Lovely poem by Rob Cullen that will appear in his next collection 'Time to Heal'

Keeping my word.

Your back was turned as you lay
In the bed in the stink of that ward
But it was the way you raised your hand
Waving without looking that was so telling
It was as if you didn’t want to see
My leaving you in that dreadful place.

I was certain at that moment
That you’d given up on your life
And I wouldn’t see you again
At that last leaving I hesitated
And thought about going back
But what in the world would I do
Or what could I say. I could try
Urging you as I’d done before
So many times to fight and get well
So that we could bring you home.

But I knew nothing I could do
Would change anything at all
I’d kept my promise to my father
To look after you when he was gone
Nine years of seeing to your needs
Daily phone calls, weekend meals
There was nothing else to be done
I am after all my mother’s son.

The phone rang in the darkness
I picked up the receiver knowing
What would be said a strangers voice
Telling me of my mother’s passing.
I did what my father had asked
And looked after you for nine years
But it hurts that lingering thought
Somehow, in some way, I had failed you.

RAC

5th October: caring for my Mother

Mum says “Sorry to be taking so long over this.”

I ask “What?”

I am helping her undress on the bed ready for the night. Did she mean being slow with bedpan, hand wash, eye drops?

“No,” she says. “This.”   She gestures with her head. “Dying.”

I pause in order to feel the right response. “Be true,” I think to myself.

“Are you afraid?”

“No. Not really. Just. I’m keeping you from getting on with your life.”

I wonder if she’d understand what I’ve come to understand.

Getting on with my life is happening, right under our noses. Inside, where it matters.

Growing. Becoming. Being.

It’s what we all do.

While we think we are waiting for it to start, it’s already chugging ahead. 

Later I write this poem, inspired by a book I read on quantum physics:

I am living in a field of death.

No asphodels or grim shades grieving.

This is light

Dissolving into light.

We now know that all

Is everywhere

For all time.

That we are each a

Distillation of light

And breath. A drop

Of nectar quivering

For a moment

On the skin of a petal.

More on misophonia

Since I discovered misophonia yesterday, I’ve had a few responses to my blog, (mostly on Facebook) and I’ve been looking at what people say on a Facebook group for misophonia (they call it ‘miso’ but I can’t. Miso is a Japanese food  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miso  )

I’ve had a few more thoughts.

Firstly: it seems there’s quite a range of neurologically atypical sensory responses that have been researched and named, including one that seems to be almost exactly the mirror image of misophonia, where people experience intense pleasurable sensations in response to certain sounds, like eating. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_sensory_meridian_response

For me - the key characteristic of misophonia is the powerful emotional reaction that seems to have nothing to do with the stimulus - ie- feeling angry because of very specific sounds that some people make when eating. I began to wonder if it's actually a form of synaesthesia, which is when you get 2 very different sensory reactions to a sensory stimulus - like, seeing letters or words as colours. In this case, it's linking a particular feeling- anger- with a sensory stimulus - sound of eating (or whatever). So I found an article about synaesthesia which lists misophonia as a possible form of that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia#Auditory-tactile_synesthesia

That makes sense to me. My problem that certain eating-sounds trigger anger in me is troubling in itself. I’m usually very in touch with my feelings and I’m used to knowing why I feel something. I expect my feelings to make sense, and feeling random anger that switches on and off like a tap, is disturbing. Hence my sense of relief at discovering an explanation for it.

Secondly:  A couple of lovely and dear friends have suggested they will alter their behaviour when we eat together in the future. I do really want to state that I feel this is my problem and it’s my responsibility to deal with it. I do not have the right to ask anyone else to alter the way they eat. I have never actually said anything to my mother about her eating style, even though I have witnessed (back in the day when she was mobile and visiting with friends or relatives) eyes swivelling to her when she was chewing. So her eating is loud enough to draw attention, even from people who aren’t bothered by it. But it’s her body and she has a right to do with it what she likes. And she can’t help her breathing which is caused by her COPD.

I have a dear brother who suffers from a painful condition where he gets polyps growing in his sinuses and when he eats his breathing is very audible. Actually, oddly, this does not bother me as much as some other eating sounds, but it is moderately hard. He can’t help this and I’d never make him feel bad about it. He actually suffers a lot of pain from his condition, so he is the one who deserves sympathy.

I have been stoically bearing this distress for over 60 years, (apparently most people don’t start misophonia till they’re older) and I know what I can cope with and what I can’t. Even when that partner I mentioned, started to eat sweets deliberately in my ear, I did not break up with her because of the sounds she was making – it was her deliberate attempt to distress me that made me lose all respect for her.  

So please do not think you have to leave the room or anything else when eating with me. It’s actually more distressing to think that people are reacting like that to my confession, than to have to put up with the occasional munch. As I said in my article, I seem to get more tuned in and sensitive the more time I spend hearing the sound, so most people aren’t at that stage with me yet anyway.

I do however, give myself the right not to stay with anyone who eats in a really loud and offensive way. But I will find my own way to deal with that if it arises. Anyone who eats in a normal well-mannered way with me is safe. 

Caring for my mother and misophonia: This is the most important thing I’ve read in my life

Misophonia: This is the most important thing I’ve read in my life

Years ago I chanced upon an article about synaesthesia, in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. The most common form of it is where letters or numbers are perceived as inherently coloured. So I discovered a) that not all people see numbers and letters as colours, and b) once I began to pay attention to this,   I realized there were all sorts of other ways in which I was synaesthetic – such as experiencing numbers as 3 dimensional objects with colour, texture and movement. No wonder I struggled with doing even the simplest arithmetic.

A few years later I read the very excellent books of Dorothy Rowe, with her descriptions of Introversion and Extroversion, and began to form a more positive self-concept of myself as an introvert – and hence– well, basically a super-cool person – heheh.  

Here’s a bit of basic info about this that I just cut and pasted from a website, for those who don’t already know it: “Psychologist Dorothy Rowe, author of The Successful Self, explains: ‘Either we are “people persons”, who judge ourselves in terms of how others respond to us, or we are “what have I achieved today?” people.’

These definitions have been widely used by psychologists ever since, as a way of dividing personality types. One of the most popular assessments, the Myers-Briggs personality test, considers extroversion and introversion in terms of where an individual gets his or her energy from. According to this approach, an extrovert tends to draw energy from interactions with other people, while an introvert is more self-sufficient, drawing on his or her internal world.

The next useful bit of insight for why I am so weird and always feel I don’t fit it came from reading Elaine Aron's 1996 book The Highly Sensitive Person, which I have already written about in this blog.

So, that’s enough for one person, isn’t it?  Highly sensitive, introvert and synaesthetic.

But there’s one other totally weird, off-the-scale bonkers thing about me that I have lived with all my life and thought was unique and inexplicable. No-one else in the world was like me. I have spent years trying to find some kind of explanation for it, even considered having hypnosis to help me with it.  And now, today - by pure chance – I came across an article giving it a name: misophonia.

Sometimes called selective sound sensitivity syndrome, misophonia is a baffling and bizarre disorder. Sufferers feel an instantaneous, overwhelming rage - often accompanied by physiological responses such as sweaty palms or a racing heart — to certain sounds.

These triggers are often chewing and eating sounds, sometimes barely audible. Some people report visual triggers such as fidgeting or foot-bobbing, or even olfactory or tactile triggers.

Here’s the article I stumbled across:    

https://www.statnews.com/2016/06/17/misophonia-noise-rage/

The first time I ever noticed I didn’t like the noises people make while eating, I was literally about 2 and a half years old. I still remember the moment. We were still living in Alberta, Canada, where I was born, and my 2 older brothers had gone outside into the back yard to play, my younger brother had been put down for a nap, as he was still a baby, and I was enjoying a moment of quiet with my Mum, sitting at the dining table, after lunch. Mum was reading a book, and I was musing in my quiet, odd way over important questions like “If I shout really, really loud, then stand very, very quiet, will I be able to hear the sound come all the way back round the world to me again?” And “Why did the clock stop, never to go again, when the old man died?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrJZLs5zUtU

(I’m not making that up. I remember this so vividly I can even remember what I was thinking at the time, and I did tell you I was weird – or at least, an unusual child)

Then, my mother started to eat some grapes.

Now - I do have to say, in mitigation, m’lud, that my mother has believed for her whole adult  life that every mouthful must be chewed a minimum of 37 times. Not 36 and not 38. 37. And in order to achieve this totally unnatural way of masticating, it is necessary to push the food back to the front of the mouth once it has been chewed the normal number of times, say 15 or 16, and re-chew it. So, even if you are not misophonic, this is not actually a very agreeable thing to listen to.  But that does not really explain my reaction. It was like having the inside of my skin sandpapered.  It was really annoying. I commented on it to Mum by saying “You make lots of noises when you eat those grapes, Mummy.” To which my mother responded by laughing and popping another grape in her mouth.  I distinctly recall that it took 3 grapes and I was out of there. I was so small I had to ask Mum to get me down from the table.

Since then, I’ve just had to learn to live with it. I’m usually ok if there is plenty of background noise. Partners are simply informed - not asked, told - that I will never eat a meal in a silent room with them. TV, radio, buzz of background chatter, all help to mask the noise. I had one partner who actually deliberately set out to annoy me by insisting we turn off the telly, then opening a bag of sweets to start slowly chewing on them while she sat right next to me on the sofa. Relationship didn’t last long after that.  At one time I was married to a person of the male persuasion who used to eat just like my Mum – he would chew even ice-cream, or porridge, for 37 times, AND clonk his teeth together while he did it. 

What I noticed about that was that mostly it doesn’t bother me at first, providing people are reasonably normal in their eating habits, but the better I get to know the person, the more tuned into it I become, and the harder it is for me to cope with it – because I can’t screen it out of my awareness. As I’ve known my mother all my life, she could be chewing with a DC10 revving up in the background, and I’d still be able to hear her.

So, as a family, we’d all be sitting at the meal-table and every time Mum started to chew a new mouthful I’d get this surge of anger. It freaked me out really. I mean, disgust and irritation at the bad manners of someone who can’t keep their lips together while they chew, yes – but anger? It would just come and go while she was chewing, switching on and off like a tap.

I’ve even tried some kind of psychological explanation – like -  Mum started that slow eating thing, and clonking her teeth together, as a form of dumb insolence when she was a teenager, because of the way she was silenced in her own family, and the anger is still there, and as I am an empath, I’m just picking up on that. I still think there may be something in my theory about her doing it as a reaction to her own family dynamics, especially as the teeth clonking is akin to teeth grinding during sleep, which is definitely associated with anger. But I was only 2 years old when I first had this reaction! Sensitive and too perceptive for my years, yes, but at 2 years old you believe everything your mother does is good and nice – you don’t start getting angry because of the noises she makes when she eats. You’re more likely to just eat the same way.

Since I moved in with Mum she has stopped clonking her teeth while eating, so at least that is not so bad, but she's added in  a whole range of other sounds that drive me crazy to do with her breathing. At first, when she was still mobile, I decided the only way I could survive meals was to eat my food as fast as I could and leave the table. I know Mum thinks this is bad manners, but it’s what I need to do. I’d shoot into the kitchen and start to wash up. Now I’ve been doing this for so long, I’ve forgotten how to eat at a normal speed.  

But now Mum is making noises all the time because of her breathing problems. She fills up with mucous towards the end of the day and makes this kind of continuous throat-clearing sound. And she kind of smacks her lips in what I can only describe as a wet Velcro type of sound, because her mouth is so dry. Even when she’s not doing that there is this kind of gravelly breathing sound. She can’t help it of course. But I also can’t help the way I react to it. It’s a physical reaction. I’d really love to be able to just sit with her in the evenings, but I simply can’t do it.

Reading this article, I did just sit and cry.   I never did that about the HSP thing, or the introvert thing or the synaesthesia thing. But this just got to me. It was the thing about the anger, really. I’m not an angry person. I hate being angry. I freak myself out with that. Reading this, I realize that I am not alone in this. My anger is just a physiological reaction and not a judgement on my mother. It’s not even really anger, in any real sense.

And of course. I never act out on it.

It’s my problem and it’s up to me to find my own solutions, as I have done.  I have kept silent about my distress all my life, apart from to a few close friends, and family. I know I can keep coping. But having a name for it and knowing it’s a recognized phenomenon, even though it has no cure or anything, makes it just that little bit easier. 

Naomi Klein, Paul Mason and Jeremy Corbyn v a return to feudalism.

 9^th Sept 2016 

Years ago I borrowed a book from my local library called ‘The Shock Doctrine’ by Naomi Klein.

It scared the bejazus out of me.

Last year I decided I needed my own copy, so got one, but it’s taken me till now to pluck up the courage to read it again. I’m only half way through the first chapter and already I’m fighting the urge to curl up foetally under the bed.

This time I’m reading it after reading Paul Mason’s ‘Post-Capitalism’.

But, where Mason ends on an optimistic note, looking at the possibilities in moving beyond capitalism to the time when almost everything can be produced with hardly any work, using technology already in existence, I am looking at a world where the real powers, the super-rich owners of multi-national corporations, have already seen this future and have begun to seize control of assets that so far have always been free – such as water – in order to consolidate their power over the population of the whole Earth.

Let that sink in.

It’s never been about money.

Money is only a means to an end – and the end is power.

Paul Mason, these guys get it! They probably got it before you wrote ‘Post Capitalism’. They are preparing for the post-capitalist world while we are still dazed and bewildered at the crumbling of capitalism around us.

This is what ‘The Shock Doctrine’ is about. It describes the conscious policy of exploiting every single natural or man-made disaster, to make a clean sweep of whatever social institutions or property rights were in place, so that every single thing can be replaced by a for-profit business that dispossesses the mass population while corporations move in and take over.

So - a hurricane destroys New Orleans? Bulldoze all their state schools and replace them with privately-run charter schools. A tsunami hits Sri Lanka? Bulldoze hundreds of fishing villages and replace with high-rise hotels for tourists.  Terrorists destroy the World Trade building? Use it as an excuse to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the attack, and destroy very hospital, school and police force in the country, prioritize that over military targets, then offer to replace them with for-profit-run businesses owned by US companies.  Not to mention the vast fortunes to be made by weapons manufacturers and so-called security firms.

Shock Doctrine was written before the banking crash in 2009. But there again was a perfect example of how to take advantage of a crisis that swept away peoples’ livelihoods just as completely as the tsunami and left people too bewildered to plan for their futures.

Enter austerity. 

The exact same economic plan that had already been imposed on countries in South America, many parts of Africa and the Far East, destroying their democracies and economies, and reducing people to frightened and obedient chattels.  

In the US we see a booming business in privately owned prisons, where the black population is incarcerated and made to work for nothing, producing commodities that used to be made in factories by ordinary folk who had jobs. The re-enslavement of the black population.

It’s a little harder in the UK. It’s mainly the white working class who have lost out, so a little finesse is required.  Zero hours contracts, the gig economy, split the working classes along race and geography, feed them childish stories about immigrants taking their jobs, when it’s the corporations that have taken them. All in the name of the free market ideology.

Make no mistake - this free marketism will be enforced by violence where they can get away with it. Any kind of organised resistance – Trades Unions, legislatures, and laws like the Human Rights Act, the European Union, the democratic voting system, the free Press – whatever - will be destroyed.   

It might not be the systematic violence of Pinochet’s Chile but the aim is the same. To make us all too frightened to resist. We see it here in the draconian changes to our welfare system.

All of these measures actually destroy the economy. Capitalism doesn’t really work when too many people, globally, are too poor to be able to afford to buy any of the so-cheaply manufactured goods using slave labour. The system relies on enough people having enough money to keep it going.

But that doesn’t matter.

It’s not money that matters, it’s power.

Those who are running this show will be quite happy with some kind of technologically-based feudalism – as long as they are on top.

Which is where they are making sure they will be.

Destroying capitalism would just be the final coup, after which they’d be able to take off the gloves and come out from behind the screens from where they’ve been pulling the strings of their puppet governments all this time., and show who’s really boss.

And we’d probably hail them as our saviours for doing it – just as so many already are with Trump in the US.  

This whole scenario relies on producing enough shocks to the system to keep the population afraid and unable to rally any kind of resistance.

There’s been a slight glitch to this scheme though, just lately.

The shock got delivered to the wrong people.

The government that was meant to deliver austerity and keep the people under control, is now the one that’s in a state of shock. They didn’t know Brexit was part of the plan.  So Cameron and Osborne collapsed, the rest of the crew, Gove, Boris etc, have been shown for the ineffectual clowns they always were.

Our PM is still trying to stick to the script by foisting grammar schools on an unconvinced country, and they are handling the NHS takeover so badly that most people actually support the striking junior doctors.

And the biggest shock of all?

The obedient, endemically corrupt tool of big Business – The British Labour Party – has actually elected a leader who actually has a plan.

A different plan.

In the middle of the panic and disarray, Corbyn is there calmly, quietly talking about taking back the country’s infrastructure into public ownership.

Of all things!

That idea was supposed to have been well-and-truly discredited decades ago.

But don’t worry.  The LP has always obediently stepped up when its masters snap their fingers. So there they are, doing everything they can think of to get rid of that irritating nuisance who just won’t play the game.

Corbyn’s opponents will not be stopped easily. He can’t be got out of the picture as easily as the Democrats got rid of Bernie Sanders. They will still keep hammering away.

And we must not let them.

The Labour Party is OUR party.

It grew out of a labour movement that our ancestors fought and bled for.

We are not consumers, to flounce off and find another party that suits our tastes better. We have to stay and fight to return ownership of what is ours, however long it takes.

So- Heave ho! My hearties! Courage!

That picture of feudalism with technology is not just drama. It’s the reality that faces us if we let the bastards win. This isn’t about ourselves.  It’s about whether our grandchildren are going to grow up free, or as serfs.  

3rd September: what happened to the golden light? And: would you put your mother on one of these?

I went to see a friend and wise teacher, who is also a chiropractor (in the generic sense of hands-on manipulation of muscles and bones to help injury or pain.) I've been going to her for a couple of years because she helps with aches and pains caused by lifting Mother, and also with older, deeper emotional injuries that have been held in the body through life.  So she’s a part of my journey of discovery of my mother in me.

I told her about this golden light thing that I am experiencing around Mum just now. Her take on it was that as Mum is approaching death, she is entering into an in-between place. Whatever death is.  She is becoming more and more transparent, and as I am living close to her, I too am being drawn into this transitional, transparent place of openness. I don’t think you have to believe in an afterlife, or Spirit, or anything like that for this to happen.  I don’t know what death is, but knowing one is approaching it has to be the ultimate assay of life.  It’s a place of shedding all that is inessential down to a photon layer of self, as that self comes closer and closer to a point of not-being.

In her own way, Mum is working away there, though she is not a deeply reflective person. She dozes on her chair, mouth open, wakes and switches on the telly, listens to her music, eats her food, toddles about the room when she feels strong, breathes eggcup-full sized breaths. But underneath, I know, from the occasional comment or story, that the sifting is taking place. Drawing closer. Shedding whatever needs to go.

And I’m in there with her, though I’m still full of life and future, this side of the veil.

My practitioner tells me a story of the night her own mother died: how she phoned her and her mother said her long-dead husband was there with her and it was so exciting because she was moving house. Her mother had been utterly prosaic and unspiritual all her life, and sounded quite bonkers talking like this. But that night she died.  

I was reminded of how I sensed my grandfather around me, who I had not thought of for years, one weekend when I drove over from Wales to spend a weekend with my parents. Dad had some health problems, but nothing major, and on the visit he was just the same old infuriating Dad. Except there was something oddly different about him, something transparent, that puzzled me. One week later he died suddenly.

Of course, it would be me that picked up on that.  My grandfather came to me the moment he died, when I was still at boarding school. And there he was, coming again to me when my father – his son – died.

I drove home after the treatment, my practitioner’s words about her mother snagging me. Suddenly I feel Dad there, strongly present in the car with me.  I am spooked. I realize I’ve forgotten my mobile phone. Anything could have happened while I’ve been out.  It’s almost an hour and a half’s drive home.

When I arrive all is well. The new carer coped alright.

The humid house-smells wrap around me as I go in. Normality resumes.

After all that I was surprisingly crabby with Mum, getting irritated over petty things during the evening. At bed-time I thought “I don’t want to be snappy with her. I’d hate it if the last thing I said to her was an angry reaction to something trivial.” I resolved to watch for this too, and try to remain in the golden light.

The following day a kind of turntable thing arrived that I have ordered.  It’s a pivot transfer. The ‘patient’ stands on it then you turn them in the direction they need to go. Mum’s left leg seems to have seized up completely lately and she’s finding it hard to make that sideways turn to get from one seat to another – bed to wheelchair, chair to commode etc. Last week her legs got all tangled up with each other and she fell – not on the floor, she caught herself and went face down on her chair. I had to lift her and set her to rights on the chair. Hence my need to see the chiropractor. I’m worried about coping with this long-term. And also not all the carers are able to get Mum up to stand on days when she’s weak.

So I researched various kinds of lifting, and transfer aids and found these things. There seem to be lots of different makes of them so I assumed they must be useful, so I decided to give one a try. It was only just under £20. I hadn’t been able to find any films on YouTube of how exactly they are used, and they give few details on the websites where you can buy them. 

Well, call me stupid, but I assumed there’d be some kind of catch on it, so you could lock it while the patient gets on or off it. But no, there was nothing like that, so it swivelled as soon as you put a foot on it.  

I knew Mum was nervous at the thought of standing on anything like this, so I tried it myself, holding onto the back of a chair to simulate her walking frame.  It was clearly took a bit of a knack, but I thought it would be alright once she’d got used to it.  So I persuaded her to try it, and she put one foot on it while still sitting, felt how it swivelled and refused to go any further. Of course she couldn’t use it. It was quite unsuitable for anyone with even the slightest problem with balance. In other words, anyone who was so wobbly they’d need one of them could not possibly use one. But I became inexplicably angry with her for not trying harder. Quite unfair and my internal witness was saying “WTF?” but I couldn’t stop myself. I stormed out and slammed the door as hard as I could – something I used to do as a child.

I get that it was because I was anxious about being able to cope on my own as Mum gets weaker and weaker. But I was completely out of order. Even when I’d calmed down and acknowledged this, I still couldn’t bring myself to apologize. I was afraid Mum would take the apology with bad grace. So I sent the rest of the day being really nice, but acting as if nothing had happened. But feeling shaken and upset with myself.

What idiot designed that thing? How does anyone get any use out of them?

And what happened to the golden light? Was this reaction some kind of internal bullshit-detector restoring me homeostatically to mundane normality?  

I decide to keep the turntable and use it if and when I ever do start doing sculpture. I’ll still need to clamp it to stop it rotating while I’m hacking away.

As for helping Mum move that leg – I have perfected a method of bending down and just lightly pushing it forward, while I hold her upright against my hip.

On Trotskyism and Entryists.

I thought I’d write something on a hot topic of the moment: - whether the surge of new members of the Labour Party includes extreme left, Trotskyist members of other organisations who were expelled from the Labour Party decades ago. Or rather, as it’s pretty clear some of those who were expelled have indeed joined, or tried to join, whether they are entryists, or just honest people who see the LP taking a leftward turn for the first time in decades and feel there is now a place for them. I’ve seen a couple of articles about how ‘entryists’ operate, and it has caused me to go back to my time as a Trotskyist, prior to joining the LP, and to reappraise it. Since I re-joined the LP just over a year ago, I’ve always made it clear that I was on the left, and had considered the LP to be too right-wing since Neil Kinnock took over, pre- Blair, for me to wish to support it. So I am completely open and honest about who I am and where I come from, as I see no point in being anything else.

So- here’s my history.  

In 1977 I got a job in a hotel in Oxford, while I was trying to finish my thesis (I never did finish it). I was parking cars in the Randolph Hotel, working with one other guy. I had already done a hotel job, and had been pretty appalled by the way staff were treated and what they were paid. So when a group of chambermaids decided they were fed up with conditions and decided to join the TGWU, and came round to talk to my colleague about it, I decided to back them up by joining too. I did it because I thought it was fair. I’d never been political, although I had backed a strike by the staff in my college when I was an undergrad and had always been vaguely left-wing. When all the staff who were known to be in the Union got the sack, I came out on strike to support them. I could have just left, but I thought the right thing to do was stand by my commitment in joining the Union. Once we were out on strike, standing on a picket line every day through all weathers, for 6 months over the winter of 77-78, we got all sorts of left-wing groups coming in to support us. That was when I met Trotskyists for the first time. They were all there – SWP, IMG, other groups whose names I forget, and a local off-shoot of the WRP, set up by men who worked in the car factory up at Cowley, called the Workers Socialist League. At first I wasn’t interested in all the political talk that went on. Most of the members of these organizations- like the SWP- were students, and even though I was a student, I still shared the idea that as they weren’t ‘real’ workers, they didn’t really have anything valid to say. But I was impressed by the car factory blokes who came down so consistently to support us, and gradually began to listen to what they had to say. I thought that if they - real working class blokes, thought Trotskyism had something to say to them, in their real-life, working situation, then there must be something in it.

Of course, as a historian, I knew about Marx. No serious historian dismisses Marx’s theories about economic causes underlying social processes and so forth. But I didn’t know much else. Eventually I joined the WSL, and spent about a year or 18 months being a Trotskyist (NOT a TrotskyITE!!) . The strike had ended, with no success, and I had got a job working on a milk round for the Co-op.

As a Trotskyist, part of my remit was to be a Trades Union activist – that is, go into the local branch of my Union, the TGWU, and sort of push things to the left. In any way I could. It was all a bit vague, but the image presented by this writer,

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/11/trotskyists-on-the-march-chaos-ahead?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+main+NEW+H+categories&utm_term=185636&subid=15465306&CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2

about how Trotskyists operate, is, I suppose, accurate. It wasn’t done in the cynical way he describes. The argument, as I recall, was that it was important to address the real concerns of working people, in the organizations they had set up for themselves, but try to keep those organizations from descending into trifling, bits and pieces about their working conditions, and inject a wider, more political perspective. Or at least, that is how I understood it.  

Anyway - after more than a year of attending meetings, trudging around council estates selling the newspaper, attending meetings, standing on the street selling the paper, attending meetings, going on demonstrations and mass pickets, attending meetings, being expected to provide my car, and myself as driver, for any use to which the organization wanted, attending meetings, well - you get the picture – I just decided it was all a waste of time, and resigned.  

But I had become politicized by the whole experience, and rather than giving up in disillusionment, I joined the Labour Party.  In my brief experience of Trotskyism, ‘entryism’ consisted of Trades Union activity. Joining the LP was considered a cop-out. But this was around the time when the Militant Tendency were openly advocating entry to the LP, so I can only speak for the lot I was mixed up with (and reading the Wikipedia entry on the WSL I see their policy on joining the LP changed around the time I left them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_Socialist_League ).  I’m not sure about the description of Trots as deliberately disrupting meetings and tactically using points of order and such like to scare off any moderate members in order to take control of local branches, but I think it is true in some cases. What I noticed was that all left-wing groups seemed to hate each other more than they ever hated Tories. I can certainly remember going to a Trades Council meeting in London where Jack Dromey was speaking, sounding pretty good, to my mind, but the attitude of my fellow Trotskyists was that he was some kind of lackey of the state or something.

Anyway - once I had left the WSL and joined the LP, I did indeed find that I was too left wing for the then leader of my local branch. This leader then left to join the newly formed Social Democratic Party, complaining that his local branch had been infiltrated by Militant Tendency entryists - meaning me and my husband.  My husband was not as left as me, and was really a floating voter, but he had rashly called this guy a fascist. It weren’t me, honest! Once he’d left, the rest of the Labour Party group became very enthusiastic and started producing a regular newsletter which we distributed free in our area. It was a lot more fun that what I’d done in the WSL, and really, the politics were better, although I had to learn that the LP generally doesn’t see itself as a Marxist organisation, which was a total shock to me. We canvassed the whole area during the election when Michael Foot was Leader, and also opposed Neil Kinnock as leader because we wanted the more left candidate. I suppose the reason why we didn’t get disillusioned by Foot’s defeat was that we were in such a strongly Tory Constituency that we knew we’d never win in our own area anyway.  I find the same spirit in the LP branch I am in now, in Theresa May’s constituency.  

My husband did accidentally get himself elected to the Town Council, rather in the way Jeremy Corbyn has accidentally got himself elected as Leader of the Labour Party. He put himself forward as the token LP candidate, because he was the only one available to do it, believing that we lived in such a Tory area that he’d never win, only to find that people voted for him because he looked honest and they couldn’t stand the other chap.  Some of them told him this as he stood outside the polling booth on the day. Of course it was quite boring and un-political on that town council, but he did his bit for the few years he had left to live. He died in 1984. After that, I moved to Wales and decided that none of this politics stuff was for me.

Now I’m back in the Labour Party, because of Jeremy Corbyn. The LP is shifting to the left for the first time in decades, and is finding itself attracting hundreds of thousands of new members for doing so.  It always describes itself as a ‘Broad Church’ but in reality the hostility of the right wing of the party towards the left has always been absolute, in the time-honoured tradition of the left always fighting amongst themselves. There is nothing new about this, it was the same when Foot was leader, and the reasons given by this generation of right-wing-Labour (I don’t like to call them right wing as I reserve that for Tories, but I have to call them something) – that Corbyn has no leadership qualities, that the British public will never vote for a left wing government, etc etc, are the same reasons they gave under Foot.  Corbyn has plenty of leadership qualities but too many of the PLP just don’t want to follow him. Their views were summed up perfectly by Tony Blair when he said he’d rather see Labour defeated than win on a left platform.  They really would rather destroy the party than work together with a left-wing leader. Even if they have to put up a fake leftie like Smith, to get Corbyn out. And they will never ever ever see themselves as the ones who are destroying the party. Or as the ones who can’t compromise, or co-operate.  Or as the ones who aren’t realists.

Having said that – I don’t want the Labour party to expel anyone who joins them, whether on the right or left of the party, just for having the wrong politics.   Obviously anyone who is a member of any other party that opposes the principles of the LP has no place in the party – that includes other parties of the right and left. But if people have joined the LP recently who used to be in other parties of the left, then they should be allowed to stay. A lot of them might be people like me. If they do proceed to behave in the way described in the article linked above, then they should be expelled because of their behaviour, not their politics. If they persistently disrupt meetings and prevent the business of any local group being attended to, then, yes, they have to go.  But that applies as much to those on the right of the party, within the PLP, who are disrupting the business of the Party and preventing it doing its work as Opposition and Government-in-waiting.