Kmflett's Blog

A very English obsession: French wining & dining

There is a tradition (of sorts) of some sections of English society being rude about the French dating back at least to the Napoleonic Wars and before that 1789.

Yet there is another tradition to be found in ruling circles of seeing French food and wine as the best available. Of course there is excellent French food and wine.

Churchill’s cookbook, a volume of recipes provided for him by his cook in the 1940s and 1950s focuses a lot on French food, although his favourite cheese was the Swiss Gruyere.

Partly the reason for this was that English food at the fine dining end of things during this period was not great. One of the reasons Raymond Postgate started the Good Food Guide in the 1950s was to address this.

Things have changed. The Times prints articles most weeks pointing out, for example, that France is one of the biggest consumers of Macdonalds, and recently noting a French trend for fish and chip eating.

The veneration of French wine (which has its own issues) continues. It may explain for example given who owns and edits the main ‘broadsheet’ papers that everyone has a regular wine column but only one, the Sunday Times has a beer column (and that recent, written by Pete Brown)

On 5^th March 2025 published a list of world capitals with the most restaurants.

The research was by Knight Frank and headed the Wealth Report. It should clearly not be taken too seriously.

However on a list of restaurants with extensive fine wine list. London is top with 528 and Paris only third. The average London fine dining restaurant has a wine list running to  428 bottles.

Who is drinking it? The Times reports that ‘parts of the capital over the past decade have become to the global rich’. By 2028 London will have a further 20 five star hotels.

Cost of living crisis anyone?

Denmark is to end all postal deliveries by December 2025 citing a 90% decline in what is sometimes referred to as snail mail. Its bad news for traditional letters writers (and future historians looking for sources) but even worse news for the postal workers who will lose their jobs.A

According to a BBC report Denmark is very largely a digital society which raises the question of whether the Tony Blair Institute has taken State Power there.

Private postal deliveries will continue, no doubt at a price.

The Danes will be missing things like the latest Royal Mail stamp release featuring Wildlife including the hedgehog (pictured). Getting a letter with a hedgehog stamp is surely one of the marks of a decent society

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg8jllq283o

https://shop.royalmail.com/garden-wildlife-stamp-set

The battle between industrial producers of pasteurised Normandy Camembert and 461 producers of unpasteurised artisan Camembert is becoming increasingly tasty (Times 5th March)

Two producers of industrial Camembert Lactalis which sells President Camembert and Savencia which sells Coeur De Lion Camembert (both available in the UK) want the right to put ‘Normandy’ on the boxes of Camembert they sell. Lactalis sell 37 million boxes a year.

A Court has ruled they can’t do this and agreed with the artisan producers that Big Cheese sell is ‘pasteurised merde’.

In response Big Cheese has threatened to make its industrial Camembert with imported milk thereby hitting Normandy dairy farmers.

All this will also no doubt have a potential impact on significant numbers of jobs but this isnt something that interests the Times

Labour’s Employment Relations Bill is back in the Commons this week. The Government has tabled 200 amendments but The Times (prop. Rupert, Wapping, Murdoch) has published another Editorial attacking it.

Its true that some of the phrases most loved by Times Editorials when it comes to unions such as ‘old Spanish Customs’ and ‘union barons’ are missing. However the Editorial concludes the Bill is a ‘regressive exercise in old-style socialism’.

In reality more could have been done but the Bill does something to restore the level playing field in employment that the Tories spent 14 years destroying, to the detriment both of workers and the economy.

If it becomes law and is implemented, (in about eighteen months to start) it will provide opportunities for organising more people in unions, creating better conditions at work and ability for people to exercise collective power.

The Times is very far from the best guide to matters of employment so while it celebrates the dropping of a right to disconnect from the Bill, it was never in it in the first place. The commitment there was for it to be looked at separately. Apparently that is still the case but as often campaigning will be needed to make it happen. Addressing work-life balance and the long hours culture are really key issues in the modern workplace.

As ever what happens from below is as important as what happens from above. That worries the likes of Murdoch more than anything

Beard Liberation Front

3rd March

Contact BLF Organiser Keith Flett @keithbeard.bsky.social

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has issued advice on pie eating and Beard Friendly Pies as part of British Pie Week 2026 which runs from March 2nd to March 8th

The hirsute campaign group says that as with many prepared foods the requirements of people with beards are often overlooked when it comes to pies.

The BLF says that common issues with pies for those with beards are:

Excessive gravy

Puff or flaky pastry

‘Deep filling’ making it difficult to avoid contact of the pie with the beard

The campaigners cite the traditional steak and kidney pie as an example of pies which are made without thought for the requirements of the hirsute pie consumer. Such pies often have excessive gravy- and comparatively little steak and kidney- which ends up in the beard.

The campaigners say that the hirsute should choose their pies with care to ensure that they enjoy a traditional eating experience without beard pollution

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said we think the hirsute are put off eating traditional British pies because they are often not felt to be beard friendly. No self-respecting beard wearer wants the remains of their lunch or dinner in their beard so once again as part of British Pie Week we are promoting the Beard Friendly Pie. Roald Dahl’s Pogonophobic book The Twits is off the menu

Trump, the State of the Union & the Society of the Spectacle

The Society of the Spectacle was a book by Guy Debord (1967) that argued that capitalist society was now focused on images rather than reality. Hence advertising provided a framework for what was ‘real’. Beyond this was a political movement, Situationism. Verso (2024) have recently published writing on the Situationists, Leaving the Twentieth Century by McKenzie Wark.

An essay in a recent issue of the London Review of Books, argues that the second Trump Presidency is all about image and smartphones rather than political substance. Politics has always had an element of theatre but on this analysis Trump is taking it to a new level.

Hence the Oval Office meetings as reality TV, including the bullying of Zelenskyy.

In his first weeks back in the Oval Office Trump has issued a slew of reactionary and regressive diktats, including an attempt to re-name the Gulf of Mexico, and a fresh attempt to ‘buy’ Greenland. A lot of the diktats will have a harsh impact- as they are designed to do. What Trump is interested in is the spectacle of the pronouncements and keeping himself firmly in the news.

It’s not the only analysis of Trump of course but it’s a more interesting perspective than is likely to be found in most of the MSM

T.J. Clark · A Brief Guide to Trump and the Spectacle

125^th anniversary of the start of the Labour Party. Can it be done again?

125 years ago on 27th and 28th February 1900 a meeting took place at the Memorial Hall in Farringdon St to form the Labour Representation Committee.

The building still stands although today it is a modern office with a plaque to mark the founding of the Labour Party. For many years I represented workers there as a union officer

The meeting marked the start of a decade and more of events that still provide much of the framework for the Labour Party, the labour movement and the left today.

The period covered the election of the first Labour MPs, the beginnings of the welfare state and Parliamentary reforms in favour of working people and the Great Unrest, one of the biggest and most militant strike waves in British history.

At the root of this range of strategies and tactics was the same idea. How to defend and promote the interests of working people in a market capitalist society.

Historically the formation of the LRC, the Liberal Governments from 1906 and the syndicalist wave of the period from 1910 are often see as separate and opposing developments.

Yet they are linked by this underlying theme of how to effectively change society in the interests of labour. We find often the same players are involved in debates and discussions in all three spheres- party, Parliament and Union.

Once you start to look at the historical detail of how the LRC was formed, who was responsible and what happened then, a picture far more complex than the stereotypical view that Labour was formed by the Unions emerges. Although it should be noted that like all successful stereotypes there is some truth in that point.

The man who moved the motion at the 1899 TUC that an LRC should be set up was James [JH] Holmes. He was an organiser for the ASRS. The Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, and its General Secretary Bell was a ‘moderate’ Union. Moderate not in the sense that it was particularly linked to the Liberal Party, as some Unions were, but by virtue of the fact that it did not generally support militant industrial action or strikes.

But Holmes, the organiser in the West and Wales, was a militant and he built Union membership against a backdrop of decline by aggressive recruitment tactics and taking on the railway employers.

He was at that time based in South Wales and lived in Cathays Cardiff. He was central in the early 1900s to the Taff Vale dispute, one of the landmark issues in the development of trade union and Labour politics in the UK.

His political and union activity is a fascinating snapshot of the transition in the labour movement from Liberal to independent Labour politics and a reminder of the role that trade union officials had in the formation of the Labour Party. Holmes stood as a Labour candidate in the West Midlands in the 1906 Election but lost out to a Liberal.

The wider issues- of the effectiveness of industrial or Parliamentary action in protecting and advancing the cause or workers remained hotly contested, as did the relationship between the two.

Historically it is worth noting that the Labour Party and its current configuration did not come ready made but was built, and much argued over particularly around what mechanism was most effective to promote the cause of labour itself.

It is noteworthy that 125 years on the successor to the ASRS, the RMT, is not affiliated to the Labour Party anymore and the debate about how best to effectively represent and promote the interests of working people continues

This post appeared originally in the Morning Star

This piece appeared in the Morning Star 4th March 2025 but there is a lot more to say about the years between 1900 and 1920 in respect of the formation of the structures of the British working class

The document below was written by Margaret Thatcher’s Press Secretary Bernard Ingham on 7th March 1985 and can be found in the Thatcher Foundation archive.

The Tories efforts to break the NUM and destroy the coal industry had cost the Government many billions of pounds. Thatcher realised it would have to be mentioned in the forthcoming Budget by the then Chancellor Nigel Lawson.

The PR answer was a ‘Scargill Levy’ Ingham concluding that ‘Mr Scargill is clearly the most expensive trade union leader in history’. A significant compliment in the class war..

Photo: PA

There was another farmers protest in central London on 4th March. The police allowed seven tractors and harvesters to join several thousand protesters. That is seven more than any other London protest has been allowed in recent times.

Nigel Farage was there playing at being a farmer again. While he was wearing several jackets it was not evident that he had a suit on. The dark glasses were presumably because the Reform boss doesn’t get on well with sunlight

So far his efforts to make an appearance at the bar in the Bull, Ambridge have been unsuccessful…