• WAY back in the 1940s I was brought up on a farm and lived with the pigs in their sty.

I chewed old leather boots to stave off hunger. I had ambition and the pigs, being intelligent creatures, knew this and encouraged me to go to university.

I met other ambitious, deprived, teenagers from similar backgrounds but with the drive to succeed.

It was there I became acquainted with a Miss Beales and her pal Miss Sunak who, I recall, had an ambition to start a chemist shop. These young women became mothers and had ambitions for their sons.

Actually none of this is true, but what the… it’s de rigueur now.

I was intrigued by Cllr Danny Beales’s political claim to be defined by that little understood phenomenon, pragmatic socialism; now there’s a thing! Precisely what sort of thing this is has unfortunately escaped me.

Cllr Beales is in favour of the gig economy, that is, modern slavery, as witnessed when he supported Swiss Cottage’s Deliveroo against a member of the public’s detailed, recorded, democratically-acquired, extensively-evidenced, account of its unsafe practice across five lanes of traffic on the Finchley Road.

He supports estate regeneration, heavily critiqued by Paul Watt, Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London, 2021, Policy Press.

Stuart Hodkinson, Leeds university, states, “[estate regeneration] is a cautionary tale of how public housing and its contribution to London’s working-class lives was destroyed by venal politicians on behalf of real-estate lobby”.

Clearly a term frequently used by politicians, pragmatic socialism is 90 per cent vicious, 10 per cent elastic. Wash at temp cold and don’t even attempt to iron out the obfuscation.

ELAINE CHAMBERS, NW3