Kmflett's Blog

According to Simon Kuper (Financial Times 30th May 2026) who lives in Paris but lived as young man on the W7 bus route (Muswell Hill to Finsbury Park) PSG may represent Paris but Arsenal (where he attended games at the old Highbury ground) does not represent London. Kuper clearly has not read Labour in the Great City (New Left Review) where he opines on how working class London and its distinct areas were focused on football teams, West Ham, Spurs etc. Arsenal were an exception moving from south to north London.. Since then(1920s) travel around London has got a lot easier (if certainly not quicker in many cases- the point that any journey in London takes an hour still holds)

My social media thoughts below

Since I live in London N17 I’m a lifelong Spurs fan but as a socialist while I support loyalty to a team I deplore tribalism. Travelling around London today, north & south (I was speaking in Battersea)I saw people (mostly men tbh) wearing Arsenal shirts & they were as diverse as London itself. Good.

Beard Liberation Front

May 30th

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that Arsenal men’s manager Mikel Arteta  ‘Stubble Supremo’ Award given after Arsenal won the Premier League found himself shaved by the Beard Power of PSG manager Louis Enrique in the Champions League Final on May 30^th.

The campaigners say that while Arteta consistently fails the Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western test where stubble becomes a proto-beard there is no question that he has finally calibrated his stubble match by match to meet the requirements of the moment.

However Louis Enrique has developed and perfected the art of transforming his stubble into a slight but perfectly styled beard. This proved decisive on Saturday night

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we have perhaps been guilty of not taking stubble seriously enough, and Mikel Arteta has reminded us that stubble is a perpetual work in progress. He fully deserves his Stubble Supremo Award. However he met his match in Louis Enrique who has moved the stubble school of football management to the next level with a perfectly styled beard for Champions League Final conditions.

I was sad to see that Marion Miliband died aged 91 on 27th May.

The partner of the late Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband and mother of David and Ed Miliband.

She was well known as an activist in her own right from CND to Jews For Justice for Palestinians

There are numerous references to her in Tony Benn’s Diaries. Below is an edited passage from 10th December 2000

Hilary picked me up and we went to Marion Miliband’s for dinner with David and Edward Miliband. David is still at Number 10 and Edward is at Number 11 (Downing St)… We had a very amusing dinner. I was keen not to be provocative in anyway. The boys live entirely in the world of the Prime Ministers advisors (Tony Blair)…I had this terrible cold and I’ve got a blood shot eye which makes me look utterly grotesque and Marion insisted on putting a cold teabag on my eyelid.

Marion Kozak – Wikipedia

Picture & report @MrBenSellers on Twitter

There is not much good news around at the moment so I was pleased to see a report that Durham Pride today showed a significantly increased attendance after Durham’s Reform Council withdrew funding.

Instead funding was received from numbers of trade unions, include the Durham Miners, and community groups.

As Ben Sellers notes Reforms gesture and culture war politics is a dead end.

Not only is Nigel Farage avoiding public questioning he has not voted in the Commons since March 2026. He is well paid as an MP to do just that, tho admittedly not £5m..

Last orders for the Business University? From Warwick 1970 to 2026 redundancies & financial crisis

Hardly a week goes by without news of redundancies at a University and reports of financial crisis.

The UCU has called for Government action given that thousands of jobs and the education of many students is at risk

It reflects that latest stage of the Business University- a degree factory, where profit rather than learning is the bottom line.

I exist only on the margins of academia as the long-time convenor of the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London School of Advanced Study. Despite the fact that the Government goes on constantly about history, there isn’t much profit to be made out of studying it. The IHR in this context does a great job as the centre of UK research history.

As a socialist historian the current story reminds of a long history. It goes back to Warwick University in the late 1960s. At that point the late socialist historian E P Thompson held a senior  post there (not as a Professor- he hated them). When students discovered the links between the University and the local motor industry- which was really running the place- he collaborated with students to publish Warwick University Ltd. It was an expose of the Business University at its beginning and its only gone downhill, learning, research and study wise, since.

The 2024 General Election posed the question of whether a Labour Government might promote the labour’s movement’s long association with the quest for learning and knowledge. After all Keir Starmer has made much of his time at Leeds University.

I think perhaps the organised strength of the UCU provides a better hope for the future. 15,000 jobs were cut in higher education last year. UCU conference this week heard calls for co-ordinated strike action against compulsory redundancies

The latest Government survey of union membership which has been issued since 1892 shows an increase of 192,000 in 2025 to 6.6m. Its a welcome if modest move in the right direction with the hope that the Employment Relations Act, despite some issues, will allow unions to organise to get more members.

This doesnt happen by magic. It requires sustained grassroots work by union members and activists to promote union membership and recruit their colleagues.

Interestingly in an area which has long been a concern union membership in the private sector increased by 76,000.

While the overall increase saw more men than women join a union last year in fact there are 3.7m women in membership compared to 2.9m men. Trade unionists and their wives anyone?

Of course union membership is a basic if important statistic. It depends on what benefits it brings in terms of improvements in wages and conditions and actually, despite what Reform and the Tories think, how much it improves workplace relations.

That said there remain bad employers and the more union members there are, the more effective industrial action will be to counter poor workplace practices.

Trade union membership, UK, 1995 to 2025: statistical bulletin – GOV.UK

Of course brewery closures (and some openings btw) are far too common in what are hard times for hospitality.

Things could be done such as VAT reductions and sorting out access to market for independent brewers but in the meantime the crisis continues.

The news that Tottenham’s Redemption Brewery has entered administration feels personal. It was one of the first of the new wave of craft/indy brewers to open in London in 2010. I marked my 60th birthday at its taproom near Spurs.

The administrators are looking for a buyer (as is normal) and trading continues meanwhile (also normal) but it can be reflected that it wasn’t the excellence of the beers that was the issue here, but a system where Big Beer calls the shots and the genuinely independent community focused brewers lose out.

The move has provided quite a bit of media publicity, much of it AI generated. Redemption was the first brewery in Tottenham for 100 years. It is not 100 years old. It started in 2010 (as above). It has also provided much comment on Government loading costs on to hospitality without a great deal of mitigation. While there is some truth in this, and the Government could do more, there are also agendas running, and not ones that would do much if anything to help small brewers or those who enjoy drinking what they brew.

The Government could act to regulate the beer industry (something |Margaret Thatcher did with mixed results. Gordon Brown also did it, with measures to help small brewers, with better results, which the Tories later partially over turned. Heyho…)

Meanwhile Redemption Big Chief a 5.5% IPA is on the current Wetherspoons seasonal guest list. It appears to be widely available in Spoons pubs, though such is the excellence of the beer, rarely for very long.

Family-owned Tottenham brewer falls into administration as industry pressures mount

Back in the day the front cover most coveted was Rolling Stone but perhaps on 2026 James Watt will be content with the cover of the FT (23rd May 2026) for his mooted Second Best beer adventure.

The FT being one of the few papers that still does journalism notes that Watt plans canned beer project with a couple of pubs

Since the report Watt has returned to Insta and denied reports that the as yet not existing beer would be contract brewed in Germany and solicited thoughts on what beer styles should be made.

The offer for Equity for Punks shareholders to become founders of Second Best (buyer beware etc) seems to be time limited on the Second Best website.

One suspects that Tilray while happy that they got Brewdog for a knockdown price out of administration may also have regrets that they did not pursue an earlier reported buy-out deal which might have tied Watt to not attempting to dump on new Brewdog’s parade for a while

Tony Blair on Benefit Cuts 1997-2026

In his latest rare intervention into British politics Tony Blair has returned to one of his favourite themes, benefit cuts

After the Labour landslide in May 1997 there was a ‘virility’ test over lone parent benefit cuts.

Tony Benn, who was one of 47 MPs who voted against, recorded events in the entries for December 1997 in his diary.

He noted: I spoke for four minutes only. I said I was against the Bill and gave the reasons why and said I intended to vote against the third reading… I was angry at the way the Government had behaved 10th December.

On 12th December after facing angry constituents Benn recorded ‘there is no doubt this has been Blair’s biggest mistake so far’

On 17th December there was a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party addressed by Blair. Again Benn recorded what Blair said. This included the line, ‘there are choices to be made. It is a test of our nerve. The welfare state has got to be reformed’.

The 47 MPs who voted against changes on 10th December comprised left Labour MPs and Liberal Democrats (in their pre-austerity phase). Beyond underlining on 17th December what his project was, Blair felt secure enough to take no action. Starmer with a similar majority took a different view on benefit cuts, later reversed..