Wednesday was the final day of the Labour Conference at Liverpool. The delayed vote on plans to scrap the winter fuel allowance for most pensioners finally took place with a powerful speech by Unite GS Sharon Graham. After some deliberation on the platform the motion was rightly declared as carried. Keir Starmer underlined that such votes were not binding on Party policy. Such a position by a Labour leader is ,far from being new, traditional. Harold Wilson in the 1960s made it clear that conference was free to pass what it wanted just as he was free to continue with the policies he wanted.
There has been at least one occasion however when a vote at Labour Conference became immediate policy:
Tony Benn Diary Monday 2nd October Labour Party Conference Blackpool
There was an overwhelming vote against smoking at the Conference, so that was the end of my pipe
25th September 1848: Black leader of London Chartism, William Cuffay, sentenced to transportation to Australia
It is the 178th anniversary of the effective beginning of the British 1848, the Chartist protest on Kennington Common on Monday 10th April 1848, and it’s worth also paying attention to the efforts that the Government made to frustrate protest in that year of revolutions in Europe.
John Saville in his authoritative book on 1848 (CUP) argues these were decisive.
The actual machinery of Government in 1848 was limited but the forces it could command were considerable as were the laws it had to deal with threats to order.
For example the current Treason Felony Act dates from 1848 when it brought together several earlier Acts and replaced the death sentence for treason with a felony- in practice at the time transportation to Australia.
The Act was discussed in the House of Commons on the evening of 10th April 1848 and passed within 24 hours despite concerns that a clause on ‘open and advised’ speaking could lead to a treason sentence for political dissent.
The State had reason to do this. Juries were reluctant to convict where the death sentence was involved and in the revolutionary year of 1848 the State wanted convictions to frustrate any attempts at revolution. Hence the first two people to be convicted under the newly amended Act were the Irish Republican Chartist John Mitchel and the leader of London Chartism William Cuffay.
Cuffay was arrested for his alleged role in an attempted Chartist rising in mid-August 1848 and sentenced on 25th September 1848 to be transported to Tasmania.
Cuffay told the Court
I expected to be convicted, and I didn’t think anything else; but I don’t want to be pitied. No, I pity the Government, and I pity the Attorney-General for convicting me by means of such base characters. The Attorney General ought to be called the Spy-General. and using such men is a disgrace to the Government, but they only exist by such means. I am quite innocent, my locality never sent any delegates at all and I had nothing to do with the ‘luminaries.’ I have a right to complain of the other spy Davis being kept back till the last moment, and he had read the evidence of the miscreant with so many aliases. As to my having a loaded pistol, I only carried it for my own protection, as my life had been threatened. This, however, it what I have always expected, I always thought it would come to something like this. I am not anxious for martyrdom, but after what I have endured this week, I feel that I could bear any punishment proudly, even to the scaffold. This new act of Parliament is disgraceful, and I am proud to be the first victim of it after the glorious Mitchel. Every good act was set aside in Parliament–everything that was likely to do any good to the working classes was either thrown out or set aside, but a measure to restrain their liberties could be passed in a few hours. I have nothing more to say.
Cuffay (1788-1870) had been born in Chatham to a former slave from St Kitts. He went on to lead the resistance to the imperial Government at its centre in London and ended up, still active as a trade unionist in Hobart Australia.
The British State, the oldest in the world, was concerned to crack down on political opponents and to avoid creating martyrs. Beyond the boundaries of the UK, British imperial policy was not so nuanced.
More detail on William Cuffay from the admirable Chartist Ancestors site
Keir Starmer has said that those who are on sickness benefit should be looking for work. Its the 190th anniversary of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act that gave us the Workhouse. Here people who were unable to provide for themselves were given somewhere to stay and basic food in return for routine work. The Act was passed not by a Tory Government but by a Whig (later Liberal) one.
Starmer’s comments appear to be in the same area. There is dignity in labour, a long held labour movement perspective. At work you can join a union, organise and start to change things. However if you are unable health wise to work-think long COVID- that just doesnt work.
The Chartists in the 1830s and 1840s had a slogan for the rich who lived well,often not from their own labour but from exploiting others, while those who worked could not afford to eat.
It came from the New Testament but it resonates in the world of Keir Starmer still:
As research historian I am strongly in favour of investigating issues, preferably with a series of open questions which don’t have preconceived answers. In that context its baffling why there has apparently been research into whether beer drinkers prefer pints or two-thirds measures. Certainly the big pub chains sell beer in pints and halves. However many independents and craft beer bars offer both two-thirds and one-third measures. A pint might be just the thing on a hot day after a walk. Two-thirds might work better for a robust 6% IPA, while an imperial stout at, say, 10% is certainly best sipped as a third.
Given that the researchers in question have previously published on whether people want smaller glasses of wine, perhaps it would just be better if they called for people to drink a bit less. Not all will agree but its a perfectly valid point that does not require rather oddly based research.
The Truss Budget 2 years on. Her Oxford Tutor was right ‘a refusal to admit she is wrong’
23rd September marked two years since Kwasi Kwarteng and Liz Truss’s disastrous budget. To mark the second anniversary Truss has been active on social media claiming that she was right and the measures she launched in September 2022 remain the only way to save the British economy.
Even KGB News has been quiet on that although Mark Littlewood who heads the ‘Popular Conservatism’ sect with which Truss is associated does appear from time to time.
Marc Stears(now at UCL) wrote about the time he was Liz Truss’s tutor during her time as an undergraduate at Oxford in the Sunday Times (31st July 2022)
According to Stears Truss’s time at Oxford was marked by an ability to come up with unusual angles on issues and stick to them even when informed that facts showed she was wrong. Secondly an ability to fiercely argue a position only to drop it and equally fiercely promote something different.
The more we hear, unfortunately, from Truss the more Marc Stears seems to be right
The art of dealing with the political heckle from Wilson to Reeves & Keir Starmer
Rachel Reeves speech to the Labour Conference in Liverpool on Monday was interrupted by a heckler. He was making a point about selling arms to Israel. Far from answering him with an effective riposte(although in this case its difficult to see what that might be), Reeves waited while security bundled the heckler out of the hall, while noting that Labour was a party of power not protest. The current Labour Party no doubt but historically it has managed both, depending on context, and found them to be linked
On Tuesday towards the end of his speech Keir Starmer was heckled about the deaths of children in Gaza. The heckler was removed and Starmer’s riposte was that they must have thought they were at the 2019 Conference. It didn’t engage the audience, which is what an effective response to a heckle does, and in fact just less the issue of Starmer’s Gaza policy hanging in the air.
It reflects the reality that while there are still very good public speakers out there, very few are to be found in Parliament, where MPs have mostly given up on the idea of engagement with a mixed audience.
Arguably the tradition survives virtually with the social media riposte.
One master of how to deal with the political heckler was Harold Wilson. Addressing a crowd in Birmingham in 1966 Wilson was talking about his public expenditure plans when a heckler cried, “What about Vietnam?” – the burning issue of the day. “The government has no plans to increase public expenditure in Vietnam,” rejoined Wilson. Heckler: “Rubbish!” Wilson: “I’ll come to your special interest in a minute, sir.”
The key to it is both an immediate response, but also a witty one that demeans the heckler and gets the audience on the side of the platform speaker.
I’m no great fan of Wilson, Starmer or Reeves, but in a democracy, both heckling and responses to it have a role to play that doesn’t involve calling security.
The late Tom Nairn writing in New Left Review 1/24 had a pithy summary of what English identity means which may be useful to Mr Jenrick…
“English separateness and provincialism; English backwardness and traditionalism; English religiosity and moralistic vapouring; paltry English ‘empiricism,’ or instinctive distrust of reason …”
Nairn was Scottish but this was part of an argument that he developed with Perry Anderson in New Left Review in the 1960s. The view was that Britain had had at best an incomplete bourgeois revolution and was therefore stuck hopelessly in the past.
E P Thompson’s well known riposte was published in the Socialist Register (1965) as Peculiarities of the English. Notwithstanding that Jenrick is a nasty and ill intentioned racist albeit very likely someway short of leadership potential. That doesnt mean he wont be Tory leader of course
The death has been announced of Frederic Jameson (1934-2024) one of the best known and most interesting Marxist theorists of our time.
Jameson’s work was focused very much on the literary but in noting this the socialist historian E P Thompson (1924-1983) started out in this area and wrote aside from history poetry and a novel.
In reviewing the cultural logic of late capitalism in New Left Review in 1984, Jameson argued that if the times had moved beyond modernism one way of seeing things was Guy DeBord’s Society of the Spectacle where everything had been reduced to images. Images that were commercially available, a form of commodity fetishism.
In one passage he touched on what this might mean for history
Of course there is a deal of truth in this. Historical images are used to sell things rather than help understanding of the past to inform the present. Fortunately as E P Thompson might well have noted had he not died shortly before the piece appeared, historical research does continue. The battle for the past continues.
The work of Frederic Jameson and E P Thompson in their various ways remains indispensable in the present day
The past is thereby itself modified: what was once, in the historical novel as Lukács defines it, the organic genealogy of the bourgeois collective project—what is still, for the redemptive historiography of an E. P. Thompson or of American ‘oral history’, for the resurrection of the dead of anonymous and silenced generations, the retrospective dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation of our collective future—has meanwhile itself become a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum. Guy Debord’s powerful slogan is now even more apt for the ‘prehistory’ of a society bereft of all historicity, whose own putative past is little more than a set of dusty spectacles. In faithful conformity to poststructuralist linguistic theory, the past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts.
Frederic Jameson Post Modernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism New Left Review 1/146 July/August 1984
Eddie Grundy has been in a furious row with Susan for turning George into the police. Eddie’s class position is that you don’t grass people up, particularly if they are your own people.
Of course George is far from the easiest person to feel solidarity with not least because he did cause a car to fall into the Am. However class solidarity trumps that. Eddie is right. Class Justice can’t be relied on.
Crisis at the tea room
Emma has quit the tea room leaving Fallon to run it on her own. The dairy and farm shop are also struggling with Clarrie out of the picture (in fact we haven’t heard from her since February 11th 2024). Apparently the solution is to hire a contract milker. Fallon’s solution hopefully is to run the café at the new and now much delayed charging station and ex-Sgt Knacker Burns can wait at tables
Flower and Produce Show
Normally the venue for vicious class tensions this year Jazzer has a giant sunflower (which is not really his) while Kenton and Jolene are producing some kind of apple pie variants to boost the Bulls socials..
Cats
Not to be outdone by Starmer at No.10 the Bull has a new cat and unlike Hilda, its friendly.
Two years after her mould breaking Budget Liz Truss has updated her list of the enemy within and combined it with a globalist perspective. The former 49 day Premier is lurching further and further to the right
Its the lawyers in London, the people working in the big corporates..its the civil servants & the bureaucrats “They don’t support normal people in Britain who back Israel and see China as a threat”
