Kmflett's Blog

It’s one of those stories that has something of the flavour of an urban, or perhaps, rural myth and the likelihood that it is true enough for the TUC to post on social media.

JD Vance his family and a large number of security operatives stayed in the Oxfordshire location of Charlbury for a few days earlier this week. He managed a visit to a farm shop, a BBQ with guests co-ordinated by George Osborne and, reportedly, (this story being less likely than the one I’m posting here) breakfast with Farage.

One thing he did not do was to eat at the Award winning local Charlbury pub, The Bull. Noted for excellent food and good beer it is suggested that an attempt by Vance’s entourage to book was rebuffed because staff refused to work. That of course would be unofficial industrial action. Perhaps as likely and possibly in conjunction the owners of the pub realised that Vance eating there would not be great publicity for the venue. Kamala Harris reportedly at there in recent weeks, but until now this had received no publicity.

There is a long history of public figures of the right (and the left for that matter) being shunned by pubs and restaurants which perhaps provides a wider context.

Seven Dials in 2025

16^th August 1848. The Chartist plan for an insurrection in central London

Below are the two final meetings that took place before a Chartist attempt at insurrection in central London on 16^th August 1848

Monday 14 August. Orange Tree, Orange Street, Red Lion Square 

25 or 30 present. Allnutt, Bligh, Brewster, Cruikshank, Cuffay, Fay, Fleming, Ford, the two Granshaws, Gurney, Hayman, Mullins, Nash, Payne, Pearce, Ritchie, Scurrey (or Scurry), Simmonds, Warry, Davis, Powell.

Tuesday 15 August. Lord Denman, Great Suffolk Street. 

30 or 40 present. Allnutt, Brewster, Cruikshank, Cuffay, Donaldson, Dowling, Fay, Ferdinando, Fleming, the two Granshaws, Gurney, Lacey, Mullins, Page, Payne, Pedley, Ritchie, Simmonds, Davis, Powell.

William Cuffay was the black leader of London Chartism, Powell and Davis were police spies who alerted the police to what was planned.

The events of August 1848 were the culmination of a strategy that developed after the frustration of the mass Chartist protest for the vote on Kennington Common on 10^th April 1848. Most of the Chartist Executive including the left leader Ernest Jones had been jailed by August, leaving local leaders to pursue matters.

The plan for insurrection in London was well supported by Irish repealers and a range of radical trades. It was also meant to be part of a national English plan to seize power which had echoes for example in the north-west of England.

What was the plan?

Chartist forces were to gather in four locations:

Seven Dials in the West End

Strutton Ground in Westminster

Clerkenwell Green

Tower Hamlets

The strategy was to set fire to police stations and warehouses and in doing so to create chaos in central London that would allow Chartist forces to take control

It didn’t happen because the police were forewarned and moved in and arrested key figures including Cuffay. As David Goodway notes it was the last instance of a conspiratorial tradition which became supplanted by the mass democracy of the labour movement over time. Notably the Reform League protest for the vote in Hyde Park on 6^th May 1867 that was banned by the Government and troops mobilised to stop it, succeeded not by conspiracy but by open organisation and sheer weight of numbers.

The Magistrate who gave the order to send the Yeomanry in at Peterloo in Manchester in August 1819 was William Hulton (1787-1864).

In a review of books published to mark the 150th anniversary of Peterloo in 1969 EP Thompson noted that Hutton’s mother had a prize horse called ‘Church and King’ providing a flavour of what the family was like. He noted that when it came to events like Peterloo it was not so much that Hulton would lie about what took place (he did) but that he was simply not interested in what the ‘plebs’, those fighting for the vote, said or did.

Hulton left another legacy aside from Peterloo. As EP Thompson notes in 1832 the Reform Act, a result of Peterloo in 1819, saw the Tories lose South Lancashire. Hulton was one of those who met in a beer house in 1834 to form the South Lancashire Conservative Association dedicated to defending, like the family Horse, Church and King.

That organisation was one of the forerunners of the modern Tory Party.

No apology for Peterloo has ever been forthcoming from the Tory Party

Arrests & Prosecution of people protesting about genocide won’t stop the protests, any more than State action to stop freedom of the press in the 1820s did

On Saturday 9^th August the Met Police arrested 532 people for protesting largely under a Defend Our Juries basis for mentioning words about Palestine that Yvette Cooper the Home Secretary thinks should not be mentioned. Now despite warnings from a range of bodies including the EHRC not to proceed further until a legal challenge to the ban on Palestine Action is heard the DPP has authorised 60 prosecutions. The DPP has clearly never heard of the first law of holes and as with Cooper his future will be in doubt if the ban is not upheld.

High stakes but a familiar arrogance from a Government that has not listened on welfare cuts and arms sales to Israel.

It’s clear also except to Cooper who was not paying attention in history lessons that more protesters will step forward. There is a well-known precedent in British history.

Around the period of Peterloo in 1819 the (Tory) Government was determined to crack down on radical opinion and calls for democratic rights. Prosecutions for seditious libel were common and the taxes on knowledge(levied on newspapers) saw the rise of an unstamped, illegal press. Many who published it went to jail, but that didn’t stop publication.

One of the best known was the freethinker Richard Carlile. In the early 1820s he ran a radical bookshop in Fleet Street known as the Temple of Reason. Carlile was frequently jailed but he had an important principle: THE SHOP IN FLEET STREET WILL NOT BE CLOSED AS A MATTER OF COURSE’

It wasn’t. Before the Government gave in 150 volunteers, shopmen, printers, newsvendors, had been jailed and served over 200 years of imprisonment between them.

Whose were these people? E P Thompson noted in the Making of the English Working Class:

The men and women who came forward were, in nearly every case, entirely unknown to Carlile. They simply came out of London; or arrived on the coach from Lincolnshire, Dorset, Liverpool and Leeds. They came out of a culture.

Interestingly though Thompson was also clear that while those who broke the law and fought for press freedom were part of the rise of a radical working class movement, they themselves were not usually workers, with the power to organise and challenge capital at the point of production, but artisans.

However the reading culture they promoted and developed fed into the rising working class movement and was one of the motors for Chartism from the later 1830s.

Perhaps the protests on mentioning words that must not be mentioned won’t change the world but they might help create a movement that does

Farage, Reform Peers & the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925

The Times (15^th August) has a front page column where Nigel Farage (or his PR person, Farage hasn’t been spotted for a week) demands that some Reform Peers are appointed. Surely Rupert Murdoch isn’t after a Peerage, not least because he is above the current age limit(80 years old).

Farage and consistency are not things that go together and a quick Google will reveal that in the past few years Farage has called for the abolition of the Lords, a referendum on its future and so on.

Additionally there is at least one former Reform(Brexit Party) MEP in the Lords, ‘Lady’ Clare Fox of Living Marxism. Has Farage fallen out with her? Beyond that there are others in the Lords such as Kate Hoey and Dan Hannan whose views are essentially the same as Farage in most areas.

Further if Reform is as Farage claims entitled to some Peers so clearly are the Independent Group who have more MPs than Reform. They are no keener on the Lords than Farage once was but this is a matter of political principle.

While a word most commonly associated with Farage is grift he is clearly aware of the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925 and everything would be above board as it always is with Farage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honours_(Prevention_of_Abuses)_Act_1925

Liz Truss returns: the 2012 Olympics ceremony was run by an elite that hates Britain

With Reform’s summer offensive apparently taking a pub break Liz Truss has returned to fill the gap.

Speaking to yet another US right-wing media person Truss has decided that the key issue is the 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony:

‘The views expressed in the Olympics ceremony are not the views of the average Briton.

‘The problem is we have an elite that hates Britain, and they have done for some time.’

She claimed the following are all part of the problem:

NHS, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Shakespeare, Peter Pan, Jerusalem, Mary Poppins, Elgar, Pink Floyd, The Clash, James Bond and the Queen.

Of course she praised the 2012 Ceremony at the time but hindsight trumps all

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/politics/government/liz-truss-claims-elites-behind-2012-olympics-ceremony/ar-AA1Knr5N?ocid=BingNewsSerp

In Britain, Bagehot looks at the silver-haired radicals hauled off for supporting Palestine Action: “The spirit of ’68 is held by those who are now 68.” (The Economist 14th August 2025)

The graphic shows the Met Police’s figures (unlikely to be completely accurate) on the age range of those arrested at the Palestine protest in Parliament Square, Central London on 8th August. Another, larger protest, is planned for early September.

There is a flaw in the Economist’s argument. I am 68 but I’ve been protesting since my teenage years…but the specific flaw is that in 1968 I was not a teen but 12 years old. I lived in North London so no doubt picked up some of the revolutionary mood of that year but I wasnt really active until 1969/70 when I was a teen.

JD Vance is continuing his UK holiday (& he clearly does less damage when he is on holiday) & has now appeared in Ayrshire playing golf at Donald Trump’s Turnberry course. It costs £1,000 to play a round before 1pm but whether Trump bills Vance is not known.

What can be said is that finding a picture of the World’s leading golfer Donald Trump in a bunker is likely to end in failure. No doubt he would regard a golfer going in a bunker as a loser

Neither JD Vance or Nigel Farage are apparently available for the Strictly 2025 line up. However Essex pillow salesman and JD Vance fan Thomas Skinner is in the line-up. Skinner a self styled social media influencer is apparently well known for a catchphrase ‘Bosh’ (not perhaps a novel one) and a capacity to eat lead large breakfasts.

Skinner was guest at a gathering at JD Vance’s holiday sojourn in Oxfordshire on Monday evening. The gathering was organised by George Osborne, although what links Skinner has with him is unclear. Perhaps Osborne likes pillows, or large breakfasts..

Skinner is also known for his robust, hard right, views, and his appearance suggests a further attempt by the BBC to court the Reform curious section of the viewing public. Whether this group actually watches Strictly must be doubtful but presumably there is the capacity to vote for Skinner to stay on at the end of each episode..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Skinner_(businessman)

London Socialist Historians Group

Media Release

14^th August

Contact Dr Keith Flett @keithbeard.bsky.social

Historians raise concerns as History drops out of Top 5 most popular A Level Subjects

The London Socialist Historians Group, which convenes the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, has said there are concerns after history dropped out of the top 5 most popular subjects studied at A Level in 2025.

The numbers taking a history A Level declined by 5.5% with 44,717 students taking the exam down from 47,297. History which has had a steady fifth place in the A Level subjects ranking has now dropped down the table.

The historians say that while the rise in students taking other subjects in particular Sociology, may reflect different approaches to understanding how society works, in a world where history is the subject of never ending culture wars, it is of concern that less are studying it.

LSHG Convenor Dr Keith Flett said, of course taking an A Level is not the only way of learning about and studying history. However the A Level numbers do reflect a concerning drop in focus on what in 2025 is an increasingly important subject. Learning from and about our history has never been more important.