As Labour Conference started in Liverpool media headlines could be found exclaiming that Keir Starmer is the worst Prime Minister ever. As a socialist and a Spurs fan I’m no fan of Starmer but this simply underlines how badly served we are by a 24 hour clickbait news culture.
In fact the polls example only goes back to 1990. The first British PM, arguably, was Robert Walpole (1721-1742). Most PMs since have had their pros and cons but given Britain’s imperial history if we look at what they presided over outside of the UK (unless you’re a flag waver) the record will not be good.
Recently for example it can be said that Starmer has failed to act on genocide in Gaza, Blair backed an illegal war in Iraq, Thatcher went to war over the Falklands and so on.
However Starmer is nowhere near in the same league as the PM who I’d regard as the worst ever, Lord Liverpool who was in Office from 1812-1827. He was at No.10 on 16th August 1819 when peaceful protesters for the vote were cut down in Manchester in what history knows as the Peterloo Massacre. There is no historical evidence that he ordered it. There is some that he was aware of what was planned and was content to let matters take their course..
To be clear there is no evidence that Farage’s PFLs (Proper Fucking Lunches) include swans. This is a satirical image. Farage’s PFLs by contrast are genuine, the format:
Several pints of beer
Cigarettes
Meat based meal (chop of steak & red wine pudding)
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has praised the importance of Beard Power in golf after Irish golfer Shane Lowry’s beard won a decisive singles match on the final day of the 2025 Ryder Cup to see Europe retain the title.
In 2019 Lowry became the first golfer with a beard to win the UK Open Golf since 1882.
Until recently men’s golf was the most clean shaven of sports but in recent years an understanding of how follicles can enhance ball control by stimulating air currents has grown.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we congratulate Shane Lowry. Its a victory against Clean Shaven Trumpism
The Society of the Spectacle is a way of understanding market capitalist society developed by the Situationists and in particular the late Guy Debord.
Everything is seen as an advertising slogan, an image, a brand. The market rules.
Donald Trump is good at this. Partly it might be suspected he does know what he is doing and partly sometimes he does not.
The problem is that while in pursuing a Society of the Spectacle project Trump can be very effective in his main aim-promoting himself- what he says can often have significant real world consequences about which he cares little
Below are the (edited) original notes of a speech I gave at an event to mark the 150th anniversary of the First International at the Rivoli Ballroom Crofton Park on Sunday 28th September 2014. As usual I did not speak directly to the notes.
I suspect not many people will be remembering the 162nd anniversary of the First International which was founded at the St Martins Hall in central London on 28th September 1864
On the hundredth anniversary in 1964, whatever view we may take of it, the socialist countries of Eastern Europe still existed and the occasion was marked by the publication of the complete minutes of the International from that time.
Indeed so familiar was the matter to at least those on the left that a collection of radical and socialist writings from the 1860s, The Era of the Reform League, passed over the IWMA on the basis that the story was already well enough known to readers.
Not anymore.
So there is a job of recovery to be done by the left and by socialist historians in particular.
The International met on that late September day [a Sunday] in St Martins Hall on Long Acre. It was then a Music Hall and became a theatre. It is now a substantial office block and judging by the cramped desk layout and working conditions the inhabitants could well do with finding out what went on in their building 150 years ago.
The English labour movement during the Chartist period had developed a strong sense of international solidarity and London, then the pre-eminent capital of capitalism worldwide, had a relatively relaxed view about asylum, refugees and immigration.
So the basis for an international gathering existed in terms of personnel and precedent.
Marx was a relatively late addition to events, but he was sufficiently well known to the London trade unionists who were part of the core of the International to be invited to chair the opening session. He ended up too writing the still well-known opening address.
It might be argued that the address was the most significant thing to come out of the International. The ideas and formulations in it influenced a generation of the left. Even so Marx wrote it as a compromise document, something that different and opposing strands of thought represented in the International could live with.
Marx had great hopes for the impact of the International but with hindsight it is difficult to suggest they were vindicated.
The International certainly played an important role in the formation of the Reform League, which itself was central to the 1867 Reform Act. Unfortunately the extension of the franchise it allowed did not, as Engels complained, lead at the subsequent General Election to an increase in working-class MPs.
It did spark the formation of the Land and Labour League in 1869/70 but this did not become the new working class party to replace the Chartists that Marx had hoped for.
Gareth Stedman Jones writing in History Workshop Journal almost a generation ago now argued that while Marx was enthusiastic about the activity of the International Engels was not and thought he should be cracking on with more theory.
Well, not really. The International was very much a London affair. The organised labour movement and refugees from European despotisms were generally rather weaker elsewhere. Engels did gather together supporters of the International in Manchester, but there were not all that many.
All that said 28th September 1864 is part of our history and one that continues to have relevance 162 years on.
The pressure on Brian to become Farm Owner Emeritus is increasing. Ruari who knows about management (not particularly a good thing) but nothing about farming has decided he will be around to help. Adam’s views on this are not yet fully clear. Stella by contrast has decided to steer completely clear, depending perhaps on yet another offer from Brian to ‘ride off into the sunset’
George’s home coming
George is due to be released shortly and Amber’s plans to organise a large welcome home party remain contentious. If it was turned into a celebration of the Grundy’s Ambridge it might work better
Grace Archer was killed off by the BBC 70 years ago on 22nd September for trade union activity
It was 70 years on 22nd September since Grace Archer (Fairbrother) died in a fire as she tried to rescue horses from a barn fire. The unfortunate event, which took place on the same night as the launch of independent television, attracted 20 million listeners.
The reality of the demise of Grace Archer was revealed on a Radio 4 programme, Dead girls can tell no tales, on 19th September 2015.
The BBC had decided to kill off a leading character to coincide with the launch of ITV, but which one?
The actress Ysanne Churchman, who died aged 99 in 2024, was chosen and she was clear why:
It was “victimisation because I’d been to Equity to get my fees put right”. Churchman wanted the same pay as her male co-stars, and for actors to be in the union. The Archers creator Godfrey Baseley wanted her out.
Ambridge Socialist Editor Keith Flett said, 70 years on its time for the BBC to issue an official apology
Bartleby
Apparently Bartleby is on his last legs as it were. Joe Grundy will be concerned. George has been updated by Emma and Amber. He is also concerned. We are talking the Grundy Legacy Project
Before the Ryder Cup. Eric Hobsbawm on golf & class
As far as I can ascertain Eric Hobsbawm was not a golfer. He was however interested in golf as an indicator of class and gives a number of examples in the Age of Empire
Golf clubs were to play an equally important role in the (Anglo Saxon)masculine world of middle-class professional men and businessmen. The social potential of this game played on large, expensively constructed and maintained pieces of real estate by members of clubs designed to exclude socially and financially unacceptable outsiders struck the new middle classes like a sudden revelation
The late miners leader Mick McGahey described golf as a waste of time. At his election victory party in November 2024 Trump had as the guest of honour Bryson DeChambeau. He is a championship winning golfer, aside from being extremely annoying, which no doubt endears him to Trump.
The class divide is clear from a historical perspective too. Eric Hobsbawm noted in Labouring Men that in the late nineteenth century as the male working class was identifying itself by wearing a cap, the middle class turned to golf courses. Twenty-nine golf courses were laid out in Yorkshire between 1890-95. Before 1890 there had been just two.
At the UN on Tuesday Trump found himself on a stopped escalator and blamed all and sundry. It was his own staff that did it.
On Wednesday Reform owner Farage appeared on LBC and proceeded to promote Big Lies. Firstly that Eastern European migrants are eating swans (a protected species in the UK). The Royal Parks posted that this was a lie. Secondly that he wasn’t sure, repeating Trump’s lies, if paracetamol was safe.
Nathan Gill who was a UKIP and then Brexit Party MEP was briefly the leader of the Reform Ltd in Wales in 2021. He then stood down and has not been replaced. Reform will go into the 2026 Senedd Elections without a leader in Wales it seems.
This week Gill pleaded guilty to taking bribes from an Ukrainian pro-Russian politician while an MEP. The politician was sanctioned as a Russian agent by the US in 2022.
Gill is expected to receive a lengthy prison sentence.
Given the perpetual talk of Farage being pro Putin one might think this story would be front page news. Of course not. It has been reported by the BBC and can be found on the Welsh politics section of the BBC website.
Farage who was a UKIP MEP with Gill does not seem to have commented
E P Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class was first published as Pelican paperback (price 90p) on 27th September 1968. It remains in print 58 years later
The extract below is a good way of understanding Thompson’s approach to both history and politics. He looked not at fixed categories but ats relationships at specific times and contexts. The extract is from his 1965 essay Peculiarities of the English but it also appears as the conclusion to the 1968 Postscript of the paperback edition of The Making of the English Working Class.
Sociologists who have stopped the time-machine and, with a good deal of conceptual huffing and puffing, have gone down to the engine-room to look, tell us that nowhere at all have they been able to locate and classify a class. They can only find a multitude of people with different occupations, incomes, status-hierarchies, and the rest. Of course they are right, since class is not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works once it is set in motion – not this interest and that interest, but the friction of interests – the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise. Class is a social and cultural formation (often finding institutional expression) which cannot be defined abstractly, or in isolation, but only in terms of relationship with other classes; and, ultimately, the definition can only be made in the medium of time – that is, action and reaction, change and conflict. When we speak of a class we are thinking of a very loosely defined body of people who share the same congeries of interests, social experiences, traditions and value-system, who have a disposition to behave as a class, to define themselves in their actions and in their consciousness in relation to other groups of people in class ways. But class itself is not a thing, it is a happening.
