Kmflett's Blog

Guardian 23rd September 2026

Thinktank linked to Reform UK calls for abolition of state pension

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/sep/23/thinktank-reform-uk-abolition-state-pension?CMP=share_btn_url

Labour are going after pensioners once again.

Reform will protect your pension.

Nigel Farage Twitter 29th September 2026

Tony Benn had been told by Eric Heffer MP that at the end of the 1986 Blackpool conference the organist had said the Red Flag would not be played. After protests it was but Benn recounts that at the end ‘Neil and Glenys (Kinnock) threw a whole mass of red roses at the delegates from the platform. Benn writes in his diary ‘it was a disgusting spectacle… I rushed out before the crowd left and caught the train to London’.

He did however compose the following poem

The people’s rose in shades of pink

Gets up my nostrils and it stinks

But ‘ere our limbs grow stiff and old

Our old Red Flag we shall unfold

With heads uncovered swear we all

To let rose petals fade and fall

Though moderates flinch and media snear

We’ll keep the red flag flying here

The reference for those under 50 is the Smith’s second single released on 31st October 1983. Andy Burnham is a Smiths fan.

Beyond that The Times while making some mild criticisms is unusually restrained in its comments. It normally drones on about Labour from the right come what may. In particular while Badenoch has launched a petition on the triple lock pension, the Times is constrained because it has been demanding its end for a very long time.

Whether or not Andy Burnham should be pleased that one part of the Murdoch media has temporarily called the dogs off it should be a warning for the left, if it continues

Monday 28th September 5.30pm Gregor Gall ‘Marxism in Music: Constructing a Communist Contra-Culture with The Redskins, Rock’n’roll and Revolution’.

Recording of seminar: https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/37PCi3V-v-dp1gD9YiLEUBSH4rg8NvE8IJzM7cFw2XPwld5zcAOnCCdI065Cd9Se.5rYIMPy17Kb8MVeS

Manufacturing Marxist music (and culture) has been the missing component of the theory and practice of the revolutionary left in Western Europe. To do so, as The Redskins did, gives us a glimpse of what can be achieved in certain conducive circumstances.

Andy Burnham’s Conference Speech: history man, Unions, Co-Ops ( but Manchester also saw the birth of the world’s first working class political party)

On 29^th September Andy Burnham delivered his first speech as Labour leader and PM to the Labour Conference.

One line referenced labour history

The United Kingdom my dad represented is the one I believe in.

A union of nations that gave trade unions and the cooperative movement to the world.

Is he right here?

In respect of the Co-Operative movement (Rochdale 1844) almost certainly yes. On trade unions there may be room for question. The TUC was formed in 1868 but unions existed well before that, the Grand Consolidated Trade Union of the early 1830s for example. The wider issue is whether unions also existed in other places. That requires some research

What Burnham missed, puzzingly, was that Britain saw the birth of the world’s first working class political party, the National Charter Association, in Ancoats in Manchester in July 1840.

Ir was not a direct antecedent of the Labour Party but the idea that there should be a working class political party was born in Manchester.

 Andy Burnham’s speech to Labour Party Conference 2026 – The Labour Party

29th September

The London Socialist Historians Group, that organises the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, has said that it is backing the current wave of UCU strikes over job cuts and course closures.

Strikes are underway at Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow Caledonian, with Nottingham due to start action this week. The long running strike at Goldsmiths also continues.

The historians say that after almost 60 years its clear that the Business University model has failed. With the loss of academic and related skills, education for future generations will be downgraded. The claim is that there is a financial crisis in much of the sector. However this is not universally the case. In some instances Universities are building financial surpluses at the expense of jobs and courses

Looking historically to the Robbins Report which saw the rise of new Universities from the early 1960s, the foundation of Polytechnics which became Universities, the focus was not on how much profit they did or did not make. Rather it was about extending the educational opportunities for young people, investing in skills and education as a general good for a liberal society.

LSHG Convenor Dr Keith Flett said, the Business University model has failed. Academics and related skills are being thrown on the scrapheap, impoverishing the education system and denying the chance of future students to learn essential skills and knowledge. We back the UCU’s action. They are beacon of light in the academic gloom

Blair, Starmer and Burnham & Trotskyism

A post on UnHerd has argued that Andy Burnham should rekindle his youthful dalliance with Trotskyism. Rather fanciful. Burnham noted in 2010 that he had briefly been a fan of Derek Hatton before settling on Neil Kinnock. This does not suggest however that Burnham spent his youth studying Trotsky’s Transitional Programme.

Blair went further noting in 2011 that he had read Isaac Deutscher’s classic biography of Trotsky. There is an issue with this however. Blair is known for being somewhat economical with the truth and for not being a great reader.

Starmer by contrast was in the second half of the 1980s very much associated with a variety of orthodox Trotskyism….

Starmer and Socialist Alternatives

Andy Burnham

In March 2010 he made this confession to The Independent.

This might be career-limiting to say but, as a young teenager, I was very taken in by Derek Hatton who in the early 80s seemed to be on the north-west news every night taking on Maggie.

UnHerd September 2026

Tony Blair

The nine-item list appeared in recently launched magazine We Love This Book and includes Treasure Island, The Lord of the Rings, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes and biographies of Mohammad and Jesus. On The Prophet, Blair writes:

This book may seem an odd choice for an originator of New Labour, which is about as far from Trotskyist politics on the progressive political wing as you can be, but it was, curiously, the first political book I read and the one that got me interested in politics. It is in three volumes. It was, for its time, hugely significant. In that era, the Soviet Union was supreme: Stalinism had crushed all dissent in the communist empire; Trotsky, one of Lenin’s original lieutenants in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, was an outcast. Deutscher’s trilogy was a powerful counterblast. It described Trotsky as the true revolutionary who stood out against the cruelty and oppression with which communism came to be associated. Trotskyism and its fight with the official Soviet-style left defined student politics in the 1960s and 1970s, and no one who lived through that period can forget it. But the most interesting thing for me is the character of Trotsky that Deutscher reveals. For all his faults and inconsistencies, the range of his thinking and the energy of the creativity were remarkable. And ultimately, despite his rigid adherence to Marxism, he was moved by an impulse far more moral than scientific.

 2011

This was touched on a socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research on 28th September

I’m not sure Lenin used the term ‘miserabilism’ but the meaning of being against defeatism he certainly did expand on

The badge comes from the 1970s and was produced by the SWP for specific reasons that might also inspire some historical research at this distance (I was there but while I recall the badge, and have one somewhere, I have no recall of its specific purpose).

Given that the (non-Leninist) theme of the 2026 Labour Conference is ‘hope’ the badge sends a message to the less than hopeful John Healey.

Raymond Williams in Keywords notes that ‘hope’ is what those that think as a matter of political ideology things can never better oppose.

In terms of what Labour is up to Gramsci’s pessimism of the spirit optimism of the will might fit better. In other words doing something won’t be easy but it can be done. From below in my view

Update

Gregor Gall who gave the seminar on the Redskins has posted their version of the badge in the comments. It focuses on the miserabilism of the Smiths and the Cure. So a message to Smiths fan Andy Burnham too

29th September in the traditional calendar is Michaelmas, so expect all those who go on about British history to be speaking out.

It’s a quarter day, that is when rent is due but its also a feast day. Goose is eaten and much beer is drunk.

It is also again according to tradition the last day on which blackberries can be picked

In Medieval times there was an attempt to hold it on the first Sunday of October (not a working day) but this failed not least because drinking beer in Church while paying homage to the Saints was frowned upon

Michaelmas – Wikipedia