrisy underlying our socially determined impulses. We tolerate inequality and injustice and applaud ourselves for our magnanimity in feeling pity and being merciful rather than acting upon the righteous anger we should feel in order to eliminate the causes of this suffering. The philanthropy of some of the super rich is often lauded in the media and used as a justification for the obscene levels of personal wealth that some enjoy while the living standards of the vast majority inexorably decline, and thus we are encouraged to tolerate the ever growing levels of inequality. The poem continues:

And mutual fear brings peace,
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
Then humility takes its root
Underneath his foot.

Blake, of course, lived at a time when religion held a much stronger hold over people's lives than it does today, but the ideological hold of the church has simply been replaced with the secular ideologies constructed in an age of consumer capitalism. Our society is deeply divided and different kinds of fear maintain those divisions - fear of the power of those who have more than us, of the state as it defends the interests of the powerful, of those at the bottom who may rebel, of foreigners, immigrants, of the precarious state of our own lives and how quickly we too could become the objects of pity and so on it goes. This leads to selfishness and cruelty towards any group who we are encouraged to fear by politicians and the mass media. They collude with the powerful to encourage us to see this state of affairs as largely the product of the victims own doing and incapable of change. Thus now, as then, we live in the shadow of this 'dismal shade of mystery', the ideological forces that control and determine much of our thinking.

Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head;
And the Caterpillar and fly
Feed on the Mystery.

And it bears the fruit of deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat;

We learn to live a lie - that poverty, hunger, injustice, inequality - are 'natural' states and we should simply accept them - while, of course, showing some pity and mercy, or, as we are more likely to say now, compassion. Blake shows us that there is nothing 'natural' about this state of affairs; it is the product of our own doing. And we will need more than 'compassion' to challenge and change it.

The Gods of the earth and sea
Sought through nature to find this Tree;
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the human brain.

We are locked in - to use another Blake phrase - the 'mind forg'd manacles' we have constructed for ourselves. In Blake's original 'illuminated book', humanity, in the shape of an old man, lies bound and shackled amidst a landscape of death and decay.

In September 1961 I was feeling in need of a great deal of pity. Indeed I was consumed with self-pity. I'm still not sure why I reacted so badly to my new secondary school. I just felt completely disoriented by almost every thing about it. It seemed huge to me and the corridors were both confusing and policed by prefects (the ones with the silk bands on their blazer cuffs I mentioned in my last post) who had the power - seemingly used completely arbitrarily - to suddenly bellow at you and put you in detention for no reason I could ever fathom. The teachers were remote and uninterested in any pupil as an individual. And, unlike my junior school, I really had no friends at all. I just felt an indeterminate sense of fear of the place and my heart would sink the closer I got to the school each morning. This was made worse by an incident that occurred some weeks into my first term.
We were lining up outside the classroom of our Maths teacher while his last class were leaving. We must have made too much noise because, when we had entered he ordered us all outside to do the manoeuvre again. He was a very tall man, probably in his mid thirties and, though I never understood anything that went on in a Maths lesson, he always seemed okay to me. He never seemed very interested in any of us, but this was true of all the teachers, but he had a presence in the classroom that made the lessons pretty predictable and straightforward affairs. To send us out to line up again was unusual and I must have made some remark to another class member that he overheard.
When we had returned to the classroom, I was summoned to the front. This was so unusual, I had a real sense of foreboding. "I won't stand for insolence" he said, rather wearily, "bend over." He pushed my head forward until I was bent right over the side of his desk in front of the whole class. I heard a drawer open and, looking awkwardly from one eye since my face was pressed against the desk, he produced what seemed to me to be an enormous gym shoe - more the size of something a clown might wear. But there was nothing funny to follow. There was a pause, and then the sound of a short run and I was hit with a force I had never experienced in my life before. The pain took a second to register, but I felt my whole body jerk as though from an electric shock. My head was pushed down and the sound of the short run recurred and then another almighty shock wave right through me. I couldn't believe that this could possibly happen again, but it did, a third excruciating blow. "Next time it'll be six" he said. I straightened and had to walk back to my desk with the eyes of the whole class fixed upon me while I desperately tried to prevent the tears that threatened to shame me even more.
From that moment on, the school became simply a place of fear for me. I dreaded having to get up in the morning knowing where I was going. I often cried myself to sleep at night, feeling like a baby for doing so, but being unable to control my feelings. I had been able to adapt to life on the council estate and to deal with the threats from the likes of Georgie Burton (see earlier posts), but this school seemed so arbitrary, so unpredictable in its punishments and threats that I was powerless to find any means of dealing with it. I, of course, had no choice but to continue as best I could with this new, and profoundly unwelcome, phase of my life. And there were some brighter moments, particularly my brief, and unlikely, career as a minor entrepreneur in the 'adult' entertainment business. But more of that next post.

Wednesday, 19 October 2016

"How would you like your Brexit , hard or soft? Or would you prefer it a bit squidgy in the middle but firm on the outside? You'll leave that to the chef. Okay. But with it you would like a single market with no migrants? Sorry, if you look at the menu you'll see we can't separate them, it's all part of the same dish you see. Well, you can try, but you'll find it hard to find other markets round here at this time. You're going to try the Aussie place down the road? It's actually a really long way from here. Oh, you know that but you like the way they handle the migrants!"

It seems that, on a vote that was won by less than 3.8% on a turn-out of 72.2% forty three years of carefully constructed integration with our European neighbours is now going to be hurriedly and irrevocably dismantled by just three appointed politicians - David Davis, Liam Fox (yes, he of both the MP's expenses scandal and the scandal leading to his resignation over a too close relationship with his 'friend' Adam Werrity who accompanied him on ministerial trips abroad) and Boris Johnson, about whom nothing more needs to be said. Parliament will be completely side-stepped in terms of scrutiny or agreement on what is negotiated. So we've got our country back! This is how we do things. No debate, no democratic involvement in the process of dissolution or its effects on us or our institutions. The referendum was a simple - indeed ridiculously over-simplified - question. Do you want to leave the European Community? Yes or No. Not a mention of terms or conditions, let alone potential consequences. No minimum threshold for effecting the biggest constitutional change since we joined the EU, a change that will profoundly affect not just us, but all succeeding generations. Only absurd - and now demonstrably false - promises by the Leavers of untold wealth for the NHS and that we'd "have our country back". From whom, exactly, and back to whom was never divulged. Certainly this outbreak of a curiously English kind of metaphysical revanchism has given further impetus to the break-up of the British Union if not the European one, since Scotland and Northern Ireland were firmly in the Remain camp and another Scottish independence referendum will surely follow shortly.

This disastrous state of affairs lies firmly at the feet of one David Cameron who, with a mixture of public-school hubris and political stupidity, saw this as a terrific wheeze to get him a majority government and to finally see off the Eurosceptic wing of his party with not a thought for the possibility of losing the promised vote (Etonians don't lose) and thus offering no safeguards to be built into the voting process. Despite this,the British media and the Labour parliamentary party, chose not to blame the architect of this debacle, but instead the advocate of Remain, one Jeremy Corbyn, as the obvious culprit! Apparently he was not sufficiently ardent in his advocacy for the Remain cause and must thus take the rap for the whole thing
As usual Mr. Corbyn showed a political honesty completely absent from the mainstream political discourse with which we are all too familiar. He has - like many people on the left - never been a wholehearted enthusiast for the European Union, being only too aware that it is too much in the grip of the IMF and the forces of international capital. He has noted what happened to Italy (Mario Monti, unelected and brought in to push through an austerity programme), Greece (the crushing of Syriza) and the pressure put upon Spain when they challenged the austerity agenda. Nonetheless, he knows it is all we have as a supranational institution, and is worth defending whilst pushing for greater democratisation of it as an institution. This wholly rational position was not enough to deflect the tirade of opprobrium heaped upon him by the corporate media, including, of course, the BBC and, most egregiously, 'The Guardian', who continue to run almost daily assaults on his every action. The combined force of the mass media are increasingly resembling the pig Squealer in 'Animal Farm', the propagandist of the powerful, desperately blaming all our woes on the Machiavellian cunning of this devious Labour leader (who has even managed to become elected twice with overwhelming majorities). They defend and justify the greed and acquisitiveness of the elite as they enrich themselves to an obscene degree, the consequent rise in poverty, the impoverishment and collapse of our public services as necessary and the only sensible way to manage our affairs. The media's role in reinforcing an ideology that maintains inequality and, more importantly, in accommodating the rest of us to it, is ever more obvious. Anyone with a passing knowledge of Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony will realise the validity of his work. Plus ca change.

In 1961, a very real change was about to happen in my life. I walked the one and a half miles to my new Secondary school alone on the first day, full of foreboding and worried about what was about to happen to me. My new school uniform, with its large silk-threaded silver, green and yellow badge and my newly polished shoes gleaming mockingly in the brightness of early morning, seemed to symbolise my loss of self, my sense that I was about to be initiated into something I neither understood nor wanted. My path took me alongside the golf course where I used to scrounge lost golf balls to re-sell to the golfers. I looked through the wire mesh fence and dearly wanted to climb through and disappear down one of the drainage tunnels I have described elsewhere, alone in the darkness and safe. But I was now shut out of my old life. I trudged on alongside a small estate of prefabs, a last remnant of world war two, built to accommodate returning soldiers in 1945. Each one was surrounded by a neatly tended garden and all were painted bright pastel colours reflecting both the morning sunshine and the pride of the owners and taunting my own increasing gloom. I reached the busy main road, and waited for a break in the traffic that would allow me to dash across. When the moment came, I hurried over to the other side clutching my jumble sale satchel, the only thing that undermined my transformed appearance, and, once across, with the cars resuming their unending flow knew that I had now arrived at a new and utterly unfamiliar place.

I walked up the long drive of the school, lined with tall hedges, and now filled with boys of all ages, most laughing and chattering to each other but all wearing the same depressing clothing as myself. I entered the main building through the large glass doors into the foyer where I had waited for my interview some months before. There were several large flip charts on easels with alphabetical lists of names of the new intake, and I found my own name on the last one and next to it the number of my new form room with the name of the teacher I had to report to. But where was it? Boys were scurrying off in all directions, but I hadn't a clue where to go to find my tutor room and I was too intimidated to ask anyone. I noticed a group of much older boys - actually they seemed to me fully grown men who had mysteriously chosen to dress as children like myself. These all had one or two silk stripes sewn around their wrists in the style of military uniforms, and they were chatting together and occasionally casting an eye on the thinning throng of newcomers. Eventually there was only me remaining, shifting anxiously from one leg to the other and wondering whether to just do a runner and have done. One of the uniformed men detached himself from the group and made his way over to me. "Where do you have to go to?" he said wearily. I looked up at him, but couldn't speak, so pointed to my name on the flip chart. He shook his head. "Down there", he pointed to a corridor, "up the first set of stairs to the top. I assume you can read numbers. They're on the doors." He turned his back and wandered back to his group of friends. He said something and they laughed. It was only when I got to the start of the corridor that I saw there were signs indicating the room numbers in each one.

I was the last to enter the classroom and I was relieved to see Keith was in the same class, but he had already claimed a desk and the one next to his was occupied. In fact there was only one vacant desk left, so I placed my satchel on top of it and lowered myself next to a boy I had, of course, never seen before. I opened the lid of my desk and peered inside. I don't know what I expected, but it was empty. I looked around the room. It was only then that I noticed the teacher was already at his desk at the front and was staring at me as I arranged myself in my new seat. He was a tall man with a black moustache, wearing a dark blue corduroy jacket and leaning backwards in his office chair sucking pointlessly at a large unlit pipe, an ostentatiously curved pipe with a carved amber bowl. He removed this and pointed it at me. "Good of you to turn up", he said, "now you know where we are I'll expect you on time in future. You understand?" I nodded. If this was to be my future, I desperately wanted to return to the past. But this was not an option.During the morning I was issued with a time-table indicating that my learning was now divided into many separate subjects, all taught by different teachers. Most of the subjects I recognised - English, Maths, History, Geography, Art, but there were new ones as well. French, okay, but Woodwork? Metalwork? Technical Drawing? I hadn't fully comprehended the implications of a technical education. I had no idea what these were and I felt a bit alarmed. Everything about this new institution that would now dominate my life felt disorienting. I just felt hopelessly out of place and longed for something familiar.
At break I looked among the hundreds of black-blazored boys in the playground for Keith, and eventually saw him on the other side of the playground. He was standing with a group of other kids from our tutor group, all avidly discussing the morning's events. I didn't feel able to simply walk over and join in, since I only knew Keith, and wasn't sure how I might be received. So I walked around the perimeter of the tarmaced area with its high wire fencing and I was reminded of when I was let out to play in the isolation hospital all those years ago. Though the playground was full of boys, it felt just as empty.

Friday, 5 August 2016

I haven't posted anything for a few weeks due to domestic circumstances I won't bore you with - and look what's happened. We've abolished Europe, said goodbye to our Bullingdon boy PM, acquired a new PM avowedly on the side of the downtrodden but wishing to abolish all Human Rights Law, appointed another old Etonian with an aversion to all foreigners as Foreign Secretary and seen Her Majesty's Opposition set about committing harakiri over its inability to find a unified socialist identity. Also, Summer appears to have been completely abolished along with Europe. I really must try to keep posting regularly to keep us all on an even keel. The only positive thing I can find in all this chaos is the ignominious humiliation of Michael Gove, placed firmly back, hopefully permanently, in his hamster wheel.
The vote to leave the EU is surely, at heart, a reflection of over two decades of neo-liberal economic dogma that has left huge swathes of our country, particularly in the old industrial areas of the Midlands and the North, in Wales and some of our coastal regions, economically decimated and culturally undermined. The irony of the EU being one of the few sources of regeneration funding in these areas is more than offset by the failure of national governments to do anything effective to alleviate conditions in these areas, and the perception that the EU is fundamentally remote and undemocratic in its structure. The arrival of EU migrants working for the minimum wage or less, in insecure jobs with no protection from exploitative employers makes them an easy target for the impotent rage of those who have been left in the decaying heartlands of our old industrial areas with no hope, their communities destroyed and fast disappearing social protection. However, it's worth remembering that 63% of Labour's 2015 election vote supported remain, while only 46% of Tory voters did. Cameron's reckless and ill-considered gamble has finished his political ambitions and done colossal damage to Britain's future.
This should be the moment when the Labour party comes to the fore and sets about demolishing the neo-liberal myths, attacks the staggering incompetence of the government and develops a huge lead in the polls offering hope to those who have been left behind as our productive economy has declined. But no. The behaviour of Her Majesty's Opposition, were it not so tragic for those wishing for fundamental change in our deeply fractured society, would have the makings of a great new series of 'In the Thick of It'. The Parliamentary Party, being handed a golden opportunity to take the Tories apart, instead saw only an opportunity to turn on their own recently elected leader, a man whose political beliefs have always been at odds with the broadly social democratic views of those who have come to power in the twenty years since Blair's first premiership, and set about doing their damnedest to turn him out of office. Meanwhile, the well-drilled Tory party got on with what it does well - scuppering the pretensions of those whom the party elites dislike and quickly placing in power their chosen replacement. No necessity for wider party endorsement there.

The behaviour of the Parliamentary Labour Party can only be described as despicable and a gross dereliction of their first duty which is to be as effective an opposition as possible in taking the Tories to task for their ruthless pursuit of their own class interests. Rather than this they set about organising an embarrassingly cack-handed coup, then tried to stop the elected leader from standing in any re-run election and then, when failing in this, decided to run an election anyway whilst simultaneously attempting to rig the result through hastily implemented new voting restrictions. These are - quite rightly - being challenged in the courts.
The job of fiercely challenging the current government who have just removed us all, for the flimsiest of electoral reasons, from a European Union relationship that has been carefully constructed over more than forty years, on a tiny majority vote, clearly in opposition to the wishes of the coming generation, the implications of which are still only beginning to be realised including the probably irresistible strain on the unity of the UK, has been abandoned in favour of an opportunistic attack on a leader whose politics they have always disliked. The cry that Corbyn has "lost the confidence of the PLP" is a nonsense. He never had the confidence of the PLP. They did everything they could to prevent his election and have undermined him at every opportunity for the simple reason that he represents a strand of political thought in the Labour Party that has been there since its inception and found its zenith in 1945 under another uncharismatic leader, Clement Attlee, who, nonetheless became the best peacetime PM in this country's history. I am not for a moment comparing Corbyn to Attlee, simply making the point that charisma is not always essential to effective politics, even in an information age. What is needed is the support of those with experience and ability to assist the democratically elected leader.

Another view on all this, of which I am very well aware, is that this behaviour is more to do with Mr. Corbyn's shortcomings as party leader than it is about not doing what an opposition is supposed to do - oppose the government rather than themselves. They will say - with some truth - that Mr. Corbyn is not a natural leader or communicator. That he speaks only to his own narrow base of supporters and fails to reach out to the country as a whole. That the opposition cannot effectively oppose until he has gone. Simple as that. As I have suggested, I think there is some truth in this. But it is not quite as simple as that.
Mr. Corbyn has faced sustained opposition to his leadership from large sections of the Parliamentary Party from the moment he was elected. This has little to do with his personal shortcomings as a leader, and everything to do with the fact that he has, for over thirty years as an MP, consistently argued for traditional socialist principles - nationalisation of public utilities, opposition to the neo-liberal economic policies implemented by both parties in government during the time he has been an MP, deeply critical of the deregulation of business and finance, opposed nuclear weapons as our principal defence policy - as well as being active in campaigning groups outside of the party like CND and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. This has, inevitably, meant he has a record of opposing some of the policies of his own party.
The shift of the party to the right, politically, during the Blair years has exacerbated the tensions between the traditional left and those who have found favour within the hierarchy of the party. The electoral success of Blair (I refuse to call him 'Tony', just as I will never call Thatcher 'Maggie' with their jocular overtones) has led to an intake of some Labour MP's with no connection to the labour movement or sympathy for socialist principles. The very word 'socialist' was outlawed under Blair. They now are led by someone whose ideological position many of them fundamentally oppose, and, of course, they have the support of all sections of the traditional mass media whose profit driven interests are also opposed to a socialist ethic, and, without exception, have launched an unceasing assault on everything he does.

It is small wonder that the rather self-effacing Corbyn has had trouble getting his ideas across. He needs a strong supportive team to assist in the presentation of a radical and fundamental change to the way our economy and our profoundly undemocratic society is run. But Corbyn is also trying to forge a new way of doing politics. Of developing ways of involving ordinary people more directly and in a more sustainable way in the ongoing development of policy and its implementation. Both the leader of the party, and all those elected to further its policies, need to be more accountable to the membership of the party, making politics less contained in the Westminster bubble and bringing the electorate into the political process more directly.
Britain has a huge democratic deficit in its political structures. Minority Tory governments can continue to dismantle the publicly owned and funded structures of our society and hand them over to enrich their friends in the city because we continue with a political structure in parliament that in no way reflects the way people think and vote. Until there is real proportional representation, the majority of the voting population will continue to be unrepresented. Mr. Corbyn is interested in developing ways of involving people more directly in the political process. Of forming loose alliances with other parties and groups on the left to work together to develop an effective opposition to the austerity agenda. If he is seen to have shortcomings as a leader by those in the PLP currently splitting the party in two, then they should recognise that he has a democratic mandate won fairly according to the rules of the party and they should do their utmost to assist the effectiveness of the main opposition party. What are they going to do if, or, more likely, when, he wins the leadership again? To simply stand aside from what the party, through an open democratic process, is insisting they do? Or split the party completely by breaking away in the manner of the ill-fated SDP? I'm reminded of an observation of Bertolt Brecht :

"There are many elements to a campaign. Leadership is number one. Everything else is number two."

I watched an interview with Stephen Kinnock on television in which he lambasted the democratically elected leader of his party and refused to assist his leadership in any way. When asked what he would do if Corbyn is re-elected, his repeated reply was "I will continue to represent my constituents from the back benches." I was left wondering how he considered he was helping his constituents by abrogating his responsibility to assist the Party he represents, the party that has supported him in his political ambitions, and the party that is at least attempting to wrest power from the wealthy elite that currently holds it and empower ordinary people in a democratic and accountable manner. Unfortunately, he is not alone in the PLP and the Labour Party continues to suffer as a result. Bertolt Brecht again:

Some party hack decreed that the people
had lost the government's confidence
and could only regain it with redoubled effort.
If that is the case, would it not be simpler,
If the government simply dissolved the people
And elected another?

Substitute party for government and you have Kinnock to a tee.

At the age of eleven, in1961, a schism was about to appear in my own life - a division that would have a big effect on many of my friends and certainly on me. I was about to leave my Junior School for a place at the new Technical High School a couple of miles from where I lived. I don't remember much about the last days at junior school. I knew my best friend Colin, who had won a place at Grammar School would probably disappear from my - admittedly narrow -horizon, the council estate on which I lived. The only other boy going to the technical school was a quiet boy called Keith who was in another class and I didn't really know. My other close friends were all consigned to the secondary modern, and I also knew that those friendships would fall away as we no longer saw each other on a daily basis. I felt quite scared of what was ahead.
That last day at school I do remember was marked by a kind of suppressed hysteria as everyone in our year group knew that this was the end of a significant part of our lives. People ran excitedly, but pointlessly, around the playground and the field that we used in the summer, but with little sense of fun. As we lined up for lunch - my last free school dinner - we sang songs, most of which were to do with the horrors of school. I can only remember a few lines, but one refrain has always stuck in my mind due to its absurdity: "No more Latin, no more French, no more sitting on the old school bench.." Latin? French? at our state junior school, the main aim of which was to turn out a reasonably literate and numerate workforce? Not many of us would have known what Latin was.
I walked home that day with a group of my mates and I knew that something irrevocable was about to happen, but something we couldn't talk about. We grew gradually quieter as each one of us peeled off to our respective homes. I lived the furthest away, and walked the last stretch alone.

My mother always had a problem with us in the holidays. She was working full time and there was, of course, no child care available. Single parents had no public existence in 1961. My maternal grandparents both still worked, and anyway, they cared for us after school most days, so needed a break from the three of us. My other grandparents simply were not up to the task. One strategy my mother adopted was to take us with her to work in the back of the old A35 van she now owned and drove to work in, and then set us free for the day with instructions on where to go and where to meet her at lunch-time. Since she now worked in central London, just off the embankment in Smith Square editing a small magazine for the Labour Party called 'Labour Woman', this was something of an unusual strategy and one which would certainly have social services on our backs today.
Sometimes it was only my brother and myself, so she must have found someone to look after my sister, but often it would be all three of us. At around 9.30 in the morning we would be set free to explore London with some suggestions of where we might go. We were still living on the breadline, so there was rarely much in the way of money between us. We got to know the Millbank area very well. We would walk down towards the Houses of Parliament and spend some time in Victoria Tower Gardens. A little further along, and across the road, was the Jewel Tower (still there of course), part of the original palace of Westminster, and it housed a small exhibition on several floors accessed by a medieval spiral staircase. Over the weeks of the summer I got to know every exhibit in that exhibition, since, in those days it was free to enter and thus a good place to take cover from rain. None of the exhibits interested me in the slightest, but it was dry. The curators also got to know us, and were usually very friendly towards us. We would wander on to Westminster Abbey and that must also have been free, because I certainly remember wandering around inside and finding Poet's Corner with its array of monuments to writers, some of whom I'd heard of and most of whom I would come to know later in my life.
On other days we would walk in the other direction, sometimes crossing over Lambeth Bridge and being very disappointed to find that Lambeth Palace seemed to be simply a red brick building of no interest to small children. Certainly not what we thought of as a palace. A long walk down river would take us past Vauxhall Bridge and down to Chelsea Bridge, where we could access Battersea Park, an enormous area of greenery that included a fun-fair, a small zoo, a huge pond and lots of stuff to play on. This was a really long trek for us, and would usually take up most of the day. I can't remember what we ate. Maybe my mother made us sandwiches, but we certainly would not have had money to spend. I enjoyed these explorations of the city - and there were occasions when we would take a bus to remoter areas like Greenwich - but how releasing three young children, unaccompanied by an adult, to wander freely around the metropolis would be viewed today, I don't know. I have always valued the knowledge I gained of the city, and I think my love of simply wandering without maps or directions, in all cities, here or abroad can be traced back to these childhood explorations.
Summer, of course, would draw to an end and I knew that I would soon be wearing my new school uniform for the purpose for which it was acquired. I dreaded this next phase of my life. Only the unknown Keith would be a familiar face and the vast new building that I had visited for the interview haunted my mind and invaded my dreams. But there would be no escaping it.

Wednesday, 22 June 2016

For anyone who reads this blog from time to time, apologies for the long break since the last posting. I've been away and thus have avoided the dire nature of the Brexit / Remain campaigns which I have, with increasing depression, followed via the net from various parts of France. The lack of any inspiring vision from the Remain camp, focusing exclusively on the economic consequences of leaving, and the barely suppressed xenophobia, bordering on racism, from the Brexit group, has been depressing to behold. While away I read a history of Europe from 1914 to 1945 called Fire and Blood by Enzo Traverso, a book I can't recommend too highly, and I finished reading the autobiography of the Austrian writer, Stefan Zweig, called The World of Yesterday and subtitled, significantly, Memoirs of a European. Reading these two books together was fascinating since Traverso brilliantly synthesises the underlying forces in Europe that culminated in two world wars, while Zweig lived through the period, commenting on what was happening as he experienced it, and reinforcing from a contemporary viewpoint Traverso's analysis, though in quite different terms.
I mention these works because, from both, you get a worrying sense of the same underlying destructive forces at work in our own era that resulted in such terrible destruction in Europe and the world in the first half of the twentieth century. Traverso sees the period from 1914 to 1945 as fundamentally a continuous civil war, triggered by the collapse of European empires, most critically the Austro-Hungarian and fought between two competing ideologies - Communism and Fascism. This political divide produced linked binaries -revolutionary v counter-revolutionary, fascist v anti-fascist, military v civilian, collaborator v resister. This ideologically driven violence initiated the idea of 'total war', civilians as legitimate, indeed necessary, targets, and resulted in death on a hitherto unprecedented scale, the partition of Europe and the beginning of the Cold War.
One of the central points he makes is that civil wars, driven by ideological certainties, permit violence of any kind against opponents. Everything can be justified, and although these two wars were ostensibly between nations, they should be seen as essentially a continuing, continent-wide civil war, begun by the fear of Bolshevism from 1917 onward when Western powers intervened in Russia to support the anti-Bolshevik forces, and thence driven by the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain and Germany with the new Soviet Union becoming the focus of anti-fascist activity throughout Europe.
Traverso concludes his analysis of this period by presenting another binary opposition that appeared as a response to the defeat of Nazism in 1945.

"The return to freedom and democracy was experienced as a new triumph of the Enlightenment, reason and right, which made fascism appear a parenthesis, an ephemeral episode, an anachronistic and absurd fall-back into ancestral barbarism, a vain attempt to arrest the 'march of history'. In this climate of confidence in the future, when history seemed to have resumed its natural course, the Nazi extermination camps were no more than the result of a tragic derailment. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, drew the rewards of the immense tribute it had paid to defeat Nazism." This avowal of the triumphant victory of rationalism was opposed by, among others, the Frankfurt school of philosophers, whose largely Jewish founders could not be so sanguine. For them, "Nazism had already changed the face of the century and the image of man....recognition of Auschwitz as a rupture in civilisation was indissociable from a radical challenge to the idea of progress. If Nazism had tried to wipe out the legacy of the Enlightenment, it had also to be understood dialectically as a product of civilisation itself, with its technical and instrumental rationality now released from an emancipatory aim and reduced to a project of domination.....Before the spectacle of a civilisation that had transformed modern technology into a gigantic destructive power, the only sentiment possible was one of shame."

For anyone wanting to understand the present state of European politics, Traverso's book is simply indispensable. Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jew who, with his wife, committed suicide in 1942, presumably due to their despair at what was happening in Europe, takes pains to make clear in his autobiography his feelings of being a European rather than having a purely national identity. Little known now, he was one of the most popular writers in the world between the two wars. He makes clear in his memoir that he had no interest in politics at all and spent his entire life devoted to art and the art of fiction in particular, seeming to know all the major European writers of the time (this included Soviet Russia, of course). He lived through the horror of the 1st. world war and records the rise of Nazism in Germany and Europe as he witnessed and suffered it. He concludes his review of his life with these bleak premonitions of his beloved Europe:
"And I knew that yet again all the past was over, all achievements were as nothing - our own native Europe, for which we had lived, was destroyed, and the destruction would live long after our own lives. Something else was beginning, a new time, and who knew how many hells and purgatories we still had to go through to reach it?"

The creation of the European Union, in its most elevated ideological justification, was seen as a means of eradicating the threat of European war through the development of a union in which the whole of Europe would have an investment. As we observe the rise in poverty throughout Europe as the neo-liberal economic policies of the EU, imposed on the poorest nations who have no means of defence against EU instructions that transfer wealth from the poor to the wealthy in an entirely undemocratic way, we see, inevitably, the rise of far right and neo-nazi groups and regimes re-emerging in a dangerous fashion. A worrying similarity to the pre-1945 situation in Europe described by both Traverso and Zweig exists in Europe today. In terms of the immediate situation, despite its readily apparent weaknesses and lack of democratic accountability, the EU is all we have to act as a bulwark against the forces that threaten us all. It is an institution that needs a radical challenge and transformation, but to abandon that project for atavistic nationalist feelings is a profound mistake and will hand Britain over, at least for some time, to the most right wing and, indeed, racist factions in our -also- undemocratic and unrepresentative 'democracy'.

In 1961, even at the age of eleven, I did have fears of European warfare and its global expansion due to my mother's involvement in CND and the literature that ended up in our flat. Also, I overheard conversations at my paternal grandparents house when we were there and my uncle Edward and auntie Dorothy (Dottie to us) were visiting. Edward, you will recall from earlier posts, was the historian and political activist, E.P. Thompson and his historian wife, my father's sister, Dorothy Thompson. Those fears were to become very intense a year later when the Cuban missile crisis arose and threatened the extinction of us all.
The more real crisis for me in 1961 - where was I going after junior school - had been to some extent ameliorated by my getting a place at the Technical school rather than the Secondary Modern, but, being always prone to anxieties, I began to worry about what this intimidatingly new building and its large number of big men in suits had in store for me. Would I be able to cope with the work? Did I really 'fit' in such a new and swish place. It seemed so far removed from everything I had experienced so far in my life - and I had often found my far from intimidating junior school a lonely place where I would feel sudden overwhelming feelings of homesickness, even though home was less than a mile away and available at the end of the afternoon. What would it be like so far away in the alien world where the interviews had taken place? It scared me.

My mother, by this time, had begun to forge a career as a journalist, and now had enough money to buy me the compulsory new school uniform. Grey trousers, black shoes and a black blazer with a large and brilliantly garish badge sewn onto the breast pocket. I tried it on and was so taken with a complete set of new clothes - a first for me - that I went out in it to play with my mates on the estate. My first encounter was with Jimmy Burton, younger brother of the notorious Georgie, and Jimmy - still sucking his thumb at the age of ten - was suitably impressed with my new attire. "Bloody 'ell" he muttered through his thumb, and I joined him as he wandered off in the direction of the parade of shops nearby. He looked at me again "Fuck me wiv the wrong end of a pineapple." This was a new one on me and I added it unconsciously to the list of agreeable expletives for future use - this one particularly appropriate since it turned out we were headed for the greengrocers where the very object might be observed.

We entered the greengrocers where Jimmy had been dispatched to get various vegetables. The greengrocer was a man who seemed to be permanently at war with the world in general and his customers in particular - probably with good reason given his clientele. He had one trick, though, that always impressed me. His shop, due to its nature, attracted a large number of wasps, and he would kill them by trapping them mid-flight between his thumb and forefinger and flick them to the ground. He would do this without even apparently noticing he was doing it while he went about his tasks. If you entered his shop at the end of the day, the floor would be littered with small wasp corpses, but he remained always unscathed. I was mightily impressed with this, and often tried it myself, but would always draw back my hand at the last moment, fearful of the pain I was risking.For literary analysts, there's probably some symbolism there.

On this occasion, the greengrocer was particularly off-hand to Jimmy and myself, seeing the request to purchase some veg as something of an affront to his worth as a human being and giving me in particular a series of dark looks that suggested I might get the wasp treatment if I didn't get out of his shop pretty sharpish. When Jimmy had got his vegetables, he couldn't resist pointing over to me with the thumb that wasn't stuck in his mouth, and remarking "look at that then. Look at that badge eh? That means somfink dunnit ? Betcha not seen tha' in ere before." I hadn't realised that jimmy had been quite so taken with my new self that he felt compelled to show me off in this manner, and I felt acutely embarrassed. The greengrocer looked me up and down carefully. He slowly took the roll-up from out of his mouth, threw it down among the wasp carcasses on the floor, and in a thoughtful manner, ground it under his foot. He looked at me again, and said "That badge don't mean bugger all. That uniform means bugger all. An as far as I'm concerned, 'e means bugger all as well. E's no better than anyone else an e'd do well to remember that." This lesson in class consciousness, triggered by the now absurd crest on my chest left me - well - crestfallen. I wandered home and changed back into my usual jumble sale clothes, now knowing my place and even more anxious about what was to come.

Friday, 13 May 2016

There has been much discussion over the last few days of anti-Semitism, both in student politics and the Labour Party. This is unusual since, in Britain, anti-Semitism has historically always been the preserve of the far right, particularly among the aristocracy and the nether regions of the Tory party. They must feel rather put out at the left apparently intruding upon their long-held territory. The election of Malia Bouattia as president of the NUS, a historical tweet by the MP Naz Shah and some ill-considered off-the-cuff remarks by Ken Livingstone have resulted in a media furore which really needs a bit of unpicking.

Let us take the case of Ms. Bouattia as a starting point. If I were a Jewish student at this moment, I think I might have some misgivings about her election as president of the NUS. I am a long-standing supporter of the Palestinian people's fight for a state of their own and fully support their struggle against the colonial policies ruthlessly employed by the state of Israel, with the full support of the USA and other Western powers. It is, though, essential in this conflict to always be completely clear on separating Jewish ethnicity from Israeli politics, particularly since Jewish ethnicity is the central plank of the current Israeli administration's policy of creating " a Jewish state for the Jewish people", a clear statement of a country to be defined purely in racial terms. Israeli Palestinians would have to know their place - almost certainly under current Israeli policies in something equivalent to apartheid era South African Bantustans. (Israel was always a close ally of the old South Africa).
Ms. Bouattia has not always been sufficiently scrupulous in this vital separation of ethnicity and political policy. She has spoken of Birmingham University as a "Zionist outpost" because it has the largest Jewish Students Society in the country, thus melding ethnicity and ideology in a thoughtless, and possibly revealing way. To refer to the media's undoubtedly biased reporting of Israeli politics as "Zionist-led", with its connotations of a Jewish conspiracy, serves only to give ammunition to those who try to counter the misrepresentation across the whole of the mainstream press and TV by allowing accusations of anti-Semitism to deflect attention from the very real bias against the Palestinian cause in the media.

Malia Bouattia

To be fair to Ms. Bouattia, she must look at events in Israel and the middle-East generally from the experience of her own ethnic background (her parents came to Britain to escape the violence of the Algerian civil war - a horrifying end-of-Colonial rule period in which violent resistance by the Algerian people, countered by French military brutality did finally achieve independence) and her studies in post-colonial theory. This would suggest that she would see the struggle of the Palestinian people against what they regard as a colonial power in a broad historical context of indigenous peoples fighting to liberate themselves from foreign occupation as has happened in almost all parts of the old European empires with varying degrees of success. Add to this the current fears surrounding all things Islamic, whipped up by irresponsible media reporting, but complicated by the undoubted horrors of militant jihadism, and it is easy to see how analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict lends itself so easily to accusations of implicit or explicit racism on both sides. In such circumstances it is all the more vital for their to be no ambiguity over distinctions between ethnicity and ideology/ political policy. Malia Bouattia needs to demonstrate very clearly that her long-standing opposition to all forms of racism includes anti-Semitism as strongly as any other form of ethnic discrimination.

Naz Shah re-tweeted a map of Israel superimposed onto a map of the USA with the suggestion that Israel should be re-located in the USA to solve the problem. Any suggestion of re-locating Jews is bound to be a sensitive issue, but this was so clearly intended as a joke - albeit in questionable taste - that the absurdly over-the-top reactions in the press are clearly more a means of embarrassing Corbyn's Labour Party than any real outrage on behalf of Britain's Jews.
What it has allowed is to encourage long term supporters of Israel to make statements like " Zionism is the Jewish people's right to self-determination in Israel. All people have the right to self-determination, so denying that right just to Jews is antisemitic" (Spokesperson for the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism). This immediately demands the response 'why, then, do you deny the Palestinians the right to self-determination in their land, Palestine, the land you continue to occupy? And by what right is Palestine the site for the state of Israel? (We know the answer to this, of course - it is the word of God. End of argument.) And why did the creation of the state of Israel, by force of arms, demand the violent removal of 750,000 Palestinians with no right of return and the deaths of some 13,000?
The right to self-determination is itself fraught with difficulties in international law since there is no agreed definition of what constitutes a state, or how it is formed or which groups can legitimately claim this right. What is clear is that, even a cursory glance at the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights will show that, of the first thirty articles, Israel routinely disregards over half of them in its treatment of Palestinians. The map that Naz Shah re-tweeted,was clearly intended as a joke and has been treated as such by most Jews in America where the image was first tweeted, and who have felt no particular threat from it. You can judge for yourselves, but it's worth noting that the map originated from the Jewish Virtual Library, to show the relative size of Israel =though not, of course, the added text!

As for Ken Livingstone's comments, well, at best you could say that they lacked nuance! But to suggest that he is an anti-semite is utter nonsense. His reference to the Nazi government's interest in using the Zionist movement as a means of removing Jews from German territory in the 1930's has some basis in fact, but equally the Nazis rejected any notion of Jewish self-determination, since this gave Jews a human status that was denied them in Nazi racial theories. Ken Livingstone, an experienced politician, should have known how his words would be used by a media hostile to everything that Corbyn's Labour Party stands for. Corbyn himself needs to stand up to this obvious attempt by those who wish to depose him much more forcefully and expose this media hyped witch-hunt for what it is. His performance at PMQ's when Cameron attacked him and the Labour Party for harbouring anti-Semites was dismal. He, more than most, should see that the pro-Israeli lobby is in full cry at the moment and the Labour Party should be making a firm and principled stand in support of the Palestinian's just demands for a homeland and for the removal of the ever-increasing settlements built for Jews only (who are the racists here?), defended resolutely by the Israeli Defence Force and all built on occupied Palestinian territory against every principle of international law.

Media coverage of this spat has been universally appalling in its obsessive focus on the alleged disintegration of the Labour Party and attacks on all those attempting to put some perspective on the furore. The worst example I saw was, surprisingly, Krishnan Guru-Murthy on channel 4 news whose only question appeared to be "Does Israel have the right to exist?" repeated several times. This is - frankly - a stupid question. Israel does exist, it is the most heavily armed middle-East state, the only nuclear armed state and has the total support of the world's greatest superpower. It's existence is never seriously in doubt. What gives any state a right to exist is simply the fact of its existence. Does Australia or indeed the USA have the right to exist since they were founded on the genocide of the indigenous population? It's an irrelevant question. They do exist, and, like just about every other state, historically, their existence was created through force. Guru-Murthy might have put a more pertinent question- "Does a Palestinian state have a right to exist?"

Back in 1961, the problems of Israel and Palestine figured nowhere on my 11 year old consciousness. It is worth remembering, though, how racial insults permeated the language of children at this time - and these were almost certainly acquired through imitation of adult usage. In the playground a common remark made to any kid who refused to share sweets or kept lunch snacks to themselves would be "come on, don't be a Jew, hand some over." Even at this tender age I always felt some discomfort at these kinds of remarks. I came from a household where any kind of racial insult would be unthinkable, and even though I wasn't quite clear on the implications of "don't be a Jew" I always felt discomfited when such a phrase was used. Later in my school career I would experience much worse examples of overtly racist language, but not in the playground from my friends, but from adults in the classroom and elsewhere as I shall explain later. The kids in the playground almost certainly had little idea of what the implications of their insults were, but adults certainly did.

Since I've mentioned ant-Semitism in this post, I'll leap ahead a few years for a moment to when I was about fifteen and in the fifth form at school. We used to bunk off school at lunch-times, and on this occasion walked round to my friend Brian's house. I'd not been there before, and it was obvious that Brian came from a very poor background. I could identify with this. The house was a tiny terraced home, very dark, poorly furnished and Brian's very large family somehow squeezed into it. It smelt badly. While we were there, his dad came home, got himself a beer and joined us. For some reason something to do with Jews entered the conversation. Brian's dad, quite calmly and with no emotion, remarked, "that's one good thing 'Itler did - got rid of a few of the buggers." The comment hit me as hard as a physical blow. I'd read quite a lot about the genocide of European Jewry and regarded it as the benchmark of human depravity. Brian glanced at me. He knew how I might react to this. But I found I couldn't react at all. I was literally dumbstruck. I left the house in a state of shock that I still feel fifty years later when I recall this incident. The casual approval of inhumanity on a scale that defies imagining is still, I think, the most shocking utterance I have encountered in a life that has not been especially tranquil or sheltered.

If you read my last post, you will know that I now faced THE INTERVIEW for a place at a Technical High School having come unstuck in my 11+, but presumably having showed enough of something to warrant a temporary reprieve from the terrors of the Sec. Mod. I remember being taken by my mother to the school for my performance which would be judged by I knew not who or, indeed, what I would be expected to do. Everything about the school I found intimidating. The long concrete driveway lined with tall, dark hedges, then the school itself. Huge, very modern-seeming in design, which should have been reassuring, but frightened me even more. I wasn't comfortable in such a plush environment. All I can remember is being seated outside a door, and then being ushered in on my own, my mother remaining outside, to find myself confronted by a large desk, with a seat for me in front, and two besuited men sitting intimidatingly behind it. They proceeded to ask me a lot of questions, none of which I can remember. All I can recall is feeling frightened and wanting to get out. Which, finally I was allowed to do. I felt huge relief, went to find my mother, only to be guided by one of the besuited gents further up the corridor to another set of seats, outside another door, where, it appeared I had to be interviewed all over again.
I waited anxiously until the door opened and I was summoned inside. Here, again, was a desk, a single chair, and two men in suits sitting waiting to interrogate me. I remember some of this interview, since a part of it focused on my reading. I was asked what I enjoyed reading. I ran through my list of C.S. Forester novels, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dorothy L. Sayers who I had recently discovered and they asked me a bit about some of these. "Anything else before we finish?" one asked, which I took to mean, 'there must be more than this'! All I could think of was James Thurber, an author I had recently found among my mother's books (The Thurber Carnival) and found very, very funny. I hadn't liked to mention this because, well, a funny book didn't seem appropriate. I also found the cartoons at the end of the book the funniest things of all, and cartoons, I felt, would not impress my interlocutors (I still think those Thurber cartoons are among the funniest ever created). The two men looked at each other for a moment. "You like Thurber do you ? " one of them said. I wasn't sure if this was good or bad. "Yes", I said, hesitantly. " You .. understand his humour do you? I mean, you get it - it makes you laugh?" "Yes".

I think the great James Thurber got me my place at Bromley Technical High School for Boys, for good or ill. Certainly better than the Sec. Mod. Of course, I never hit the heights of my fellow allumni, David Bowie, Peter Frampton or Hanif Kureishi, but that was obviously because I only remained there for one year, before my mother moved us away to the wilds of the deepest Kent countryside, and negating my opportunity for superstardom. But more of that later.