The Times Editorial on the Tolpuddle Martyrs (21st March 1834) makes interesting reading. It said (in part):
The offence of swearing agricultural labourers, and binding them to the observance of an illegal oath, by ceremonial partaking of mingled folly, superstition and ferocity was brought home to the accused and the conviction was followed by a sentence of transportation for seven years against the whole of them, six in number. This sentence as regards the poor deluded men who are the objects of it seems to us too severe, but it may be useful if spreads alarm among those more powerful and acute disturbers of the town populations throughout England who combine in spite of high wages and whose combinations are as destructive to honest workmen as they are to all but the richest masters.
Open Golf at Royal Portrush, Trump fan Bryson DeChambeau’s 3rd shot at hole 4. His baseball swing is no match for the rough & he misses the ball. Apologies for the Twitter clip but its the medium for Trump fans..
Labour’s Persistent Rebels: the cases of Nye Bevan & Michael Foot. A history of expulsion & losing the Whip
Keir Starmer has suspended four Labour MPs for being ‘persistent rebels.
Labour PMs in recent times don’t tend to have much sense of the history of their own party but the cases of two of the best known figures from the left suggest that persistent rebels have been essential to the Labour Party.
Nye Bevan was expelled from the Labour Party between March 1939 and November 1939 for supporting, in effect, a popular front of the left including the Communist Party against fascism. During the war Bevan led opposition to the Wartime Coalition earning praise from Churchill who called him a ‘squalid nuisance’.
Out of Office again after the 1951 Election, Bevan led the Labour left- the Bevanites. In March 1955 he led 57 MPs to abstain on the testing of a hydrogen bomb. Labour MPs voted 141-113 to suspend the whip although it was restored after a month.
After Bevan’s death Michael Foot became the MP for his Welsh Constituency. He lost the Whip in March 1961 for opposing AirForce estimates. It was not restored until Harold Wilson became leader in 1963.
Really Useful Knowledge: how Starmer trumped a Tory crisis
I’m hardly a fan of Alastair Campbell but he clearly did run an efficient news management operation in the early New Labour period. By contrast its unclear who is running Starmer’s operation.
The Telegraph, not noted in recent times for its devotion to news rather than views has the story about Tory Cabinet infighting in 2023 over Afghans who worked for the UK and who had a right to expect protection when the Taliban took over.
This story is not currently leading the news because Starmer decided it was a good idea to remove the Whip from four ‘persistent rebel’ MPs and therefore trumped, as it were, the headlines.
Starmer is an Arsenal fan so he will know well how the team regularly manage to rescue draws and defeats from what appear to be winning positions.
Telegraph story (Gordon Rayner)
Inside the Cabinet Office briefing room, or Cobra for short, defence minister James Heappey was trying and failing to persuade the country’s most senior ministers to back a secret airlift of thousands of Afghans to the UK.
An impassioned Mr Heappey, who had fought in Afghanistan as an Army officer, insisted that Afghan soldiers’ lives had been put in danger by a data leak of 18,900 names, and he needed the help of other government departments to sort out the mess.
His colleagues were unmoved. Not only did they make it clear it was his problem, they also expressed grave reservations about the scheme, which quickly turned into a full-blown row in the summer of 2023.
Accusations of “total incompetence” by the Ministry of Defence would later be made, as well as claims that Mr Heappey was using “emotional blackmail” on his colleagues.
Their objections were manifold: quite apart from the staggering cost of the scheme, which could run into billions, there were legitimate concerns about national security and logistics.
Among those who raised objections were Sir James Cleverly, who was foreign secretary and then home secretary; Suella Braverman, who preceded Sir James in the Home Office; Michael Gove, the communities secretary, and Laura Trott, the chief secretary to the Treasury, it is understood.
Yet the secret scheme, codenamed Operation Rubific, went ahead, with no scrutiny from the public, Parliament or the media, thanks to a super-injunction that not only threatened imprisonment to anyone who uttered a word in public about what was going on, but also, until it was lifted on Tuesday, prevented any reporting of the arguments it caused in the Cabinet.
The Open Golf at Royal Portrush is underway. Golf is a more working class sport in Ireland and Scotland than England but that still didn’t impress the miners leader & Communist Mick McGahey who died in 1999.
I can testify that golf is seen as a people’s game by bosses, even when the people are not always so sure. In the 1980s the union which I’m a long standing activist in had a Field Office in Victoria St, Central London. The building was a series of offices. It was not uncommon to bump into Denis Thatcher at lunchtime carrying his golf clubs and off to play a round well out of sight of Margaret Thatcher at No.10
In his Chesterfield constituency on 7th July 1984 at the height of the miners strike Tony Benn met miners leader Peter Heathfield. Heathfield told Benn about a recent negotiating meeting with Coal Board boss Ian MacGregor. MacGregor had invited fellow union leader Mick McGahey for a game of golf. McGahey had responded ‘I’ve never played golf in my life, it’s a total waste of time
King Charles met the Indian Mens and Womens cricket teams at Clarence House on Tuesday. No doubt the King saw it in a Commonwealth framework, although whether the Indian cricketers did is not reported.
In fact the event appears to have been little reported. The report I found was by the PA although Test Match Special did mention it was happening.
King Charles perspective on the Indian men’s performance at Lords is reported as:
Charles sympathised with the Indian team when he hosted them at his Clarence House
There is no news yet of a reaction from cricket tragic Farage but the Indian women’s team have been doing much better than the men. It was at least positive for both women and men to appear together
Another way to approach this is to look at the online profiles of leading political figures and parties. The Guardian has found that Reform gets fourteen times more engagement per post on TikTok than any of the other main political parties. Nigel Farage has as many followers on TikTok as all other MPs combined. (Less than a quarter of Labour MPs and only a handful of Tory MPs have TikTok accounts, in part due to the restriction on using the app on official devices.) The left isn’t completely out of the picture, but it is its anti-establishment figures who have gained a foothold: Zarah Sultana is the second most followed MP and Jeremy Corbyn the third, both of whom were recently ejected from the Labour Party. The fact that TikTok is a platform dominated by the young, and the young still tend to lean left in the UK (relative to their parents and grandparents) ought to make it tricky territory for Farage. Conversely, to the extent that Faragism is developing a youth wing, TikTok is likely to be playing a significant role in that.
William Davies London Review f Books 26th June 2025
The Labour Church & persistent rebels. From Nye Bevan and Michael Foot on
Historically political defections in Britain have tended to go from left to right. Beyond individual renegades there are two significant markers, Ramsay MacDonald’s decision to split Labour and form a National Government in 1931 and the departure of right-wing Labour MPs to the SDP in the early 1980s.
The 1930s also offered two further examples of significant splits. The first was Oswald Mosley’s New Party which led to fascism. The second was the ILP which tried to re-create an independent socialist presence outside of Labour but was unable to do so
Keir Starmer has reversed the process. Seven MPs were suspended in 2024 for voting against a Welfare issue, they wanted the two child benefit cap scrapped. Four have subsequently regained the Whip, two remain suspended and one Zarah Sultana has quit Labour with plans to form a new left grouping. On July 16th Starmer suspended four more Labour MPs for what was described in the media as being ‘persistent rebels’ including voting against the more recent Welfare Reform Bill. The term well describes Nye Bevan who was suspended from Labour in the late 1930s and came close again in the 1950s as well as the MP who succeeded him Michael Foot who was suspended in the early 1960s
When the Labour Representation Committee was formed in 1900 it certainly was a broad church. The plan was to secure Parliamentary representation for working class interests. It was composed of trade union officers- many of whom had supported the Liberals, the ethical socialists of the ILP, the Marxists of the SDF and the Fabians. The SDF mostly dropped out and by 1918 the Sidney and Beatrice Webb had drawn up a Labour Party constitution that allowed for individual membership and local party organisation.
However after the formation of the Communist Party in 1920 the question of how broad Labour was remained open. While applications from the CPGB to join Labour were rebuffed there were on occasions joint Labour and Communist candidates at elections. Saklatvala was elected as an MP for Battersea on this basis in 1922. However by the late 1920s the possibility of Communists being part of a Labour Broad Church was closed off.
The decades that followed saw the policing of the boundaries of Labour to the left. In the late 1930s Nye Bevan and Stafford Cripps were temporarily excluded for pursuing a united front against fascism. In the early 1960s Michael Foot lost the Labour Whip on the issue of nuclear disarmanent.
In recent decades the boundaries of the Broad Church have continued to be flexible and disputed. A new left around Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and others built considerable influence and were tolerated by New Labour, but not in the main by Starmer who has been constructing an ever narrower church. He told the Observer on 6th May 2024 that everyone was welcome, but self-evidently only if they are singing from precisely the same hymn sheet as Starmer himself.
This poses a long considered alternative question. If the Labour Broad Church is not that broad can another one be built. While this applies to a wider socialist movement, the focus has often been on Parliamentary success for candidates of a socialist and left wing persuasion.
WIllie Gallacher was Communist MP for West Fife between 1935 and 1950. Decades later George Galloway, himself excluded from Labour, was elected as a Respect MP for Bethnal Green in 2005. Caroline Lucas has sat as the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion from 2010 to 2024 and there are now four Green MPs and a number of independents including Jeremy Corbyn.
The benchmark for those standing in an election to the left of Labour has historically been not just a hope of electoral success but that the process of being a candidate helps to build the wider movement. From time to time the question becomes whether that might see an alternative to the Labour Party appear.
It is certainly a question that Keir Starmer’s Great Moving Right Show provokes, and an answer appears to be making progress
I really like the prime minister a lot, even though he’s a liberal.
Donald Trump interviewed by the BBC 15th July 2025
Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind for socialists of a certain age is the late, a US musician Phil Ochs song ‘Love Me I’m a Liberal (and that’s why I’m turning you in) that is actually probably close to Trump’s meaning. Of course neither the BBC or Trump have heard of Ochs.
Trump does not mean that Starmer is either a liberal in the British sense (economically he likely is, socially he is not) or a Liberal Democrat. Blair has long argued for a return to the progressive liberal/labour politics of the late nineteenth century. The caveat here is that Blair knows nothing about labour history, this is my construction on his politics. Starmer however is not on that page. He does know something of labour history from his 1980s period, but chooses to try and forget about it.
Trump’s use of the word ‘liberal’ in the US sense means a moderate Democrat. It is an insult but as insults go he has much worse. He recently called the Democratic contender for New York Zohran Mamdani a ‘communist’ which he certainly is not, unfortunately. Trump will also use terms such as antifa and anarchist (and rarely Marxist) which covers a range of views, at least some of which might be called liberal in the UK but is not Trump’s meaning here.
