Kmflett's Blog

Olympic traditions. London 2012, booing politicians

The media noted, often with some approval, the booing of George Osborne and Theresa May at the Olympic Stadium as they presented 2012 Paralympic Games medals.

What was not noted is the historical context.

After all in the age of texts, twitter and e-mails shouldnt booing be as old fashioned and redundant as the heckle at a political meeting? It would seem not, as the crowd’s disapproval made news headlines in a way that more modern methods of expressing dissatisfaction with a politician often don’t.

In fact booing has a long and complicated part in the history of protest.

Historically, certainly dating back to the time the crowd becomes an actor on the stage of history in the mid eighteenth century, booing has been a way of showing collective protest at the rich and powerful.

But it hasn’t been just booing.

What the American historical sociologist Charles Tilly called the ‘repertoire’ of the crowd went far beyond booing.  It extended to hissing, groaning, hooting and pelting with missiles, often  rotten vegetables or fruit but sometimes stones as well.

The London crowd in particular was well known from the start of the modern era for robust reactions to those it didn’t like. When John Wilkes, who went on to become Mayor of London, announced his intention to stand for Parliament at Middlesex in the late 1760s one of his opponents on appearing at a Brentford hustings found himself ‘jeered and hissed’

At the State opening  of Parliament on 29^th October 1795, EP Thompson notes in the Making of the English Working Class,  the King was ‘hissed, hooted and his carriage pelted.. the King’s carriage window was fractured probably by a pebble’

Parson Woodforde recorded  that George 111 was ‘hissed, hooted and groaned at by vast crowds’.

After the formation of the Metropolitan Police the authorities began to attempt  to control unregulated street noises and two Acts of 1839 and 1841 aimed to ban all ‘uncommon noises’ from horn blowing to street cries.

The Acts were robustly enforced and their main provisions remain in force little amended today as anyone who has ever tried to organise or do anything on the street without telling the police will testify.

However the power of the crowd could overcome robust policing at any time.

In August 1842 the 3^rd Battalion Grenadier Guards were mobilised from their barracks at Charing Cross to march to Euston Station and then by train to the north-west to be used against strikers involved in the 1842 General Strike, sometimes called the Plug Plot.

Large crowds of protesters gathered as the troops marched through central London and what the historian of London Chartism David Goodway describes as ‘murmurs of groans and hisses’ began. These grew so loud that the troops fixed bayonets in an attempt to silence the crowd. They failed.

In more recent times such crowd reactions have sometimes been stage managed- as at a pantomime and sometimes at sporting events, but the point about their use at a live event or on the street is that they are essentially spontaneous and unpredictable indicators of popular feeling.

It is not something that can be created from above or controlled it just happens, though of course in the unlikely event that 80,000 Tories could have been found to fill the Olympic stadium on that September day in 2012 possibly not too many would have booed the Chancellor

Hated politicians like Osborne get booed, while others may on occasion get cheered. Either way booing is a great democratic tradition and an Olympic one.

Liz Truss has been telling Fox News (US owned by Murdoch but think GBNews) about why her hero Donald Trump will win the US Presidential Election and why Kamala Harris will not.

She also listed the reasons why the Tories lost on July 4th. Given that she never apologised for the damage caused by her 49 day Premiership or congratulated Labour’s Terry Jermy who beat her on July 4th it is perhaps no surprise that does not list herself as one of the key reasons for the Tory defeat

“The fact is in the UK, the Conservatives got thrown out because immigration was too high, taxes were too high,” she said. “The economy wasn’t growing, people were paying very high costs for everything from food to petrol. And that’s exactly what I see here in America.”

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/liz-truss-goes-fox-news-33314303

One of the few features that the Times in the Murdoch era has retained from previous eras is the English ruling class obsession with French food. In recent times this has led to never ending articles about how the French are abandoning their traditional cuisine for fast food. France is indeed one of the world’s biggest markets for McDonalds.

Until quite recently McDonalds sponsored the Olympics but no more.

The athletes village is providing a (perhaps) more healthy menu.

The Times (23rd July) reported that a boulangerie had been built in the village to provide croissants, pain au chocolat and (of course) 800 baguettes a day.

Hot dogs and burgers will still be provided but again, obviously, using 100% French meat.

3 million bananas have been ordered.

The most in demand items are chicken skewers, salmon fillets and margherita pizzas.

Cheese is of course also on offer including Comte and Brie de Meaux.

There are special orders for particular countries. Korea has ordered kimchi, China sticky rice and Team GB porridge (very healthy btw).

There are also Michelin starred chefs who will cook a set menu of four dishes a day.

These include croissant, poached egg, artichoke cream, shavings of sheep’s cheese topped with truffle or veal in a veloute sauce enriched with cream and egg. For veggies there is chickpeas whipped into a pomade with verbena, served with beets, peas and seafood broth.

There is absolutely no mention of tofu.

What was not mentioned is that the whole operation is run by notorious global (but French owned) privateer Sodexo. Hence there have been numerous complaints ranging from the serving of undercooked chicken to too much plant based food. Numbers of athletes appear to have decided to eat elsewhere..

Bon Appetit etc….possibly

The vote on lifting the two child cap for benefits such as Universal Credit in 2024 was reportedly seen as a ‘virility’ test by the Government and the forthcoming vote on Welfare cuts seems to have fallen into the same category. Seven Labour MPs voted to end the benefit cap and were suspended. A lot more may vote against Welfare cuts, although clearly there is a political battle in progress. Starmer is often compared to Blair but history suggests he is rather more authoritarian figure, or alternatively not such a politically astute leader as Blair.

We can make the comparison because after the Labour landslide in May 1997 there was a similar ‘virility’ test over lone parent benefit cuts.

Tony Benn, who was one of 47 MPs who voted against, recorded events in the entries for December 1997 in his diary.

He noted: I spoke for four minutes only. I said I was against the Bill and gave the reasons why and said I intended to vote against the third reading… I was angry at the way the Government had behaved 10th December.

On 12th December after facing angry constituents Benn recorded ‘there is no doubt this has been Blair’s biggest mistake so far’

On 17th December there was a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party addressed by Blair. Again Benn recorded what Blair said. This included the line, ‘there are choices to be made. It is a test of our nerve. The welfare state has got to be reformed’.

The 47 MPs who voted against changes on 10th December comprised left Labour MPs and Liberal Democrats (in their pre-austerity phase). Beyond underlining on 17th December what his project was, Blair felt secure enough to take no action. We shall see how the future of the Starmer project fares.

Understanding the context of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. From E P Thompson to slavery & colonialism

In the Making of the English Working Class E P Thompson argued that there was and is a reason why the Tolpuddle Martyrs have become a labour movement tradition while others have not:

Since Luddites or food rioters do not appears satisfactory ‘fore-runners’ of ‘the Labour Movement’ they merited neither sympathy or close attention.  And this bias was supplemented, from another direction, by the more conservative bias of the orthodox academic tradition. Hence ‘history’ has dealt fairly with the Tolpuddle Martyrs… but the hundreds of men and women executed or transported for oath-taking, Jacobin conspiracy, Luddism, the Pentridge and Grange Moor risings, food and enclosure and turnpike riots, the Ely riots and the Labourers’ Revolt of 1830 and a score of minor affrays, have been forgotten by all but a few specialists, or, if they are remembered they are thought to be simpletons or men tainted with criminal folly’

Sixty years on this remains an important corrective to the grand narratives of people’s history that can sometimes be found being celebrated.

There is also a wider context and one which Thompson does not touch on, that of slavery and colonialism. Corinne Fowler underlines this in her recent book on walks through the British colonial countryside:

Corinne Fowler’s Our Island Stories, tells the story of the impact of the slave trade in the British countryside through a series of walks. One of these takes in Tolpuddle.

From the early seventeenth century Dorset people were despatched to Barbados to work on plantations. However by the 1830s they had long been replaced by African slave labour. The profits from the plantations made land owning families wealthy, but not of course the people who worked their land in the County.

The key plantation owner in Dorset were the Drax family whose land in Barbados produced sugar using slave labour. The Drax plantation still exists, although, no thanks to the family, the slaves have gone. The current owner Richard Drax has refused all attempts by anti-racism campaigners to address his families past and present.

James Frampton was the Tolpuddle Magistrate and landowner who was responsible for the prosecution of the Tolpuddle labourers. He was concerned that a union would hit profits. He had married into a family who owned plantations in Antigua

The Martyrs were framed, found guilty and transported to Australia. Frampton had sought the advice of the Home Secretary Lord Melbourne on how to successfully prosecute the Tolpuddle men. The foreman of the jury was the Home Secretary’s brother in law.

Once in Australia one of the Martyrs James Hammett was set to work for the colonial administrator of New South Wales Edward  John Eyre.

A campaign saw the Martyrs returned to Britain. Meanwhile by the early 1840s Eyre had been appointed as Protector of Aborigines in south-east Australia. Suffice to say protection of colonial interests was his priority not those of the indigenous population who he described as ‘savage hordes’.

Eyre was promoted, acting as Governor of New Zealand from 1846 to 1853 and then of the Caribbean island of St Vincent to 1860. By 1865 Eyre was in charge of Jamaica. While slavery had officially ended conditions for labourers on the plantations remained appalling. Protests were organised and in 1865 Eyre imposed martial law. A thousand Jamaicans were tortured and some executed in what is known as the Morant Bay rebellion. 

Eyre was recalled to Britain but was never prosecuted. Rather he was able to live out the remainder of his life on a modestly reduced Colonial Governors pension on his Devonshire estate. He died in 1901.

The links between the attempts to resist trade union activity in Britain and the colonial slavery regimes often owned by the same people have been too little explored. While the Tolpuddle men were certainly not slaves exploitation for profit at home and abroad was the name of the game for people like James Frampton.

It is far from just history either. At the July 4^th Election Richard Drax who was the long standing Tory MP for a Dorset Constituency lost his seat to Labour. A small victory for the six men of Tolpuddle even if i

After worst ever Election defeat Tories plan to have a new leader by November (2024)

Depending on how you want to read the statistics the defeat of the Tory Party on July 4th, winning 121 seats, was the worst since 1911 or 1832. Some may wonder what happens next.

Rishi Sunak remains as leader for the moment and the pre-Election talk of a merger between the Tories and Reform, or a split from the Tories to Reform- in other words a realignment on the right continues. The I Paper reported (20th July) that if Braverman can’t get enough backing for a Tory leadership bid she may defect to Reform in the Autumn. Presumably that would be timed for the Tory Conference.

Yet there is the near future too. Sunak has made it clear that he is not hanging around for long, so a new leader, interim or permanent, is required.

When Labour lost in 2019 the Labour right spun it as the worst result since 1935 (when the Party was recovering from the 1931 split- the parallel is too little explored) but that was on seats not total votes. It can hardly have been missed that Labour won in 2024 by getting less votes than Corbyn in 2017 but getting them in the right places. As an Election strategy it worked well..

This post is not about Labour however, simply to note that for a long while after December 2019 much of the media was full of stories and comment about Labour’s travails.

Look for similar media on the Tories post July 4th and you will have struggled. The Spectator and the Times have carried stories. In short new officers of the backbench 1922 Committee have been elected (there was controversy because not all Tory MPs were told about the closing time of the vote)and it has now been announced that a new leader will be in place by November 2024

The process appears convoluted. There is a rump of 121 Tory MPs but the initial plan is for candidates to find 10 MPs who will back them for leader, with (presumably)  a maximum of 12 candidates being whittled down to 4 and then 2 for a final vote..

The next question is whether Sunak plans to stay on until November or if an interim leader will be needed.

Conservatives launch plans to elect new leader – BBC News

Rwanda a ‘costly (£700m) con’. Make Suella Braverman pay

The Home Secretary Yvette Cooper had this to say on the Tories failed Rwanda scheme in the Commons on 22^nd July. I’m far from a fan of Ms Cooper but she did at least say asylum claims would be speeded up rather than people being left in limbo. When asylum claims were still actually being processed the vast majority were found to be appropriate.Hopefully this will go in hand with safe passages for refugees which currently do not exist. Cooper doesn’t actually say that

The person who promoted the Rwanda scheme when she was Home Secretary before being sacked (again) in November 2023 was Suella Braverman. Perhaps she should be sent the bill, or at the very least called to account for her actions while in Office..

Let me turn to the Rwanda migration and economic development partnership. Two and a half years after the previous Government launched it, I can report that it has already cost the British taxpayer £700 million—in order to send just four volunteers. That includes £290 million on payments to Rwanda and the costs of chartering flights that never took off, detaining hundreds of people and then releasing them, and paying for more than 1,000 civil servants to work on the scheme—for a scheme to send four people. It is the most shocking waste of taxpayers’ money I have ever seen.

Looking forward, the costs are set to get worse. Even if the scheme had ever got going, it is clear that it would have covered only a minority of arrivals, yet a substantial portion of future costs were fixed costs—for example, the annual direct payments to Rwanda, the contracts for escorts, the staffing in the Home Office, the detention and reception centres, and more. The taxpayer would have still had to pay out, no matter how few people were relocated. Most shockingly of all, over the six years of the migration and economic development partnership forecast, the previous Government had planned to spend over £10 billion of taxpayers’ money on the scheme. They did not tell Parliament that. I thank the Rwandan Government for working with the UK in good faith, because the failure of this policy lies with the previous UK Government. It has been a costly con, and the taxpayer has had to pay the price.

The Tory Party based on its current appeal and electorate is heading for extinction.

In 2019 the age when people were more likely to vote Tory than Labour was 42. In 2024 its 64.

If the next Election is in 2029 around 1.2m people who voted Tory on 4th July, 17% of the Tory vote, will have died. The figure for Labour by contrast is 500,000 people, 5.3% of the vote.

Its a continuing process as 10% of those who voted for Johnson in 2019 have already passed away quite possibly in some cases due to his pandemic policies.

Based on the age profile Labour could add 800,000 new young voters by 2029 while for the Tories this would be 160,000

Source: The Times 22nd July 2024

Another dimension to the Tolpuddle story: colonialism

William Cuffay, the black leader of London Chartism in 1848, is a well known figure in British history thanks in part to the pioneering work done by the later Peter Fryer with his book Staying Power.

There is now a good deal more research and published history about black people in Britain going back at least to Tudor times. Yet it remains the case that little is known about a black presence in the Chartist movement.

The presence of black workers who had come to the UK on navy or merchant ships, servants and others, meant there was a considerable black population in Victorian Britain.

The wider context of that is colonialism. Corinne Fowler’s new book, Our Island Stories, tells the story of the impact of the slave trade in the British countryside through a series of walks. One of these takes in Tolpuddle.

From the early seventeenth century Dorset people were despatched to Barbados to work on plantations. However by the 1830s they had long been replaced by African slave labour. The profits from the plantations made land owning families wealthy, but not of course the people who worked their land in the County.

The key plantation owner in Dorset were the Drax family whose land in Barbados produced sugar using slave labour. The Drax plantation still exists, although, no thanks to the family, the slaves have gone. The current owner Richard Drax has refused all attempts by anti-racism campaigners to address his families past and present.

James Frampton was the Tolpuddle Magistrate and landowner who was responsible for the prosecution of the Tolpuddle labourers. He was concerned that a union would hit profits. He had married into a family who owned plantations in Antigua

The Martyrs were framed, found guilty and transported to Australia. Frampton had sought the advice of the Home Secretary Lord Melbourne on how to successfully prosecute the Tolpuddle men. The foreman of the jury was the Home Secretary’s brother in law.

Once in Australia one of the Martyrs James Hammett was set to work for the colonial administrator of New South Wales Edward  John Eyre.

A campaign saw the Martyrs returned to Britain. Meanwhile by the early 1840s Eyre had been appointed as Protector of Aborigines in south-east Australia. Suffice to say protection of colonial interests was his priority not those of the indigenous population who he described as ‘savage hordes’.

Eyre was promoted, acting as Governor of New Zealand from 1846 to 1853 and then of the Caribbean island of St Vincent to 1860. By 1865 Eyre was in charge of Jamaica. While slavery had officially ended conditions for labourers on the plantations remained appalling. Protests were organised and in 1865 Eyre imposed martial law. A thousand Jamaicans were tortured and some executed in what is known as the Morant Bay rebellion. 

Eyre was recalled to Britain but was never prosecuted. Rather he was able to live out the remainder of his life on a modestly reduced Colonial Governors pension on his Devonshire estate. He died in 1901.

The links between the attempts to resist trade union activity in Britain and the colonial slavery regimes often owned by the same people have been too little explored. While the Tolpuddle men were certainly not slaves exploitation for profit at home and abroad was the name of the game for people like James Frampton.

It is far from just history either. At the July 4^th Election Richard Drax who was the long standing Tory MP for a Dorset Constituency lost his seat to Labour. A small victory for the six men of Tolpuddle even if it did take 190 years

This post originally appeared in the Morning Star

The Guardian sacked long time cartoonist Steve Bell in October 2023 for drawing a cartoon that was mildly critical of war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu. The cartoon was of course criticised by the usual suspects and the Guardian caved in. It does not appear ever to have apologised and the paper is much the poorer for lacking Steve Bell’s cartoons.

Thanks to the NUJ’s The Journalist we do now have a Steve Bell cartoon capturing Keir Starmer as of July 2024. It is of course right on point and probably still too much for the Guardian

Link to Steve Bell’s website: https://www.belltoons.co.uk/hotoffpress