Jean-Luc Melenchon had lunch with the Financial Times (3rd May). He is the leader of the French left, perhaps broadly equivalent to Jeremy Corbyn (resolutely without a beard). The politics are important and there is an English translation of his recent book available, Now the People! Revolution in the C21st.
However what was on the menu was of interest. Raymond Postgate who was a founder member of the Communist Party in 1920 and the founder of the Good Food Guide in 1951. There was a link between good food and progressive working class politics.
Melenchon hails from the Jura region of France and the restaurant serves food specialities from the area.
Not on the list above is the plate of charcuterie which Melenchon started with. In respect of desert it was the FT journalist who had the lemon vodka sorbet. Melenchon’s Paris-Brest is a praline cream and almond pastry.
The Ambridge Socialist understands that LibDem leader Ed Davey is set to appear for the Ambridge cricket team on Sunday. While the BBC rarely reports such matters its understood that the LibDems made significant gains in Thursday’s election for Borsetshire Council.
In the picture above Davey was playing cricket in Salisbury on May 3rd.
Sunday is grudge match against Roserran in the Vale whose key figure is Lawrence who Lynda has previously had a run in with due to his racism
What the Faragists confront: how local Councils are actually run(mostly by law)
Local Elections in England saw Reform take control of a number of Councils from Kent (which didn’t end well last time the Faragists were in charge) to Durham.
In Reform only one voice counts and its that of the owner Nigel Farage. On Friday he was making threats to local council staff. Working from home will be banned, work on climate change and diversity and inclusion will be stopped, auditors will be called in.
Leaving aside Farage’s trademark bullshit the realities are very different.
In 50 years of political and union activity on the left I have never been a Councillor. I have stood for election on occasion safe in the knowledge (in Tottenham) that I’d get an OK vote but not one that would get me elected.
There was a reason. For more or less thirty years I ran the TUC in the Haringey area of North London. Of course that involved evening meetings and various bureaucratic obligations. It also involved, mostly, working with the Labour Council and Councillors. Their evening meetings and responsibilities far exceeded mine and often they didn’t, however much effort was made, have too much to show for it.
Running a Council is a tough job and in the austerity years 2010-? It has got a lot harder.
Of course there are still political choices to be made- see the long running campaigns to get Councils to divest pension fund investments from companies that deal with Israel. As often there are legal issues.
The Times (3rd May) carries some comments from Jonathan Carr-West, Head of the Local Government Information Unit.
He notes that 70-80% of Council spending is spent on adult social care and children’s services. These are legal duties. They can’t be ‘audited’ away by the Faragists.
Carr-West notes that many Councils are carrying deficits of £100m+ and that cutting areas such as climate change and Diversity and Equality and Inclusion, obsessions of the Faragists, will make little difference. He also adds that work in the latter area is mostly to make sure the Equality Act is complied with. It’s a legal obligation and however much the Faragists want to abolish it, they can’t. It will be interesting to see how many of the Reform Councillors elected on 1st May are still there in 12 months and if they are whether they are still Reform members. Rhetoric and reality are about to collide.
It was reported that former Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger was at Arsenal’s 1-0 defeat to PSG at the Emirates earlier this week and that he had met long term Arsenal fan Keir Starmer there.
The Guardian is now reporting (3rd May) that Wenger turned up at 10 Downing St to give a briefing to Labour advisors. Clearly after the May 1st elections an ‘Invincibles’ strategy but a 0-0 to the Labour plan might appeal to Labour’s self styled strategic genius Morgan McSweeney.
Arsenal fans meanwhile had best hope that Starmer offered no thoughts on how Arsenal can beat PSG in the second leg of the Champions League semi-final in Paris next week
Guardian 3rd May 2025
In a week of difficult local elections, there was a special guest in No 10 to give a pep talk to staff: Arsène Wenger, the former manager of Arsenal, beloved of the prime minister. Keir Starmer has sought his advice before, on the importance of building a team. And they have faced some common challenges, rebuilding their clubs and parties from low ebbs to extraordinary success.
What Sunak’s Chief Whip said about the new Reform Mayor of Lincolnshire (Andrea Jenkyns)
Until July 2024 Andrea Jenkyns was a (semi-detached) Tory MP. She lost her seat, subsequently defected to Reform and is now the elected Mayor of Lincolnshire.
In his memoir Ungovernable (2025) Rishi Sunak’s Chief Whip 2022-24 Simon (now Lord) Hart has a number of rather critical mentions of Jenkyn in the book.
On 21st March 2023 Hart is reprimanding Tory MPs who had not supported the Government line:
Andrea Jenkyns, What can I say? It was she who was photographed giving the finger to reporters outside No-10 during her fourty-four day Ministerial career under Liz Truss and who has been bad-mouthing the rest of us on Twitter ever since
On 24th January 2024 Hart was meeting Tory rebels on the 3rd reading of the Rwanda Bill, in one to one interviews
Andrea Jenkins arrived with her dog and her six year old son and then attempted to say that because she has ADHD she ‘couldn’t be held accountable for one what comes out of her mouth’
Sunday May 5th 2024
The local election post mortem rumbles on. People (like Andrea Jenkyns again) just can’t help but provide a running commentary when the classier option is to stand back. We ignore her as usual
The only question is how long it will be before Jenkyns starts doing the same to Farage
Remembering a very different May 2nd Election outcome (1997)
2nd May 1997, bliss was it in that morning to be alive. Not quite so much on 2nd May 2025 and not just because I’m 28 years older.
As an historian I’m not keen on memory which I think is often unreliable, so my memories of May 1st and 2nd 1997 are unreliable.
Not surprisingly there have been numbers of memoirs of May 1st and 2nd 1997 on social media to go with those already published in print.
I’ve put together the below, which is not reliable in the specifics any more than any memory is to underline that even those on the left who were no fans of Blair before 1997 were very happy to see the end of the Tories. There was also a sense of hope.
Of course we knew Blair was not on the left, although he had been, sort of, rather more recently than Starmer (he was much younger of course) but the joy of ejecting the Tories after 18 years was considerable.
The archival world is currently in something of a turmoil moving away from the old print copies in libraries to digital back pages on-line (some chargeable some not). Even so I spent time in the British Library checking my back pages. I can’t find a Fletter criticising the new Labour Government until one in the Guardian at the 100 day mark.
On Thursday May 1st after voting Labour in Tottenham (the late Bernie Grant) I was on the May Day march organised as it still is by the London May Day Organising Committee. It was (I think) one of those years when it focused on NE London. I recall Clissold Park in Stoke Newington.
Later beer was involved, where I can’t really recall, but given the pubs in those days in North London it was probably the Tollgate-then a Wetherspoons in Turnpike Lane. Later still, there was a results party in Tottenham.
The result we were waiting for was Portillo in Enfield Southgate, a nearby constituency familiar to at least some of us. I had been out in that area in the previous few days and remember thinking- are these houses with two cars out at the front really going to vote Labour?
The answer was yes. The party was marked (in my memory) by someone- now a senior union official- shouting at regular intervals that we wanted Portillo out.
The morning brought a hangover but there was a 6am picket line to attend- bakers at Arnoutti in North Tottenham were out on strike. I attended and returned to bed.
Later it was off to Reading for the CAMRA beer festival. The sun was still shining and it was a pleasant later Friday afternoon. The festival was a much less extensive event (and much cheaper to get in) than it is now.
In those pre interwebs, pre mobile phone days, I was listening to Labour Cabinet appointments on a transistor radio. The world seem a slightly better place.
The Tories were out at last and clearly not coming back for a good while. Perhaps a change for the better was possible. Perhaps
Nigel Farage’s political business vehicle Reform has won hundreds of seats In local Elections in England. Alarm bells are ringing for anti-racists and the left (inside and outside of Labour) needs to work even harder on an alternative to Farage’s Trumpian politics.
Peter Kellner, who once ran YouGov has produced an interesting assessment on what happened after Farage’s previous electoral successes. They have happened although you will need to scroll down a lot in media coverage to find details. 24 hour news media is about now and not about history or context.
Kellner mentions several examples of what happened when Farage’s earlier political vehicles won elections. Namely UKIP and the Brexit Party. Farage eventually fell out with everyone in UKIP and walked out and decided to change the name of the Brexit Party to Reform.
In 2013 local Elections in England UKIP got 19.9% of the vote and 147 Councillors. They didn’t win any Councils however.
In the 2016 Elections for the Welsh Assembly (now Senedd) UKIP won 7 seats and 13% of the vote. By the time of the next election in 2021 none of them were still in UKIP and it won no seats.
In the 2019 Election for the EU Parliament the Brexit Party topped the poll getting 30.5% and 29 MEPs.
It will be interesting to see how long it is before Commissioners are sent in to run Councils Reform has won in 2025 because they are failing to fulfil statutory duties. It will also be interesting to see how many of the Councillors elected get expelled or split. After all when the convictions of Reform representatives are thought of its often not political ones but the kind a Court of Law decides.
None of which btw is a reason for all those who want to see Farage stopped from addressing the points in my first para.
Peter Kellner, Guardian
Ukip’s 10-seat majority in Thanet should have given it four years of power to show what its new brand of politics could achieve. Alas, it turned out, that was very little. Six months later, five of its councillors defected, following internal rows about a local airport. A byelection subsequently restored its majority, but only until another councillor defected, saying Ukip had failed to make “significant change”. The following year, 12 Ukip councillors peeled off to form an independent group. Ukip’s days in charge of Thanet were over. In 2019, it fielded just three candidates. They all lost. Thanet was not the only place where Ukip struggled. In 2017, seven of its 12 councillors in Great Yarmouth defected to the Conservatives – although to be fair, some defections elsewhere went the other way, including two Tory MPs, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless.
Research shows Reform voters are not ‘Labour’s lost voters’
With Reform doing well (far too well) In local elections in England on May 1st media hyperbole (very largely on the right) is in full swing and flies will have been having a field day as Farage’s wide open mouth emits volumes of hot air.
However new and quite detailed research has indicated that most who vote for Reform have never been Labour voters. Most are ex-Tory voters, or when it comes to 2024 non-voters. While the research doesn’t focus on it, its clear enough why. Reform is a racist party and the current and previous Tory leader are from ethnic minorities.
This doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be a focus on Labour. Morgan McSweeney is not a strategic genius when it comes to elections. Labour’s Great Moving Right Show does not deter but rather encourages Reform
Historically speaking, Reform voters are not ‘Labour’s lost voters’. About 74% of 2024 Reform voters have not voted Labour in a single general election since 2005 (as far back as we have data for). Most are historically anti Labour voters who have cycled between voting Conservative, UKIP, non voting or even Liberal Democrat. This is as true in the ‘Red Wall’ or Labour Reform seats as elsewhere.
The May Day demonstration in Hyde Park on 3rd May 1891 was a landmark as it marked the first united march (the first May Day in 1890 had seen two marches). Engels writing to Laura Lafargue about the day noted how he, the Bernsteins and Tussys had celebrated in the evening at his Regents Park Rd residence:
When we came home last night, we wound up with a Maibowle, the Maikrauth of which Percy had sent us from Ryde. We put in 4 bottles Moselle, 2 claret, 1 Champagne, and finished it — we, Bernsteins and the Tussy’s. Late in the evening Cunninghame Graham came in and actually had two or three glasses of it — he seems to have left his teetotalism at Tangiers. There is a slight but rather agreeable Kater,I kept in proper bounds this morning by a bottle of Pilsener.
A Maibowle is a punch and Maikrauth is Woodruff used to make the punch. Kater is a hangover.
From 1891 to 2026 the tradition of solidarity on May Day endures and if celebrating it was good enough for Engels 135 years ago it’s fine now surely. I am not however planning to have a morning bottle of Pilsner. Tea will suffice
