After Angela Rayner’s sacking, the history of the labour movement & ‘the provinces’
I don’t hold a brief for Angela Rayner who is certainly not my kind of socialist (i.e. an extra-Parliamentary one). Even so her sacking by Keir Starmer, who has developed quite a reputation for sacking people, is worthy of note.
Rayner after all comes from the north-west of England. Keir Starmer by contrast is definitively a man of the Metropolis and its environs. Very much a head office type one might say.
In that context its worth recalling these passages from E P Thompson’s Homage to Tom Maguire, a Leeds socialist and trade unionist who died too young and helped to found the Independent Labour Party
Provincial events are seen as shadowy incidents or unaccountable spontaneous upheavals on the periphery of the national scene, which the London wire pullers try to cope with and put in their correct historical pattern. And provincial leaders are commonly denied full historical citizenship; if mentioned at all, they are generally credited with various worthy second-class abilities..
…the ILP grew from the bottom up: its birthplaces were in those shadowy parts known as ‘the provinces’
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