Kmflett's Blog

I’m not sure the Telegraph’s Allister Heath does football but this is a New World headline generator which often comes very close to what he actually writes

The New World’s Allister Heath random headline generator produces results which are remarkably similar to what he actually writes

Daily Telegraph 18th July 2026 ‘Welcome to Burnham’s world: a farrago of nonsense, revisionism and economic illiteracy’

Tolpuddle Festival 2026. Their oaths & ours

The Tolpuddle Martyrs were jailed for forming a trade union which, based on a highly selective reading of the law, was illegal. At the centre of this however was the taking of an oath.

As E.P Thompson noted in the Making of the English Working Class oaths had a long history in British society, fundamentally they were part of traditions of secrecy, keeping authority out of the business of private individuals, for one reason or another.

Thompson noted of trade union oaths in the early nineteenth century:

Such oaths had a long ancestry, owing something to freemasonry, something to old guild traditions, and something to commonplace civil ceremonies, such as the burgess oath.

Under conditions of illegality trade unions used oaths to maintain membership and discipline.

The authorities were distinctly unhappy about the lower orders taking oaths. Indeed the matter was central to the transportation of the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

The Tolpuddle men were prosecuted under the 1797 Unlawful Oaths Act- aimed at the Navy after the French Revolution- which made it an offence to take an oath that was not required by law. It provided for a maximum sentence of 7 years transportation. It had in fact been overtaken by several other pieces of legislation not least the Combination Acts of 1824/5 which provided for lesser penalties. The decision to use the more draconian 1797 Act was of course a political one.

The taking of oaths was an important part of how ruling class society was ordered. Doctors and lawyers took them and the oath, formulated at least partly in religious terms, was designed to keep Catholics and Jews out

Thompson argues that the tradition declined rapidly after the Martyrs conviction but in reality those in favour of openly organised democratic trade union organisation, necessary if unions were to become mass organisations, were already ditching oaths.

The oath remained important in official society- for example the swearing in of MPs- until the atheist MP Charles Bradlaugh successfully campaigned for the right to affirm rather than swear an oath.

Bryson DeChambeau who is Donald Trump’s favourite golfer has been deducted two points after the second day’s play on Friday at the Open Golf at Royal Birkdale (Southport).

DeChambeau hit his ball into the rough grass at the 5th hole and video evidence showed that he trampled some long grass to make it easier to play a shot. The rule is that golfers must play the course ‘as found’

Trump who owns a number of golf courses and frequently awards himself golfing championships, introduced DeChambeau at his Mar A Lago Election victory party in November 2024

DeChambeau reportedly threatened to pull out of the Open after the penalty but it appears he will now be in Saturday’s third round

Open 2026: Bryson DeChambeau disagrees with two-shot penalty during round two at Royal Birkdale – BBC Sport

Fascism: I sometimes fear…

I sometimes fear that 

people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress 

worn by grotesques and monsters 

as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis. 

Fascism arrives as your friend. 

It will restore your honour, 

make you feel proud, 

protect your house, 

give you a job, 

clean up the neighbourhood, 

remind you of how great you once were, 

clear out the venal and the corrupt, 

remove anything you feel is unlike you…

It doesn’t walk in saying, 

“Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution.”

*Michael Rosen

One of the great cricketers Garry Sobers has died at 89.

I did see him play but the memory stretches no further than that unfortunately.

Sobers was not particularly political (itself of course a political stance) in an age when West Indian cricket was becoming a major force and taking an anti-colonial and anti-racist position.

Sobers cricket however spoke for itself. CLR James in Beyond a Boundary (1963) noted that Sobers was one of a very few batters who could see a ball early (another being Bradman) and decide what shot to play.

James saw in Sobers “the living embodiment of centuries of tortured history”, and “a West Indian cricketer, not merely a cricketer from the West Indies”.

Garfield Sobers – Wikipedia

In July 1936 Hitler and Mussolini were already in power, and Mosley’s British Union of Fascists were planning to march in Cable St (October 1936). Franco and fascist army officers in Spain launched an attack on the democratically elected Government of Spain on 17th July 1936.

There was fierce resistance. In December 1936 George Orwell went to Spain as part of an Independent Labour Party contingent of volunteers. They allied themselves with the POUM an independent Marxist party.

George Orwell wrote about his experiences in Homage to Catalonia and Ken Loach’s film Land and Freedom is partly based on the book.

As Hector Puente Sierra notes in a new study, Revolution and Counter Revolution in the Spanish Civil War it might be thought that Orwell’s description of Barcelona was made through rose tinted spectacles. In fact he argues (p157/8) it was not. Orwell was a journalist, he wrote as he saw and there are other accounts of the time that make very similar points

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

This was in late December 1936, less than seven months ago as I write, and yet it is a period that has already receded into enormous distance. Later events have obliterated it much more completely than they have obliterated 1935, or 1905, for that matter. I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señior‘ or ‘Don‘ or even ‘Usted‘; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos días‘. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers’ State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers’ side; I did not realize that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being

Beard Liberation Front

16th July

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has revealed that Count Binface, standing as a candidate in the Clacton By-Election, has a beard.

Alternatively known as Jon David Harvey, an Oxford graduate and satirist, there is clear evidence that in an alternative reality the Count has a beard.

It is not clear if it is a full time beard- this is not an issue for the BLF- or whether his beard style is intergalactic.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we have already come out as supporters of Count Binface in Clacton. We hope he shaves perpetually clean shaven Farage, the Big Barbers candidate, on August 13th

Beard Liberation Front

16th July

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has welcomed the news that London Mayor Sadiq Khan has been elevated to the House of Lords.

In recent times the Mayor has been seen sporting a gravitas adding beard.

The campaigners say that while they are no enthusiasts for the Lords, Sadiq Khan’s presence in the second chamber will add to positive images of beards in public life.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said Sadiq Khan’s Peerage will annoy the many mostly clean shaven critics of his Mayoralty and that is a good reason in itself to celebrate it.