Kmflett's Blog

Psephology, Ephology & the 24 hour news society

South-West trains became the first to be re-nationalised on 25^th May. Media and social media commentary noted a rail replacement bus service. Indeed. Change takes time. SW Trains may never morph from a privateering company into an efficient public service but if it does it won’t happen overnight. It will involve people, usually known as workers, doing things. Any number of social media posts won’t change that.

The same 24 hour news society can be found in wider politics.

Labour is doing badly in the polls. In my view it would do better if it reversed its Great Moving Right Show. This post is not about that.

The Guardian has published a summary of various polls looking at various ways in which Labour is doing badly 10 months after the Election

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/may/25/the-charts-that-show-just-how-worried-labour-should-be-about-the-polls?CMP=share_btn_url

Most articles do eventually note that the next Election could be 4 years off (it could be sooner but Labour has a massive Commons majority)

As the North London Substacker Sam Freedman has noted

we’re a long way from the next election. At this point in the last election cycle Boris Johnson looked invincible and most commentators thought Keir Starmer was one by-election loss away from resigning.

What many polls are doing is not to report opinion but to try and shape it. Currently that means promoting Farage because that gets them publicity.

As E P Thompson noted as far back as 1959

A psephologist is a man employed by the mass media to research into what people think the mass media has told them to think. An ephologist is a man employed by the ‘Observer’ or BBC to interpret the results of psephology and who makes an ephing good thing out of it

New Reasoner, Autumn 1959

The Guardian piece does conclude with a quote from veteran psephologist John Curtice who understands that whatever might be wished the world does not (except very occasionally) run at the speed of a 24 hour news cycle. There is the matter of history

Ambridge Socialist

25^th May

Of Grey Gables & Dating Apps, but still no Magic Money Tree

The hunt for Peggy’s Magic Money tree continues but very much in the background this week.

Rather Oliver has re-appeared at Grey Gables (after 203 episodes according to Simon Pemberton on Academic Archers) and a new manager, Dane, has also appeared (with apols to Archers Anarchists, the actor who doubles as Dane is starting his career & being given a leg up by the BBC).

Ed & Emma got stuck in the Grey Gables lift on Friday, possibly the only one in Ambridge.

Suffice to say chaos rules at Grey Gables as usual, although it may not be quite at the level of Fawlty Towers

Fish

Meanwhile for reasons unknown Helen is looking for a new partner via a dating app. Apparently numerous men with fish have appeared but also Martyn Gibson whose previous partner has sensibly ditched him in favour of the gardener (see D H Lawrence).

Angela

Meanwhile in the Bull another new actor Naomi has asked Daveed Archer, who was filling in behind the bar, for Angela. No doubt he thought this was a vegan activist but fortunately Lilian was able to intervene and sort matters out. Full marks to the Archers for featuring this. The male pest was called Darren btw

Money Tree

Lilian is grieving for Peggy but in reality it must be suspected for the lack so far of an inheritance. She is wondering if leaving Ambridge might help. Does the Rovers Return or the Queen Vic beckon…

How Tory Democracy Works. Failed MP Jonathan Gullis appointed a town Mayor

Jonathan Gullis lost his Parliamentary seat in July 2024 and does not seem to have got full-time employment since. He has set himself as a consultancy- Gullis Ltd.

In January 2025 he was co-opted to Kidsgrove Town Council to fill a vacancy. On May 23^rd he was appointed Mayor. In neither case has he faced electors which is perhaps just as well.

The Town Council has limited responsibilities, including, for example, allotments (which whether Gullis realises it or not are often a contentious issue)

Former Conservative MP Jonathan Gullis named town mayor – Stoke-on-Trent Live

Carrie Johnson Insta

Carrie & Boris Johnson’s latest baby has been named. No Latin & it’s not called Nigella

The lives of Boris Johnson’s children are of no public interest, unless they themselves decide to make it so, but their names as decided, one hopes between Johnson and his partner of the moment, have some passing note.

Sonia Purnell’s biography of Johnson, Just Boris, reports that he wanted to call one of his children with his ex-wife Marina Wheeler, Lettice. It is as Laeticia a Latin name used in Medieval English, meaning joy, the modern translation of which is either Lettice or perhaps Letitia*. Ms Wheeler’s preference won-out and the baby was named Lara.

Other children with Marina Wheeler were called Milo, Cassia Peaches and Theodore Apollo.

He also had a child with Helen Macintyre in 2009 called Stephanie. This was revealed by Stanley Johnson in 2020.

His first baby with Carrie Symonds was called Wilfred, Old English, which seems like a modest step forward from the Latin. Wilfrid (634-709) was an Anglo-Saxon Saint and Bishop of York. The name fell into disuse but was revived from the nineteenth century on having nowadays perhaps an association with Victoriana.

Carrie’s second baby- a girl saw both Margaret and Allegra swerved and the baby was called Romy Iris Charlotte, its seems relatively restrained by Johnsonian standards.

Carrie’s third baby and named Frank Alfred Odysseus. That Odysseus as in Trojan Horse, Illiad etc. Odysseus is usually depicted with a full organic beard

It has been announced that Carrie gave birth to a fourth baby at UCLH on 21s May. It Boris Johnson’s ninth (at least) child and has been named Poppy Eliza Josephine. With no Latin and the temptation to use Nigella swerved, it may be that Johnson is losing his touch (on naming, not babies that is)

*thanks to Peter Lucas for clarification here

Bob Dylan at 85: when did he first sell-out?

Bob Dylan is 85 on 24^th May

My late father was a fan so I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan since the 1960s. You can’t look back over Dylan’s career without mentioning what many saw and see as his various ‘sell-outs’. A hardcore regarded the signing of a record deal with CBS in 1962 as the start of a slippery slope. His switch to electric guitar- famously at the Manchester Free Trade Hall(now a Radisson hotel) concert in 1966- remains controversial.

However I think Ralph McTell’s 1972 Zimmerman Blues still sums matters up. Dylan moved from a musician who was part of a protest movement that wanted to challenge and change the world as it was to a someone who sang protest songs about it. That’s not the same thing.

There have of course been later sell-outs. He appears to have first started doing TV ads around 2004 and as recently as December 2020 he sold his entire back catalogue to Universal.

That’s not to say that the music doesn’t remain interesting and that his early years are now an impressive part of social history but as he sang in 2000 ‘I used to care, but things have changed’.

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has raised concerns about the beard and mullet combo that England cricket captain Ben Stokes is sporting at the Trent Bridge Test Match against Zimbabwe.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, of course one of our founding principles is that people should be able to dress and appear as they want. However there are concerns that Ben Stokes beard and mullet combo is not ideal aerodynamically for bowling. The mullet and the beard may work against each other

Seminar Monday 2nd June 2025

Recording of seminar: https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/r314vuCqiGRCezS5C1Fz3HFxWuNc8j4mti3dHZr84CCYb8cWMcAwIKBYlpezZw23.1wrEXKu97FfakN6h

Tony Collins talked about his new book which re-examines the rich and complex roots of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Using a range of original sources, he investigated how the young CPGB was shaped by the experiences of the Social Democratic Federation, the Socialist Labour Party and the Workers’ Socialist Federation during the years of war, intense class struggle, and the rise of Labourism before 1920. Rather than being an imposition from Moscow, he argued that the CPGB was an organic development of the British left, something that was both its strength and its weakness.’

The seminar is organised by the Socialist History Seminar at the IHR and the London Socialist Historians Group. Contact Keith Flett @keithbeard.bsky.social

The Office For National Statistics have released the annual figures for union membership.

They don’t make particularly happy reading for those like myself who are union activists but they don’t make hugely unhappy reading either.

The level of union membership has declined a little bit with increases in the public sector and decreases in the private sector. The latter needs qualifying (which the ONS does not). Most very large private sector employers are unionised. In the SME sector its a very different picture

Further union density has declined a bit, partly due to decreasing membership but mostly due to larger numbers in the workforce. You might have missed this given the media focus on those unable to work and on benefits largely because market capitalism is an exploitative system that makes some people ill.

There is a lot of interest as usual in the ONS figures (and I’ll post further).

However historical context is important. Union membership boomed in the years of the Great Unrest (1911) to the General Strike (1926) declined during the 1930s slump but then recovered to a peak in the early 1970s a second period of huge industrial militancy. After that with privatisations, the Thatcherite move away from industry to finance and the defeat of key disputes such as the miners (1984/5) and printers (1986) it has been in decline again.

Two ONS paras are worth initial comment. Firstly union members are more likely to have degrees- a reflection of public sector jobs and union density but also, as the right-wing media remind us- lots more people now have degrees than they had even just several decades ago.

Secondly union membership is higher where stable employment patterns exist and less so where they don’t- think zero-hours etc.

The Employment Relations Bill may well help, but it will only really work with union organisation at the grassroots. Not too many people join a union unless a fellow worker or rep asks them

Close to two-thirds (64%) of employee union members have a degree or equivalent or other higher education qualification compared to 51% of non-union employees and 53% of all employees.

Over 4 in 10 (43%) of employees who were trade union members had been with their current employer for 10 years or more, compared to under a quarter (23%) of non-union member employees.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/trade-union-statistics-2024/trade-union-membership-uk-1995-to-2024-statistical-bulletin

Whitsun & John Barleycorn

The Late Spring Bank Holiday, which is fixed as the last Monday in May sometimes coincides with the date of Whitsun and in 2026. Whitsun is on May 24th

However this need not concern us too much because historically people didn’t bother too much either.

I’ve been looking at the late Alun Howkins History Workshop Pamphlet (1972) on Whitsun in Nineteenth Century Oxfordshire. The 80 page Pamphlet (which can be downloaded for free with a little Googling) is a classic exposition of the research methods of the early History Workshop. Howkins was born in Bicester and was at Ruskin College in Oxford which until recently had a student body of trade union focused people. The pamphlet is a rich mixture of quotations from original documents and some oral history.

Howkins makes the point in the introduction that in the nineteenth century and earlier the celebration of Whitsun (and it definitely was a celebration) was often mixed up with both Easter and May Day.

All were focused on the end of winter, and the cold, and the return of warmth and growth of seeds planted many months earlier.

Howkins notes that one of the oldest traditional songs John Barleycorn captures this. While it is obviously about drinking its also about the resilience of barleycorn returning each Spring despite efforts to stop it from happening either natural or man made.

There were three men came out of the West,
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn must die.

They’ve ploughed, they’ve sewn, they’ve harrowed him in,
Threw clods at Barley’s head,
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn was dead.

They’ve let him lie for a very long time,
Till the rains from heaven did fall,
And little Sir John sprung up his head,
And so amazed them all.

They’ve let him stand till midsummer’s day,
Till he looked both pale and worn,
And little Sir John’s grown a long, long beard,
And so become a man.

They’ve hired men with the scythes so sharp,
To cut him off at the knee,
They’ve rolled him and tied him by the waist,
Servin’ him most barbarously.

They’ve hired men with the sharp pitchforks,
Who pricked him to the heart,
And the loader he has served him worse than that,
For he’s bound him to the cart

They’ve wheeled him around and around the field,
Till they came unto a barn,
And there they made a solemn oath,
On poor John Barleycorn.

They’ve hired men with the crab-tree sticks,
To cut him skin from bone,
And the miller he has served him worse than that,
For he’s ground him between two stones.

And little Sir John and the nut-brown bowl,
And he’s brandy in the glass
And little Sir John and the nut-brown bowl,
Proved the strongest man at last.

The huntsman, he can’t hunt the fox,
Nor so loudly to blow his horn,
And the tinker he can’t mend kettle nor pots,
Without a little Barleycorn

There can’t be many, even amongst Reform supporters, who think anything about Nigel Farage is straightforward. What you see is most definitely not what you get.

After Farage was criticised for not holding Constituency Surgeries in Clacton (he still hasnt) he made some play of the ‘fact’ that he had bought a house in the area. In fact as the Guardian has revealed the house was in fact bought by his partner.

The paper also reports his other UK properties

Farage already has a property worth about £1m in the village of Downe in Kent, as well as two houses in Lydd-on Sea in the same county, which are owned through his company, Thorn in the Side. He also has property in Tandridge in Surrey.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/may/23/nigel-farage-clacton-home-bought-girlfriend-property?CMP=share_btn_url