Stats for Lefties: Should I stay or should I go? Labour’s Brexit dile...

Stats for Lefties: Should I stay or should I go? Labour’s Brexit dile...: With the government having finally put its proposed Brexit deal on the table, and with a Parliamentary vote imminent, the Labour Party and ...

Planet Power

Ode to a planet

We test your trust
Drag you down
Use you up
Create havoc with your weather
Love you, need you, abuse you and
Our planet is dying...
"Whatever."

Greatness taken for granted.
Your planetary plight, ignored.
Perniciously we plunder
Mindlessly. We manoeuvre and mess
With the world for our wares.
Mammonism rules while
Our planet is dying...
"Who cares?"

Planet to the world

Listen to my message infant man;
This world would answer back.
I scream my plight! Now hear my words:
No more soundbites, no spin, no promises.
Your selfish rhetoric hasn’t worked.

Now!
I call for action.
Now!
I’m fighting back.

Inside my furnace is raging.
Tears of sadness become tears of rage.
Millions of years I lived before you...
You who rip off my clothes,
Blow holes in my skin!
You who make my blood boil.
Beware infant man...
Your cradle is rocking.

Sue Fewster 2009

Insanity

Dreaming, my escape
From reality.
Dreams -
Recollection, re collection.
Elusive Mind,
Mine ceases to dream.
No escape,
Dungeons
Deep
Down
Mine, Mind, Mined
Buried,
Breaking, breaking,
Broken.
Dreadful dream
No awakening.

Sue Tonge, 1976, going mad….

Wall of seclusion

You melted the ice surrounding my heart,
Wrenched out my emotions, tore them apart.
My island, my rock of defence, you invaded.
Feelings once hidden, now are paraded
When you laugh at my tears.

My life, always ruled by my head,
Now my heart of lead dominates instead
That fear of hurt, emotional pain -
That dread it fills my heart again.
A dream of love came alive.
In reality it died.

Your hands created ecstasy, a moment in time.
A natural pleasure – the senses - sublime.
I crave your touch, desire your heart;
We pull apart.
I'm afraid again, must pretend an illusion,
And build that hard, dark wall of seclusion.


Sue Tonge, June 1986 – hurting again...

Putting the world to rights

I've been getting really political just recently.  I have always been interested in politics as my Masters degree focus in Social and Political philosophy demonstrates.  But the world seems to have recently gone mad and I want in some way to help make it better.  So I started to get more active and joined the Labour Party.  I also voted for Jeremy Corbyn to lead it.  I am strongly convinced that he should lead it.

At long last there is someone giving a voice to those like me who really care about social justice, equality, fairness, and above all democracy; those who seem to have been sidelined and left to wander in a wilderness of neoliberalism for thirty or more years... 

After the Iraq war and the introduction of university tuition fees I swore I would never vote Labour again. Then the tone of politics began to change with Ed Miliband's call for increased democracy; greater openness; and a fairer, more just, society. Recognising the limitations of our political system, and its many democratic deficiencies, I decided to vote for Labour again: we at last had a small opportunity to bring about change - a chance to change things back once again to an approach focused on the life chances of all, not just the few.

When Jeremy Corbyn, a great advocate of peace, social justice and democracy - a very honest, soft spoken, polite politician and someone who definitely did not fiddle expenses - stood in the leadership competition, I joined the party to help him fight on behalf of the many forgotten, exploited, and oppressed people living in our very wealthy and prosperous country.  A country that had, in the past, benefitted me to the extent that 15 years ago I had felt it was time to give something back.

There are very many people like me: those who remember very well the hard fights for a better life for all working people, for equality of sex, gender, race, and opportunity, and for the disenfranchised in society.  Many who now clearly recognise that the abundant opportunities for social mobility available to us during our lifetime have now disappeared.  Such opportunities no longer exist for our children or our children's children because too many obstacles have been placed in their path. In my view this is all directly down to the neoliberal politics of Thatcher and their continuation under Blair and Brown.

Blair had won a massive first election on the back of a manifesto that promised much, including the renationalisation of railways, and of energy companies, and the building of more social housing.  He lied - he took our party of democratic socialists and turned it into a Tory lite neocon Party.  Yes, New Labour demonstrated that it had a much bigger heart than Thatcher's government, achieving many good things during the thirteen years it had power and indeed, righting some of the wrongs she had inflicted on us. But economically it developed into an extension of the Tory Party: adapting and adopting the small state, low tax, low pay neoliberal ideology that led us to the current state of gross inequalities, rising levels of poverty, and an increase in homelessness not seen since the showing of Loach's famous film 'Cathy Come Home'. 

Even Thatcher claimed that Blair was her greatest "creation". 

As he shifted direction further and further to the right on the New Labour journey Blair began to ooze labour supporters by the million, election after election their numbers were getting smaller.  He even got rid of many incumbent left wing MPs and shunted in his PPE SPADs - and other New Labour supporters - into areas where they had no knowledge or understanding of people's needs. Local incumbents were dumped: labour activists and councillors who had spent many years building up support for Labour, and often fighting issues caused by their own party's abandonment of industry in favour of a services key economy. The way Angela Eagle herself acquired her seat in Wallasey - a Yorkshire lass in a Lancastrian seat for God's sake - perfectly illustrates how politics was taking on the American flavour of money choosing who represented people in Parliament.  Power shifted away from local people, from local councils, to the centre.  The chances of local people getting a seat as a representative of their communities were taken away.  Which perhaps explains the current dearth of potential labour leaders in the party that led to Corbyn being elected in the first place: nepotism is rife: witness the names of those arguing against Corbyn's tenure: Stephen Kinnock, Hilary Benn.  Recently there was a plan to oust a long serving labour MP from another, even safer, Merseyside seat than Wallasey: the person being shunted in from the centre was Euan Blair.  You cannot tell me that they got their opportunities to enter Parliament purely on merit, or for fighting on behalf of  local people... Luckily Social media kicked into action and Baby Blair is still waiting on the sidelines, his chances of being a British politician have diminished greatly in recent days methinks. So, the power of local people to manage their lives was diminishing at great pace. And personal debt too was rising phenomenally.  

Blair and Brown's deregulation of the banks went further than even Thatcher's did: he allowed gambling to help pay for a crumbling infrastructure and charities to help the increasing number of the poor, forgotten underclass created by Thatcher in her sacking of the unions - a lost generation of workers still struggling to get by today.  This attack on unions continued under Blair as he carried on limiting our rights to withdraw our labour and negotiate collectively; the only real form of power working people have ever had over their masters. 

And then, to top it all, he jumped into bed with his American chum Bush and took us into a disastrous, probably illegal war, that has left the world reeling; teetering on the edge of another big war and he has not been brought to task for it: Justice is inseparable from democracy. If a prime minister can avoid indictment for waging aggressive war, the entire body politic is corrupted.  Indeed some are suggesting that we are on the brink of another World War, perhaps even another manufactured war.  I certainly hope they are wrong despite the words of Theresa May talking about threats of nuclear war are ringing through the press.  At the end of Blair's tenure the Labour Party had lost more than 6 million labour supporters, including many active Labour members, who began to form or join other, new left leaning, parties, disillusioned with the direction Labour was heading.  I was one of them.

Brown fared no better. Then Miliband arrived in the scene, was viciously attacked by the right of the party and corporate media for being too left wing. Sadly, despite being a centrist, he was not trusted by the general public either, so he had little chance of influencing anything.  Then, despite his good intentions, he totally lost us the Labour heartland, Scotland: the birthplace of the labour movement. By standing side by side with the Tories during the Scottish referendum he proved to many people that Labour had become a Tory lite Party, if not quite yet a puppet of the Tories. 

Now, over the last few weeks, the New Labour members of the PLP (Parliamentary Labour Party, as opposed to the CLP, which refers to the Constituency Labour Parties - of whom more than 80% of a large number surveyed support Jeremy Corbyn's leadership) have overtly demonstrated tendencies towards the use of the Tories'  nastier, elements such as engaging with the right wing press, to undermine Corbyn's mandated leadership, and more recently by carrying out a coup, long in the
making, against Corbyn by resigning en masse from the shadow cabinet; hoping to force him to resign.  They are acting directly against the expressed wishes of a vast majority of CLPs, of Labour Party members, and of union affiliates and supporters in a coup attempting to oust Jeremy Corbyn: the man with a very large majority mandate from members. Only 9 months after he was elected to the position, although many claim it began the day after the leadership election was won. It is not just an attack on Corbyn: it is a direct attack on the membership of the Labour Party and a direct attack on our Democratic processes, which it has tried to subvert at every turn: overtly during the coup and more subtly before and since.

The establishment has always been afraid of the famous "Tyranny of the Majority", regarded by elites as mob rule. We were, when suffrage was initially granted, a large group of predominantly uneducated people. That is obviously no longer the case. Yet, the establishment still fight, and are fighting, tooth, nail and backstabbing thrust, to keep us like mushrooms: kept in the dark, shat on from time to time, and then sold to the highest bidder. 

It is time, now that we have the opportunity, to bring about a PEACEFUL revolution in democratic politics.  That is why I decided to get involved; decided I needed to know why the hopes we had for a much better, more peaceful world in the seventies had come to nothing.  

Our politics has obviously shown itself in a bad light.  We need change and Corbyn is driving US to do that. US, not him. He expects us to get involved and help sort out the mess we allowed to happen by sitting on our backsides and allowing others: to rule over us; to dictate the kind of life we should live; to get our young people into vast amounts of debt from a very young age, and also,deny them any real firm of social security - even the basic minimum wage is not fully paid to workers under 25.  This, so that they will have no choice but to work hard for very little pay, or starve as many are forced to on our so called apprenticeship schemes where wages paid just about cover the costs of getting to work.  Many are exploited more than the old trade apprentices were in the 1960s - at least they left with a real skill worth something.

The evidence for this is obvious: there have been massive increases in the levels of ABSOLUTE POVERTY among WORKING people and their children, now reliant on charities and good will to survive. The differences between relative and absolute poverty are diminishing, which allows the Tories to claim a reduction in terms of relative poverty. And most of the PLP voting against Corbyn voted with the Tories in cuts to welfare, on going to war - their voting records speak for themselves - they do not reflect true labour values of equal opportunity, fairness and increasing equality: quite the contrary.

It is time, now that we have the opportunity, to bring about a PEACEFUL revolution in democratic politics.  I urge people to join the Labour Party; to start learning about how politics works - and doesn't work in our favour - in this country and elsewhere. For, in a world of global multinational corporates, it will take many more workers coming together than just those of any single state alone to bring about the necessary changes. We should all be more involved, use our brains, our voices, and our votes to bring about the changes necessary to return our politics to focus less on economic growth at any cost and more on creating a society that works for the greater good of all.

We want our Party back - the People's Party: the Labour Party that our fathers, and their fathers before them, fought and died to create. And Corbyn is the man who will help us do that.

Born on a Black Friday

Born on a Black Friday

by Susan Fewster, 2009

‘Push, now Mrs Tonge... push!’


‘No, it can’t be born today!’ She exclaimed breathlessly. ‘Not today...’ A scream tore through the tiny back room as nature failed to hear her plaintive plea, ‘Please, not on Friday the thirteenth.’


‘I can see the baby’s head...’, it had been a long labour of three days and the doctor was as tired as his patient,  ‘one more push should do it. Hrrumph! You shouldn’t be so suspicious - let’s just concentrate now.’


Another loud scream ripped through the tired room, as the rest of me eventually swooshed into the world. It was one o’clock in the morning, on Friday 13th April, 1956. I often wonder what the impact on my life might have been if I hadn’t had it drilled into me that I had been ‘born unlucky’. I constantly referred to my date of birth as the reason behind the many tragedies that eventually dogged my young life. But, before they began appearing, my earliest memories are very happy, they are of the relationships I had with my siblings.


My early years were as idyllic as life in a working class Salford slum could be. I was born in my paternal grandmother’s tiny, back to back terraced house on Sunnyside Street. Sunnyside Street, how ironic, the sun was constantly blocked out by the black fumes pouring out of the nearby rubber works: Greengate & Irwell. The factory produced general rubber goods including rubber belts, rubber footwear and materials used to make rubber tyres and it was the place where my father and grandmother spent most of their working lives. I too would carry on the family tradition, spending a couple of years working there on leaving school.


Gran’s house only had one living room and a scullery – a very tiny kitchen – downstairs and two small bedrooms upstairs. The street ran parallel to Ordsall Lane, just a couple of streets away from the very dirty, very smelly River Irwell that serviced the large number of local factories.


By the time my younger brother Steve came along, 16 months later, we had moved to a slightly cleaner slum. Bigger than gran’s, our new house was bought and paid for. It cost £500.00, savings my dad had sweated for at the rubber works. It had a long, narrow lobby (hallway) and a front parlour, a room I never recall entering. It was a special room, with the best furniture, kept meticulously neat and only aired when we had visitors. We never dared to enter the sanctity that was the parlour. We lived in the back room and the small back kitchen was where my mum baked all our bread and cooked her ‘meat and two veg.’ dinners every night. The washing was done whenever the rain would allow, in the back yard with its mangle and wash tub.


The house was close to where the old infantry barracks was sited during the war. By the time I was born it had been converted into a into a memorial garden that the locals fondly referred to as the ‘Little Park’, to distinguish it from the local, slightly larger, Ordsall Park. It was a spot of green in the centre of a crowd of blackened houses, far enough away from dad’s work to avoid the factory fumes. We often went for a picnic there if the weather was fine. I remember it mainly as the place I learned to make daisy chains; I used to drape myself with the flowers and dance around the grass - a little flower fairy. All the buildings around me were transformed as I lost myself in my imagination and transported myself to another more magical world.


But the trips to the park were rare treats. Mostly, I recall playing alone on the cobbled street when my brother was at school, warily watching the witch’s house at the end of the street. If she came out I would run inside the house, the door was always left open, and scream for my mam. When a little older, and a lot braver, I used to follow her as she made her way to the shop. She had an unusual walk and I decided it was a good walk and so I started to walk like her all the time. This led my mam to take me to the doctor’s because I was developing ‘knock knees’.


I had great fun in the physiotherapy sessions: I used to have to pick marbles up with my toes and walk along a wooden beam on the floor. All the attention was great and I was very sad when my secret was discovered; mam caught me following the witch, copying her every move. I was sorry to leave the physiotherapy sessions.


The street, Darley Street, was a very safe place to be, with only an occasional vehicle trundling down it very slowly. Regular intruders were the old horse and cart belonging to the rag and bone man and the lorry that delivered the coal to the little holes in front of each house. The rag and bone man was a treat – we used to take him old clothes and collect a balloon, if we were lucky, or a donkey stone, a soft scouring stone, used to clean and colour the steps, windowsills and a small patch of the pavement surrounding the steps. It was a declaration of pride in your house to stone the steps; a way of letting your neighbours know that your house was well kept. Any housewife who didn’t keep their little patch neat and tidy could be ostracised by the whole street, possibly one of the reasons the ‘dirty witch’ got her label.


The coal man, our other regular visitor, would arrive, literally covered in coal dust and once he’d prised off the cast iron lid from the hole he would swing a sack of coal onto his back and then pour the coal down the hole into the coal cellar. These small holes were just too small for a normal sized adult to get down, but a very tempting squeeze for an adventurous young soul such as me. I was fascinated by the shiny black stuff and, I am told, when I was about three years old I caused a major panic, hiding myself in the coal cellar. It took a while before they thought to look down there because the steps were really steep and it was very dark. I was discovered sitting on top of the pile of coal, sucking a small piece of it. How it must have upset my immaculately dressed mother when she saw my impish black face exposing its blackened teeth through an impish grin at the end of my adventure.


I feel sorry for my mother; I was such a great disappointment as a daughter. Once she recovered from the shock of having me on ‘Black Friday’, she was really pleased I was a girl. A machinist by trade, with her own Singer sewing machine at home, she delighted in dressing me up in beautiful, handmade dresses and little hand knitted boleros or cardigans. She would twine my hair around rollers and spend an age making me look as immaculate as her. But, in a matter of minutes, I’d be filthy, all tattered and torn and my beautifully coiffed hair would become an abandoned bird’s nest. I was a dirt magnet; nothing like the daughter she expected. Sadly, I continually failed to conform to her ideal of a daughter throughout my life. I was lucky when my baby sister, Sandra, came along and fulfilled her expectations of what her daughter should be. I took after my dad.


I desperately wanted to be a boy, like our Dave and copied everything he did. I remember one occasion when Dave and his friends were desperate to lose my company. They were off exploring the back entries, tiny alleyways that ran along the backs of the houses. These cobbled entries were about three feet wide, with a drain channel running down the middle. The walls were about five feet high. It was a dangerous game but I don’t ever remember anyone coming to any harm: we used to climb on the tops of the back walls and run along them, jumping over the uncovered doorways.


This particular time the lads had decided to get away from the pain that slowed them down and, instead of jumping over a doorway, they leapt over the alleyway itself landing on the opposite wall. They were all taller and older than me and probably believed that I would never attempt the jump. Ever the one to rebel against expectations, impulsively I bent my knees and launched myself across the three foot gap. My little legs were too short to make it across, but I did manage to grab the top of the wall as my small body smacked into it with a loud slap. Blood was running into my eyes but I was determined not to cry. And then joy of joys, as Dave yanked me up onto the ledge, he turned to his mates saying: ‘That’s my sister!’ It didn’t last of course, the next day they were trying new ways to dump me, but for a few hours I bathed in the glory of my brother’s pride.


Dave finally lost his limpet when Steve, our younger brother, was old enough to start following me around. The three year gulf between my older brother and me eventually led to our drifting apart, rarely playing together. A mere fifteen months had passed between that fateful Friday I was born and the glorious sunny day in July when Steve arrived. We grew very close as we shared the same later experiences throughout a very troubled period of our lives and we remained close until his tragic death at the age of twenty - but that’s a story for another day.

Embarking on yet another learning curve...

Wrote this in 2012

So after much procrastination I finally chose the Philosophy Masters.  Why not Literature or the English Language? Or indeed the psychology I love so much?

There is no short answer.  I have been philosophising since I was about 12, always questioning the way things are, why things are the way they are, and wondering how we can change the bad things.  I rambled around reading books and trying to find answers, always expecting that there would be someone who knew the answers to my very perplexing questions.  It's taken me a long time to discover that there seems to be no single truth when it comes to some questions, only debates and arguments.

Now, I like a good argument, as anyone who has seen my brother and I debating politics would agree. I feel very passionate about certain things: in a way I believe I have never really grown up, never matured to the extent that I can accept things just the way they are.  I still, naively some would say, believe that human beings are inherently good. The humanist in me believes that we must have evolved a social conscience and that we sometimes lose it occasionally in the moment of living.  I still have what some would call a childish belief in the good of human nature, yet I am confused by the irrational actions of many in power to subjugate some people and of others who exploit people for their own selfish ends.

So that, in a nutshell, is why I chose philosophy. I am looking for a more rational way to consider the many questions I have, as yet, to find answers for, indeed that there may be no answers to.  My worry is that in doing so I may uncover further questions that whet my appetite for knowledge about this world we have created. I also worry that this will change me, I think I actually like seeing myself as a simple soul who believes in the good nature of human beings - many things have happened in my life to challenge my assumptions but I have as yet fought off any pessimism that may arise from time to time.

I have created another blog that I will use to focus on my philosophical ramblings throughout the three year course that will deal with the course topics as they arise.  I intend to use it to brainstorm my thoughts on the topics before I actually consider what philosophers have argued.  I hope to end my naive meanderings and come to find my own sense of truth regarding people, justice and politics.