Oddly enough, although he's four years older and almost diametrically opposed politically, on everything, we have some similarities in background, not least the fact that he was a 19-year-old Cadet VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas.)
The odd thing about my time as an 18-year-old school leaver VSO is that I came home with a girl on a fiancée visa, which wasn't universally popular for any number of reasons. If I'd got odds on a 50+ years marriage from the family bookie in Sunderland at the time, Joseph Gardiner and Son, I'd have made a few thousand with a £5 bet in 1972.
The odd thing about Corbyn is that he didn't come home after one year. VSO was quite strict about the Cadet Scheme, (School leavers under 21), and extensions were forbidden. At the time and age of young Jeremy, VSO was 'in loco parentis' to some extent, and this would have been extended through the British High Commissioner, and staff, in Kingston, Jamaica.
The VSO Cadet Scheme was terminated the year after I came home in 1972 - absolutely no 'cause and effect' and just a coincidence.
It hadn't stood up to scrutiny for some time for some obvious reasons. Shipping 18-year-old school-leavers off to teach children in developing countries wasn't really a sustainable operation, although I think that it was mostly beneficial, but those benefits became increasingly marginal and unjustifiable.
It was argued that the Cadet VSOs were gaining greater benefit than the school pupils they were teaching. Practically speaking, I’d doubt that this was necessarily the case, although I’m sure that there may have been many examples which were used to cancel the programme. It was, for me at least, a tough year of teaching in a boys Catholic boarding school with some 130 children on an outer island run by nuns, two of whom had survived the Japanese occupation in World War Two.
Equipping us with an intensive course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language was a tough learning experience. I probably packed in more learning in four weeks of six-day weeks, eight-hour days to get my TEFL Diploma than I had in two years in the Sixth Form in two years. Two weeks of six hours a day - one to one - learning Spanish was a breeze in comparison, many years later.
At this point it's worth noting that the age of 19, Jeremy Corbyn was sent to an Anglophone country, Jamaica. Unless I've missed something, apart from some dialect, the universal language, written and spoken, was English.
The pupils I was teaching had, at least, one other maternal language, which ain't quite the same thing. He was also teaching Geography. I was also, occasionally, teaching History, Geography, and Science in a lab so small that half the class had to peer through the louvre glass windows as they stood on benches. This wasn’t the usual standard. Most classes were ordered, planned, and delivered well. The school buildings were in good shape. The children were well looked after with dormitories, and showers. The toilets, I’m afraid, were traditional with a Western construction. There was no reticulated water supply or sewage system on the island. The nuns had a ‘dunny’/earth closet. The children had a ‘sea latrine’ on the ocean side of the island – concrete pylons with a superstructure and corrugated roof.
The male staff, one Aussie priest, on local teacher, plus two British 18-year-olds, had a ‘traditional’ sea latrine of a timber walkway, one horizontal log, and a thatched roof.
Both of these were OK for my first couple of months. Novel, but the ocean breeze was quite pleasant. About two months in we had quite a blow from the Westerlies and I got the, by now familiar rumble in my bowels after dark, and dashed off to the beach. The staff sea latrine had largely disappeared. Bits of it were scattered along the shore. By first light we were digging the new male staff dunny.
This was an improvement, not least because you had a good idea of where it would be from day to day. A fixed, and immovable object.
Father Fletcher wasn’t a bad carpenter either, and he’d crafted a comfortable seat, next to which he’d kindly left a few old magazines which he’d discarded – National Geographic, Newsweek, and a Pacific Islands Monthly. The only, and very worrying, problem was that a large part of the mosquito population of the island had also taken up residence in the dunny.
Long story short – one lifted the lid, sat down, and clenched teeth as a few hundred mosquitoes hit their target.
I digress….I’m guessing that the 19-year-old Jeremy Corbyn had discreet flushing toilets on his first assignment to a tropical developing island country?
I’m not boasting about my experiences with primitive toilet arrangements, but Jeremy doesn’t strike me as the sort of 19-year-old, from a comfortable home, who would cheerfully walk across a fragile jetty over water to hang his arse off a coconut tree trunk and have a shit under a thatched roof every morning?
This is from Wikipedia and, with some certainty, I'd suggest that most of this is pure bullshit and post hoc invention, not least the incontrovertible fact that Jeremy Corbyn did not spend two years as a Cadet VSO. It ain't possible, but the chances of getting anybody from VSO to contradict this are zero:
'Around the age of 19, he spent two years doing Voluntary Service Overseas in Jamaica as a youth worker and geography teacher. He subsequently visited Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay throughout 1969 and 1970. While in Brazil, he participated in a student demonstration in São Paulo against the Brazilian military government. He also attended a May Day march in Santiago, where the atmosphere around Salvador Allende's Popular Unity alliance which swept to power in the Chilean elections of 1970 made an impression on him: "[I] noticed something very different from anything I had experienced... what Popular Unity and Allende had done was weld together the folk tradition, the song tradition, the artistic tradition and the intellectual tradition".’
All of this is unmitigated, unsupported, and completely unverifiable. My Castilian Spanish, the lingua franca in Latin America, isn't brilliant. Our daughters used to say that I speak Spanish like a Bolivian lorry driver...chauffer de camion - which sounds snobby, but they had three years in a Convent School in Bolivia and a very good teacher for afternoon/evening classes at home.
Corbyn has had two America Latina wives since 1987. I listened to him talking with Nicolas Maduro a few times on YouTube. Maduro was a lorry driver, and Corbyn simply couldn't keep up. He just repeated his rehearsed platitudes with a marked Anglo accent.
(My reason for doubting whether VSO would ever contradict Corbyn’s false narrative is premised on a couple of years sitting on the VSO Agriculture Committee in the late 1970s. It just happened that their office was in Belgrave Square in those days which was handily opposite mine. I got the general idea that most of the staff were somewhat to the left of the Labour Party leadership of the day, and the Chairman was a chap called Frank Judd, Labour MP/Minister, trades union sponsored.)
There's that story about what Corbyn did after his two year's as a Cadet VSO teaching in Jamaica which can only have been one year. I'm pretty sure that whatever he did after one year as a Cadet VSO didn’t look anything like the Wikipedia entry which his supporters have fabricated.
If he'd spent the next year in Jamaica smoking grass and pimping whores in Kingston it would be more interesting but equally not credible.
The conspiracy theory was that he spent the missing year, or two, in Cuba and that he was recruited by Cuban Intelligence/KGB. The problem with that theory is resolved around one word -'intelligence' - not a commodity with which Jeremy Corbyn is known to be well-endowed.
I can, almost, imagine that the Cubans may have reacted to young Jeremy's interest in their Socialist/Communist Revolutionary government, and that Soviet 'Advisers' in Havana may have thought that they'd invest a few weeks in this potential future British cheap asset. My guess is that after a few hours penetrating his mind they probably concluded that this might not be a wise investment. Not all Communists are as stupid as Jeremy Corbyn
If Jeremy Corbyn's IQ exceeds 105, I'd be astonished. Two E's out of three A levels after Prep School and a good Grammar School, from a very comfortable, stable, family home indicates a terminal thickie looking for excuses.
He wrote a foreword for a book a couple of years ago which, apparently, he hadn't read. I’m betting that he didn’t write the foreword which was published under his name.
His first wife, one Jane Chapman, probably a little bitter, said that she'd not seen him ever read a book in the six, or more, years they were together. OK, ex-husbands rarely get good reviews from ex-wives. She did, however, focus on that one issue, nothing to do with any bad habits, irritating behaviour, just the fact that he never read a book.
I know that Corbyn is generally perceived as a 'yesterday' politician in contemporary assessments of this Labour Party government. The fact that the Prime Minister, Sir Turnalot Starmer, was swiftly promoted to Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet five minutes after winning his first seat in 2015, resigned from Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet in 2016, and then went back into Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet and campaigned vigorously for Corbyn's election as Prime Minister in the 2019 General Election tells us, just a few years later, quite a lot about the pervasive influence which Jeremy Corbyn still has in Labour Party politics.
It is more than slightly ironic that large parts of the Labour Party, in Parliament and in the Constituency Parties around the country, still hold Jeremy Corbyn as the 'Gold Standard' who is the 'beating heart' of the Labour Party.
One can see how and why this is the case if one is looking at a pure, unadulterated, incorruptible, 'dyed-in-the-wool', socialist, Marxist-Leninist, with a dash of Trotsky and Gramsci, even without ever having read more than a few paragraphs of the tomes written and generated by any of them.
Sadly, or happily, the 'incorruptible' bit has unravelled with old 'Militant Tendency' warriors like Derek Hatton and Joe Anderson who are both facing serious charges of bribery and corruption whilst holding public office. Odds on convictions.
Our old friend Jon Lansman, multi-millionaire property owner and founder, funder, of Momentum, the successor to the Militant Tendency, and backer of Jeremy Corbyn, seems to have dropped off the radar. Does he think that his work is done with the election of Sir Turnalot's government with such a massive majority? I rather think that this might be the case.
Jon Lansman did an interview with somebody or other soon after the General Election in 2019. It may have been with one of my favourite polemicists/commentators Brendan O'Neill, but I can't swear to this.
Anyway, the question to Jon Lansman was elegantly put: 'Tell me Jon, haven't the working classes been a constant source of disappointment to you and Momentum?'. No answer from Mr Lansman.
This, for me, encapsulated the massive shift of the Labour Party away from its origins, heartland, and values and its change to being simply an election winning machine.
A look at how this has worked for the Democrats in the US might be a good idea. It was good for quite a while.
Things are changing, and have changed already, around the rest of Europe as well as the US. Pendulums swing, and they ain't swinging much to the left anywhere these days.
If the right-wing politicos in the UK don’t capitalise on this and get some coherent, unified, strategy and message across to the voters the lost opportunity will cost everybody in the country. My bet is that Sir Turnalot will soon work out just how big his client vote is, and how he can best engineer a re-election while the right is so fragmented. He’s as calculating as Gordon Brown, and we shouldn’t forget that Gordon Brown came within an ace of winning in 2010. There are times that I wish he had won and that we’d have passed him and Cameron out of our political system before now….