Kmflett's Blog

The news that W H Smith plans to sell its 500 or so High St stores sent me down a research rabbit hole.

While in recent times Smith’s has sold a range of left and left-ish publications not so long ago it was known as W H Smug and had a troubled relationship with, for example, Private Eye. William Henry Smith (1825-1901) was the man responsible for Smith’s entering the railway station bookstall business and, a religious dissenter, he was known as ‘Old Morality’.

With the railway boom of the 1840s Smith saw a market for reading newspapers and cheap books (known as Yellowbacks) on trains and the first W H Smith station bookstall opened at Euston on 1^st November 1848. Expansion was rapid and by 1860 all major railway lines and stations in England had a Smiths.

Dickens in an 1860 story… makes reference to the less than satisfactory catering arrangements at Rugby station and in passing mentions Smiths, without complaint.

The Great Western and London and North-West railway hiked station kiosk rents in 1905 which led W H Smith to open 150 shops in nearby High Streets. Its their successors which are up for sale. The railway business will remain- they have a captive audience.

It did make me wonder however if the early W H Smith station kiosks sold the Chartist Northern Star which ran until 1852 and was even at that point a well known paper. One issue might be whether readers of the paper were travelling by train at this point. Later working class passengers were much of the railway’s custom but again whether Smiths sold the weekly radical but sensationalist Reynolds’s Newspaper I have yet to discover.

Police force way into Quaker Meeting House & arrest campaigners. Historian E P Thompson on the right of ‘freedom from arbitrary arrest’

Novara Media has reported that police broke into the Quaker Meeting House in Westminster on 27^th March and arrested six campaigners were meeting to discuss climate change and Palestine.

The Quakers noted that it was the first time in living memory that anyone had been arrested in a Quaker Meeting House.

The late socialist historian E P Thompson would surely have provided an urgent riposte about the rights of the nineteenth century ‘Freeborn Englishman’. Democratic rights were limited but there was a tacit understanding between the State and the population about civil liberties and where the State should not be going.

The action of the police on 27^th March reflected the dangerous drift to authoritarianism in 2020s Britain and certainly would have stirred the Freeborn Englishman to revolt

E P Thompson in the Making of the English Working Class writes extensively on the matter but also provided a summary:

Freedom from arbitrary arrest, trial by jury, equality before the law, liberty of thought, speech and conscience, the vicarious participation in liberty afforded by the right of parliamentary  opposition and by elections and election tumults.. the right to parade, huzza and jeer on the hustings..

Note ‘freedom from arbitrary arrest’

Westminster: Police raid Quaker Meeting House | ICN

Beard Liberation Front

28^th March

Contact BLF Organiser Keith Flett @keithbeard.bsky.social

Confirmation that JD Vance will not appear on the Beard of Spring Shortlist after his beard invaded Greenland

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has confirmed that JD Vance will not appear on the Beard of Spring shortlist, despite being one of the world’s most prominent beard wearers

Following earlier outbursts Vance had already been provisionally excluded from consideration from the four Seasonal Awards which the BLF run. Beard of Spring will be announced on Easter Saturday.

A BLF meeting on 10^th March agreed that Vance will be barred from the annual Beard of the Year vote which will take place in December 2025 subject to further review if appropriate

The campaigners say that Vance is a relatively recent beard wearer and there are significant concerns that he has not grasped the responsibilities that come with wearing a beard in the public eye.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett, there is no way that JD Vance’s beard invading Greenland can be seen as placing the hirsute in a positive light. We are confirming today that he is excluded from the Beard of Spring shortlist.

Whatever happened to Jonathan Gullis? Its Jonathan Gullis Ltd

Tory MP Jonathan Gullis lost his seat as an MP for Stoke in July 2024 and he told the Telegraph in January 2025 that he has still to find a new job.

Gullis earlier told LBC that while had got some consultancy work he had been unable to secure a permanent role or even it seems an interview for one

He was previously a teacher and has claimed that his high profile right-wing views are an issue when applying for teaching roles.

There is still no update on whether Gullis has got a job but perhaps Liz Kendall’s measures to get people into work will help here.

Meanwhile at the end of January 2025 Gullis was co-opted (perhaps just as well an Election was not required) on to Kidsgrove Town Council. Essentially a Parish Council it has responsibilities for things like allotments. He also appears occasionally as a commentator on hard right social media site GB News.

In Mid-March Gullis appeared on GB News to back Kemi Badenoch’s U-Turn on Net Zero and went on to comment:

More importantly, if the people around Kemi Badenoch, and those backing her in Parliament, are willing to swallow their pride stop trying to be liked on social media and popular with centrist dads and focus on what is truly important to the people of this country.”

Work, or not, in progress

There is some method to this. On 5^th August 2024 Gullis set up Jonathan Gullis Ltd of which he is of course the CEO. Its designed to process payments for radio and TV work (not that this seems to extend much beyond GBeebies) and surely shows the entrepreneurial spirit of a true Tory. How much this is working we should know shortly as the Companies House record shows result are due to be filed in August 2025

Extract from the Telegraph
But breaking back into the public sector is harder still. Former Stoke-on-Trent North MP Jonathan Gullis was a teacher before he became an MP. He has said he cannot get a job now he’s lost his seat, which has a knock-on effect on his wife and two children, aged four and two.

“I’ve applied for a few jobs and sadly not even had an interview yet,” he said in a radio interview in September. “So actually, I think the days when being an ex-MP was something that was wanted or desired are no longer, as I think we’re now seen as a problem. And so that’s a challenge.” Asked if he thought that was due to his politics, he said: “When I left the profession to enter parliament, I felt being a Conservative was something that was treated with disdain.” Post-parliament, he added, he could not work in education because there are “too many activists in the classroom”. As of January, he is still looking for a full-time role.

“It’s a competitive market where I will be up against many of my former colleagues and former special advisers, some of whom will have expertise in certain fields and some of whom have come from the corporate world,” he says.

I’ve seen all these diary pieces and gossip columns say that I’m a chain smoker,” he said.

“Others have written that my drink intake verges on alcoholism

Westminster interview 27th March 2025

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/mar/27/men-more-ready-to-sacrifice-family-life-for-career-than-women-farage-says?CMP=share_btn_url

In an interview with the Times (August 2nd 2025) Farage, 61, dismissed rumours about his health and noted that he had recently had a ‘one bottle lunch’ with someone of note (unnamed). That is a bottle of fine wine not beer btw. The statement is revealing in that it suggests, occasional reports confirming, that a typical Farage lunch which he invariably describes as ‘proper’ involves rather more than one bottle.

I’m hardly a temperance fan but I rarely drink at lunch (at least during the week) otherwise nothing gets done in the afternoon…Someone who does is not perhaps Prime Minister material in the 2020s

*Lunchtime O’Booze is a Private Eye phrase from the days of historic Fleet St (as was) and City of London lunches. As someone who worked in the City in the 1980s I of course have no memory of such things.

Karl Marx, Ian Nairn & the Spaniards Pub, Hampstead Lane

In one of those research rabbit holes one can go down I was re-reading bits of Nairn’s London today. Published as a Penguin paperback in 1966 it looks at the architecture of the various areas of London (Nairn did not like most 1960s architecture) but also mentions another of Nairn’s favourite places, pubs.

Nairn was a keen real ale drinker in the period immediately before a tide of industrial old style keg beer drove the handpumps out of most London pubs in the early 1970s, only for them to reappear again thanks to a drinkers revolt organised by CAMRA.

Anyway one of the pubs Nairn finds himself is the Spaniards on Hampstead Lane. An historic pub dating back to the C16th. In the mid-1960s Nairn found it selling Bass, which he approved of.

A quick Google will tell you that well known former drinkers in the Spaniards included Charles Dickens and Karl Marx. The former is documented as the pub appears in his novels. The latter certainly is not.

Marx certainly liked beer, though possibly not quite as much as Pilsner enthusiast Engels and certainly went to the pub (when he could afford it). Which ones he went to we don’t really know. The only account we have is of a pub crawl by Marx and Engels in Tottenham Court Rd which was written by a third party a long time afterwards.

In the fifty volumes of Marx and Engels Collected Works, Engels can be found mentioning which pubs he went to and what beer (pilsner mostly) he was drinking. Marx does not.

We do know that Marx and Engels walked on Hampstead Heath- Engels being the keener it would seem, and that on at least one occasion they enjoyed a family and friends picnic on the Heath (1864). Does it seem likely that Marx dropped by the Spaniards? Yes, but we can’t be sure.

These days btw the Spaniards sells a range of mid-strength cask ales and is something of a visitor and tourist location. An afternoon early in the week when the sun is out will probably still be quite pleasant

Brewdog plan to grow brand love with a fruit lager

The Grocer has reported that Brewdog is launching a fruit flavoured version of its Cold Beer lager, using loral hops to provide a peach flavour.

According to Hannah Corker Brewdog’s Head of Customer Marketing the fruit lager  ‘delivers a differentiated shopper to traditional lager’ and opens a new ‘need state’ which in turns grows the ‘brand love’.

The product is launching in Tesco who claim that  ‘European style fruit led beer’ is Britain’s fastest growing beer trend. Jubel which launched in 2018 being the market leader.

The Brewdog beer will retail for £4.25 for 4x440ml cans

Enjoy, if that’s your thing, and if its not an early April fool

From Philip Snowden in 1924 to Rachel Reeves in 2025. Labour Chancellors & the Treasury

Rachel Reeves decision to cut winter fuel benefits in the autumn of 2024 for many pensioners reflected a long strand of Labour thinking, tied into Treasury orthodoxy, going back to Labour’s first Chancellor Philip Snowden in 1924.

Snowden stuck rigidly to orthodox Treasury thinking, while Reeves sticks to the OBR line, which is a 2025 version of the same thing. Suffice to say that while the Treasury (and OBR) is looking at the stability of British capitalism (not always successfully) its focus on improving the lot of working people simply does not exist.

The more recent decisions to cut disability benefits and cut public spending are arguably not so much in the mould of Snowden, who presented just one Budget in May 1924 before the Government fell in November 1924. Snowden’s view was that the Chancellor should not make decisions on spending at all. Where a Budget surplus was found- and it was in 1924- it was used to pay down the National Debt.

Faced with the issue of alleviating unemployment Snowden rejected public works schemes argued for by a certain Liberal, John Maynard Keynes, unless they could be shown to be a sound investment. He argued that the ‘more positive the remedy the slower the effect’.

Snowden, who was a member of the Independent Labour Party but in reality more of a Gladstonian liberal than a socialist, argued that there wasn’t much a Chancellor could do to address inequality. That would only happen in a socialist society.

No one could accuse Rachel Reeves of promoting a socialist society but historical comparisons need to be done with care. Firstly while her various cuts have made her unpopular, some of it (social media has daily examples) relates to her being the first ever female Chancellor. Even in 2025 the world of finance and finance journalism is still very largely men in suits.

Secondly she has in fact increased spending and investment in some areas, the argument being that more needs to be done. Her Spring Statement arguably matched not the Snowden of 1924 but that of the 1930/1 Labour Government where the answer to economic crisis was indeed benefit cuts.

The aforementioned Keynes had an alternative perspective of spending to promote growth. That of course does not sort out the boom/slump syndrome of capital but it can be a little more people friendly-keeping the impact on inflation in mind (which is where Reeves comes from) Fortunately in the several Labour Governments between 1924 and 2024 Treasury inspired thinking was not quite always the preferred policy, although it invariably made appearances in each one of them

Nigel Farage making a rare visit to the Commons on 26th March opposed a Government measure to ban smoking for future generations on health grounds. Farage an inveterate smoker agreed it was unhealthy but it should be left up to individuals.

He claimed that the spirit of Oliver Cromwell was alive and well in the Commons.

Farage who is often to be found promoting his vision of British history was completely wrong

Bulstrode Whitelocke said of Cromwell: “He commonly called for tobacco, pipes… and then take tobacco himself…”

As the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon occasionally points out the idea that Cromwell wanted smoking banned comes from those opposed to the events of 1649, one of the more significant dates in British history

For those understandably steering clear of the news:

Pete Hegseth, US Defence Secretary in Signal chat about US bombing of civilians in Yemen which also included a journalist

Rachel Reeves, UK Chancellor, who in a Spring Statement boosted defence spending while cutting benefits for the sick and disabled