Kmflett's Blog

The National Trust has been the subject of a Culture War backed by the likes of Farage and Rees Mogg for a while now. There is an organisation, Restore, in fact like Reform UK, a company, that perpetually tries to get members elected to the Trust’s governing body and challenge policy.

At the recent annual meeting in Newcastle it once again failed totally.

Meanwhile William Sitwell, the Telegraph’s restaurant critic and fanatical anti-vegan has written a piece criticising a motion passed at Newcastle which said NT cafes should look to sell more plant based food. This of course is line with the Trust’s climate change policies.

It did not suggest that any cafe should become vegan or indeed dictate any change to the recipe for scones. The scones have long been an obsession of the Restore mob and Sitwell quotes someone who thinks the scones are ‘woke’

It being the Telegraph its all about marxists and communists taking over the NT. We should be thankful rather that the assorted far right loons and cranks who have been trying to undermine it for years are still not getting anywhere

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/hijacked-lunatics-national-trust-initiative-060000010.html

These words were written by the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci in 1924.

He was jailed by Italian fascist leader Mussolini in 1926 to whom the ‘monsters’ is a coded but to us obvious reference. He died in prison in 1937

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

The Presidential landslide for Donald Trump is not good news for the left (although there will be left groupscules who will find reason to think it is, and beyond the US a question was who would be most likely to make the world situation even worse- clearly neither candidate had plans to make it better).

In the US abortion rights, civil liberties and much else may be under question and threat. No doubt organisations from community and labour will fight to defend them.

It is an experience of defeat but on an historical scale much worse has happened.

Perhaps the original one in the modern era was the restoration of the monarchy in England and Wales in 1660 after the Commonwealth period from 1649. The restoration saw numbers of those who had signed the death warrant for Charles 1st- regicides- executed. Cromwell who had died in 1858 was dug up and executed in his absence as it were. Censorship of radical ideas was reinstated and those who held such ideas were persecuted.

Hill notes:

we know something of the practical consequences of defeat. After 1660 nearly one in five of the beneficed ministers lost their livings, without even the meagre compensation which the ejected of the 1640s and 1650s had received. Lay dissenters had to endure nearly thirty years (until 1688 KF) of sporadic but often very damaging persecution

Hill was interested in the radicals that had supported the revolution and how they came to terms with events after 1660, in particular the poet and radical activist and thinker Milton.

Even so its a reminder that defeats, often very serious ones, happen, but ideas and radical organisation survives.

We could at least look at the experience of the 1930s, I’m thinking of Victor Serge’s Midnight in the Century but this week is thankfully far removed from that.

Times 6th November

Officially the US economy is doing well and the Biden administration has carried through a range of measures to help the less well off.

The reality on the ground as the above statistic shows is different and it was a reality that the Trump campaign focused on. Of course has no intention of doing anything about it, bluster aside.

The issue for the Democrats was that they said they were helping working period yet for a sustained period real wages were falling and have only slightly recovered now.

The picture in the UK is not much different. While Starmer has raised the minimum wage and agreed some public sector pay rises the issue is whether people feel things are improving and alongside that they actually are. After all the purpose of political parties that aim to ‘reform’ market capitalism is to make things a little bit better.

Kemi Badenoch faced Keir Starmer at PM’s Questions on 6th November. Such occasions are rarely enlightening although for those interested they can be good political theatre.

Badenoch who was not pro-Trump during her leadership campaign now pressed Starmer on whether the Orange One should be invited to address Parliament. Its a matter for the Speaker not Starmer. Interestingly a YouGov poll (6th November) on how popular the newly re-arrived Trump is with voters found only 26% of Tories were happy with President Trump.

There was another issue- inevitably a culture war one- that Badenoch raised when she suggested that the Labour activists who went to ‘help’ Kamala Harris were North London Labour people. Perhaps they were but the North London reference is straight out of the Liz Truss playbook

Kemi Badenoch PMQs 6th November

The prime minister did not distance himself from the remarks made by the foreign secretary, and I’m very sure that President Trump will soon be calling to thank him for sending all of those North London Labour activists to campaign for his opponent.

Given that most of his cabinet signed a motion to ban President Trump from addressing parliament, will the prime minister show that he and his government can be more than student politicians by asking you, Mr Speaker, to extend an invitation to President Trump to address parliament on his next visit?

Time and the hour runs through the roughest day

Macbeth Act One, Scene Three

It’s happened again. An event which while it can be understood why it happened, you really did not want to happen has done

At 9am on the Friday morning after the Brexit referendum in 2016 I was at a meeting at the old City of London HQ of one of the UK’s largest employers. It was a union-employer meeting. It really didn’t get very far because neither side could immediately grasp what had just taken place.

The world has moved on so at 9.15am this morning I was in a virtual meeting of my union’s executive. That sinking feeling reappeared but as before matters still have to be grappled with and they will be

The two tweets below are pointers to a longer discussion

Here’s the Trump victory in a nutshell: Dearborn is home to 30,000 Ford workers at the Rouge River plant and the area is also the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the US. The unofficial results for Dearborn are: Trump: 47% Harris: 28% Stein*: 22%

@johnwrees

The key lesson of the Trump victory for us is that Labour has to deliver the significant improvement in quality of life that people can feel or we face the rise of right wing populism that has swept America. Half measures won’t be enough.

@johncmcdonnellMP

*Stein is the US Green candidate

Tariq Ali on the impatience of E P Thompson

(Edward) Thompson was temperamentally impatient and determined to get the magazine (New Left Review) off the ground as soon as possible. This seems to flow into other parts of his life. Decades later Christopher Hill confessed to me that the ‘rudest and most obnoxious letter I have ever received in my life was from Edward’. Why. ‘Because’ he replied ‘I was taking too long to leave the CPGB’

Tariq Ali. You Can’t Please All. Memoirs 1980-2024

The book, an essential read for those interested in the history of the British left from the 1960s on has many fascinating, and more positive(!) vignettes about both Edward and Dorothy Thompson