Kmflett's Blog

Tory MP Jonathan Gullis lost his seat as an MP for Stoke in July 2024 and he has told the Telegraph 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. Perhaps but the question must be asked, is it the beard, or is it just Gullis?

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.

Beard Liberation Front

23rd January

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has issued a rare Beard Alert for Storm Eowyn which is set to hit Britain on Thursday and particularly Friday.

The campaigners urge the hirsute to take Met Office weather warnings seriously and to stay indoors if possible. If venturing out maintaining physical safety is obviously key.

However strong gusts of wind can seriously damage the beard and may even destroy follicles. The Beard Liberation Front advice is to secure the beard to the face with elastic bands or ties to minimise the potential for damage

The political right continues to be in turmoil and that’s only partly related to the activities of Nigel Fartage.

If many on the left argue that Labour is not the party it was (I don’t entirely agree its union based structure and obsession with Parliament dates back to 1900) its probably even more so on the right.

Historically the Tories are the party of Church and King. Indeed the mother of the Magistrate who sent the Yeomanry in to cut down peaceful protesters at Peterloo in Manchester on August 16th 1819 had a horse of that name. The Magistrate went to be one of the founders of the modern Tory Party after the 1832 Reform Act.

In 2025 we find former Tory PM Liz Truss posing under the US flag in Washington wearing a MAGA hat. The Guardian and Telegraph have both reported that at last week’s meeting of the Tory Shadow Cabinet Kemi Badenoch suggested something like a period of silence from Truss would be welcome.

Meanwhile in the first Tory members poll of 2025 on Conservative Home Badenoch is now the seventh most popular Tory MP with Mel Stride in top position. In every other poll taken since July 2024 Badenoch has led.

Silence is golden.

Donald Trump has reoccupied the Oval Office and reinvented some traditions that he had earlier promoted.

Probably the key one is a red valet button that allows him to summon a waiter with glasses of chilled diet coke.

He also reinstated a bust of Winston Churchill which was made by Jacob Epstein (1880-1959)*. There are in fact two of them, one in the White House Art Collection and the other in the British Embassy in Washington. It’s not a great surprise to find that Trump is a fan of Churchill, just as Boris Johnson, the only UK politician to actually attend his inauguration is. The two and their political methods (i.e. inability to tell the truth) were quite closely linked at one point and might be so again.

The first Churchill bust appeared in the Lyndon Johnson White House in 1965. The second bust was displayed by George W Bush from 2001 while the first was being restored. Obama from 2009 did not have it in the Oval Office but it returned with Trump in 2017 only to go again with Biden in 2021.

Traditions are disputed

*Epstein lived near to Churchill in central London and numerous versions of the Churchill bust exist including some in British museums. Epstein produced a significant body of work including in 1955 a war memorial for the then TUC HQ in Great Russell St

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Epstein

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/01/21/controversial-bust-winston-churchill-oval-office-trump

The above is Liz Truss’s Avatar featuring her wearing a MAGA hat in Washington. Interviewed by the Times (19th January) Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said she preferred Truss to Farage as the former was a Conservative.

I’m an international socialist but the Tory Party historically stands for Church and King. That’s the Church of England and King Charles not President Trump

Brewdog was spurned by Dragons Den in 2008, which perhaps underlines how good it was or not then at spotting good business ideas. Later James Watt who stepped down as Brewdog CEO in 2024 was turned down as a Dragons Den judge.

It clearly continues to rankle with Watt who has now launched a hunt for new UK unicorns- start up businesses which reach a $1billion value. There are only 89 in the UK but as Watt as certainly never read Marx he doesnt know that capitalism tends not to ever more SMEs but to monopoly.

The plan via a TV show is to get start ups to compete for a total £2million investment half of which will be put up by Watt. He claims that Dragons Den is simply entertainment but its not clear what House of Unicorns will be or where it will appear on screens.

Watt who turned up at Nigel Farage’s 60th birthday party in March 2024 and has posted in support of Elon Musk DOGE, styles himself as a disruptor. He says the business models he looks to are those like TESLA (Musk’s e-vehicle company) who offer a vision of the future. In this case a very dystopian one

https://houseofunicorns.com/the-movement

Beard Liberation Front

22nd January

contact BLF Organiser @keithbeard.bsky.social

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has expressed concern that Donald Trump’s decision to shut down all Diversity, Equality and Inclusion work in the US Federal Government, and sack employees may impact beard wearers.

The BLF stands and has always stood for the principle that people should be able to dress and appear as they want and Trump’s anti-DEI diktat is likely to have a negative impact on a broad range of people, of whom the hirsute are just a part.

The campaigners say that one reason the Beard Liberation Front was formed 30 years ago was to combat a situation where clean shaven white men in suits were the predominant occupants of many roles and particularly senior roles. While this has changed somewhat, Trump’s policy looks to set the clock back.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, of course in JD Vance, Trump has the first US Vice President with a beard since 1909. You can look at that two ways. Firstly its not sensible to understand a Trump policy as fully coherent, its also political theatre. Secondly Vance may be set for an early shave…

Rachel Reeves is in Davos and has taken a Q&A after making a speech. One interesting Q&A is below

Q: Tony Blair (who’s in Davos this week) was famously relaxed about wealth creation – are you?

“Absolutely”, Reeves replies, repeating that the UK wants to welcome the best people from around the world to help grow the economy.

(Guardian 22^nd January)

In fact the original source of this sentiment was not Blair but Peter Mandelson, who appears set to be the next UK Ambassador in Washington. He said:

“We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich… as long as they pay their taxes.”

Note that he expected the ‘filthy rich’ to pay their taxes, a point Rachel Reeves seems to have missed. However wealth creators may well be filthy rich but have a wider impact on matters than just their own bank balances and offshore funds

22^nd January marks the 101st anniversary of the first Labour Government and the 134th anniversary of the birth of Antonio Gramsci. Which has had the more lasting legacy for the left? In 1977 New Left Review 1/100 Perry Anderson published a major essay the Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. It was notable for looking at the relevance of Gramsci for a revolutionary politics in the mid-1970s, focusing on the concepts of wars of manoeuvre and position. In 2017 Verso republished the essay in book format with a new introductory essay by Anderson.

In the concluding paragraph he suggests a balance sheet between reform and revolution:

Viewed world-historically, the difference (social democracy) has made has not been
great. The welfare state attributed to it exists in countries where it has
never enjoyed significant power- Japan, Switzerland, Ireland, Canada, even in
its fashion the United States-as well as those in which it has. In favourable
conditions, it has yielded a set of small societies in Scandinavia markedly
more civilised than the bourgeois median, even if these too are now subject to
erosion. The balance sheet of what was once reformism is not negligible but it
is modest. Of the revolutionary tradition, that cannot be said. Europe was
largely saved from Nazism by the Red Army, and China today looms larger in the
scales of growth and power than the Soviet Union ever did. The crimes and
disasters, not to speak of the ironies and reversals, of the communist record
are plain. But that it changed the world as the Second International never did
is equally plain. Not coincidentally, the legacy of its ideas, for those with
any interest in ideas, is much richer. Gramsci alone is sufficient testimony to
that.

It is an interesting balance sheet even if I wouldn’t agree that Russia was part of a revolutionary
tradition after the late 1920s or that modern day China can be included in
that. But of the classic theorists of the 1920s and 1930s, Gramsci included,
Anderson surely has a point about an important legacy. There may be political
lessons to be learnt from the 1924 Labour Government but in terms of relevant
ideas for the left Gramsci is the person to study