In the Rupert Murdoch ownership era The Times mostly does stories that have appeared in the S*n with more sentences.
However some parts of the traditional paper have survived.
The cricket coverage remains excellent and the coverage of French cuisine and what the Royal Family are up to continues.
Its Obituaries are also untouched by Murdoch
The obituary for Andy Kershaw is focused on his professional career rather than personal details and while it hints at his left politics its not snippy about them as Times obits often are.
I doubt Kershaw would have been delighted by a Times Obit but at least it tries to understand where he was coming from
It was sad to see news of the death of Andy Kershaw at 66. I never met him but of course was well aware of his stints on OGWT, Radio One and Radio Three. In some ways he carried on the work of Charlie Gillett underlining that the music produced in urban City environments across the world could likewise be understood and enjoyed in the same places globally including the UK. A world of which Nigel Farage has no conception.
Kershaw although a Lancashire man had a strong North London connection with the restaurant Banners that he opened with his then partner Juliette Banner in Park Rd, N8 in the early 1990s. It closed in 2023. I was not a regular customer, preferring the pubs of Crouch End but Banners became an institution
It also reflected changing times in London N8. The Hornsey College of Art occupation was hailed as the start of the British May ’68. Later the building became the TUC National Education Centre for a period. I started work in the then Post Office telecoms office just down the road in October 1979 (its now an M&S) and drank in the immediately adjacent Railway Pub (Draught Bass).
The Queens pub on the Broadway (still open) was a left gathering point from the 1960s. Later a then little known activist Jeremy Corbyn became the organiser of the Hornsey Labour Party, while local resident Tariq Ali found his attempt to join blocked.
However Hornsey & Wood Green did not elect a Labour MP until 1992 with Barbara Roche. Following the Iraq War LibDem Lynne Featherstone won the seat and then post the Tory-LibDem Coalition, Catherine West who is now the sitting MP for Hornsey and Friern Barnet.
Andy Kershaw was very much on the left, if its little mentioned in his obituaries. Also not mentioned enough is his conviction for harrassing his ex-partner. It was as he admitted a very difficult time.
All that said Andy Kershaw did a little bit to change the world and his Crouch End years played a part in that
In 2024 Lords Cricket Ground took the perhaps surprising step of announcing Brewdog has their beer partner for the ground in the 2025 season. Reportedly things went well and 750,000 pints were sold.
However subsequently things did not go so well. Brewdog went into administration on March 2nd 2026 and was bought by US outfit Tilray. At this point Lords opted out of the agreement and announced they were going out to tender for a new beer partner. Who that will be has yet to be announced.
Brewdog went under with £550m of debts. The administrators have now filed a (long) list of creditors on the Companies House website. Among them is Lords cricket ground which is owed £420,000. Since the debt is unsecured Lords are likely to get less than a penny in the pound back of what they are owed, around £4,000.
Another London sporting venue where Brewdog got the beer franchise (and still have it) is West Ham’s London Stadium at Stratford. Here the debt, £12,000, is much smaller….
CAMRA conference weekend. Drinking a beer I first had in the 1970s
It was the Campaign for Real Ale AGM and Conference this weekend in St Albans. Like many social movements there are issues and membership is falling. Not by much however and the current level is about the same as in 2018.
Anyway I attended virtually and will comment once I’ve configured my thoughts.
To mark the occasion I’m drinking a 440ml can of Theakston’s Old Peculier. It might be argued that its continued existence owes something to the campaigning work of CAMRA down the years. I joined in 1975 and remain a member.
I first drank it in the Middle House in Marske when I was a student at the then Teesside Poly from 1975. Its Adrian Tierney Jones beer of the week in the Daily Star and he too harks back to those times. Its 5.6% strength is nothing out of the ordinary now but 50 years ago it was one of the strongest beers around.
As a Vice President of the Student Union at Teesside (yes I was agitating for socialism even then as a student organiser of NOISS) we organised Freshers Week coach trips to Masham to make sure that new students became acquainted with Old Peculier.
Theakstons were eaten up by then Scottish and Newcastle (now part of Heineken- I think) but managed to escape and regain their independence. That is just as well since I doubt OP would have survived a lengthy spell of the Corporates particularly at 5.6%.
The beer is more regularly available on cask now (not least in Spoons) than it was 50 years ago but its also in cans and bottles in supermarkets. Despite all that, while taste memory is questionable (one of the lesser byways of historical research) it seems to me more or less the same beer I drank in my early twenties as I’m drinking now in my late sixties.
That makes it not just Peculier but distinctly unusual and as above don’t forget the impact the presence of CAMRA has had on that.
Documents filed at Companies House have revealed those were owed money when Brewdog went into administration in early March with debts of £550m. The debt was almost equally split between the brewery operation and the bars.
Brewdog’s main lender HSBC was a secured creditor and is owed £98.4m while the HMRC should get £5.8m.
There are around £400m worth of unsecured debts where creditors are likely to get only 1p in the pound back.
Channel Four aired a three part documentary, The Tony Blair Story, in mid-February. It was a history of the present back to the 1980s, albeit other histories are available. One person, close to Blair, who was interviewed in each episode, was Peter Mandelson. Each episode also concluded with a disclaimer that Mandelson had been interviewed before the full details of his connection to Jeffrey Epstein was known.
It was however a reminder, needed by the few if not the many, that Mandelson was central to the New Labour project and remained so until very recently.
Mandelson first appeared in the Labour Party when Neil Kinnock became leader in the 1980s and Tony Benn noted in his diary at the time that he was not good news for the future of Labour. John Smith shunned Mandelson, but after his death, he became closely associated, using the codename ‘Bobby’, with Tony Blair’s successful attempt to become Labour leader.
Mandelson’s political methods are well known but it was the politics he promoted that was and is really key. In 1996 he published a book, The Blair Revolution, with former SDP activist Roger Liddle.
Seamus Milne then a Guardian journalist reviewed the book in the London Review of Books in April 1996 and had this to say about what Mandelson and Liddle were proposing:
coalition with the Liberal Democrats, public sector no-strike deals, workfare for the long-term unemployed, expansion of private pensions and scepticism towards universal benefits
Mandelson held various Ministerial positions in the early New Labour years from 1997 and he was also sacked twice by Blair for actual or alleged breaking of Ministerial rules
Thanks to Government papers released by the National Archives at the start of 2022 we do have a record of Mandelson’s vision for Labour at the time he was Minister Without Portfolio (May 1997-July 1998). Effectively this meant he was policy advisor to Blair and the papers contain a note he sent to him about what he thought New Labour should be. It read in part:
Its political genesis is a synthesis between the historical position of left and right. It is too simplistic to say it adopts ‘left’ values but is rightward in how to achieve them. It is probably more accurate to say that it has left values but is open about to achieve them and recognises that it was the right, not the left, that up to the end of the 80s was prepared to think more freely. Privatisation of certain industries or the sale of council homes or greater autonomy for schools could have been left ideas
National Archives File PREM 49/244
We can see here the practical impact of the New Times policy pursued by Marxism Today. Understanding that Thatcherism had become a hegemonic project on the right, Mandelson and Blair sought to emulate it with a few tweaks. As Stuart Hall later noted in a sharp criticism it wasn’t the hegemonic project that was the problem it was the failure to see, likely deliberate, that it had to be built on the left not the right.
Mandelson’s influence was minimal when Ed Miliband became Labour leader and as Jeremy Corbyn underlined in a recent Commons speech non-existent during his leadership. Mandelson however was still promoting his project and this time hit upon Starmer, someone with no specific left politics, to head it up.
At a party held in a central London pub in 2022 to celebrate 25 years of New Labour Mandelson was reported as leading a chant of ‘Viva New Labour’.
Recent events suggests the end of this 40 year affair. Understanding why it existed and what it meant is essential for the left.
Peter Mandelson failed security vetting before he was appointed to the job of US Ambassador a Guardian report has revealed.
Keir Starmer, a well known Arsenal fan, has deployed what is called the Wenger Defence. Legendary Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger never managed to see on field incidents in which Arsenal players were involved.
Starmer has claimed that he was unaware that Mandelson had failed vetting until this week.
The issue here lies with politicians not civil servants as Mike Clancy General Secretary of Prospect, the union that represents vetting workers has made clear
‘It is deeply unfortunate that following the resignation of Morgan McSweeney Downing Street allowed the impression to circulate that the vetting of Peter Mandelson had not been done correctly by UK Security Vetting.
‘Not only were UKSV put in an invidious position by being asking to conduct vetting after an appointment had been announced, but now deeply troubling reports have appeared in in the media claiming that UKSV advice was overruled.
‘Civil Servants, particularly those working in the most sensitive parts of government cannot speak publicly, and deserve ministers to take responsibility for the decisions they take and not to seek to deflect blame onto them.’
VAR may be needed to review the matter, but beyond this the matter raises troubling questions
In another political stunt Nigel Farage has posed leaning on the statue of Keir Hardie in Aberdare, South Wales. With him is the former Tory leader of Barnet Council.
Farage’s knowledge of labour history is risible. If he was better informed he’d know that Hardie was a temperance campaigner and hardly a kindred spirit for Lunchtime O’Booze Farage.
Keir Hardie’s original base, from the late 1870s, was amongst first the Lanarkshire and then the Ayrshire miners in Scotland. He was a trade unionist, a full time organiser, with a Lib-Lab, that is a trade unionist within the Liberal Party, perspective on the world that focused strongly on issues of respectability such as temperance and religious observance.
Hardie stood as an independent labour candidate election in Lanark in April 1888 and in August of the same year he became the first Secretary of the new Scottish Labour Party.
In 1892 he travelled to the East End of London, another centre of a newly organising working class, to stand, without Liberal opposition, as a small ‘l’ labour candidate for Westminster. Hardie won and in August 1892 took his seat as an MP.
Questions were asked about where Hardie’s campaign funds came from. While Hardie presented himself as moving beyond his trade union background, as Caroline Benn’s definitive biography underlines, unemployment was even more of an issue in West Ham than it was in Ayrshire. The Scottish miners understood the link well enough and certainly gave some of the money for Hardie’s election.
The following year he was one of those who formed the Independent Labour Party.
When it came to the 1900 General Election Hardie, in era when it was possible to stand in more than one seat, was nominated in Preston and Merthyr in South Wales.
Preston was never likely at this point, on a still restricted franchise, to return a labour MP.
Hardie’s chances in Merthyr weren’t thought to be too good either. After all he was a Scot who had held a seat in London’s East End and was largely unknown in the area.
Hardie however had two things going for him. Firstly he had been a miner and a miner’s union official. Merthyr was a mining seat, but one which remained firmly Lib-Lab. This though was the period when the new Trades Councils were being formed in the area, and they were often a bedrock of support for independent labour politics
In a two member seat Hardie was elected MP and in the 1906 General Election was re-elected with an increased majority.
Hardie’s politics remained as they had developed from his background. A pacifist, he opposed war, and the First World War on that basis, not that of anti-imperialism. He was a determined advocate of an independent labour politics (although one that did deals early on with the Liberals) and a supporter of women’s suffrage which at that time placed him on the left of the labour movement. On the left, but certainly no revolutionary as Victor Grayson the MP for the Colne Valley was
The central historical point is that Hardie’s trajectory as a union and labour activist demonstrates that while issues of national independence are important ones, class politics transcends boundaries.
The spectre of united working class internationalism that Hardie in a way personified, continues to not only haunt the right but be of great relevance for the labour movement.
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