Kmflett's Blog

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 reports (20th July) that if Braverman cant 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 struggle. 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 they met this week to decide what to do about the leadership.

The Observer (21st July) reports that some former Tory MPs want an extended leadership campaign possibly running into 2025 while a discussion about what future the Party has takes place. Some also apparently plan a ‘swift’ return to Parliament although quite how that might be achieved is not explained, given that the 121 Tory MPs elected on 4th July was probably at the upper end of the potential

In essence they could not decide so will meet again next week. Some want a fairly quick leadership election before Sunak clears off. If that doesnt happen and the matter is determined at the Tory Conference at the end of September a temporary leader may be needed.

Iain Duncan Smith has been mentioned. He was probably looking forward to his retirement but a Labour HQ purge of a candidate in Chingford and Woodford Green saw a split vote and a win for IDS. He seems to have declined the idea. Perhaps he has lost his voice.

Meanwhile the contenders for the leadership await. There seem to be around half a dozen. They are all of course hard to far right-wing and very unpleasant. They don’t matter in Parliamentary or Electoral terms just now.

But with the far and fascist right on the rise across Europe and Farage and Yaxley Lennon stirring it here, there could be trouble ahead if a close watch is not kept on what is happening here.

Liz Truss who is at the Republican Convention in Milwaukee has finally found someone to speak to. She has been addressing a meeting of Pennsylvania delegates, even though she admitted she had never been there.

The Mirror reports

Ms Truss told the crowd: “I have to confess I’ve never been to Pennsylvania. But I do have in my possession, a Liberty Bell showerhead, which is an exact replica of the showerhead that President Reagan has in his ranch in California, which I recently visited.

To be fair discussing her showerhead in the US is much safer than allowing Truss to run the UK economy…

Tom Usher ponders further research on men with beards. Without fail such exercises seek to determine whether beards are or are not attractive to women. They never consider that men might grow beards to attract other men or just because they know that shaving is climate unfriendly. Perhaps in 2024 it can just be accepted that people should be able to dress and appear as they want without being judged. Gareth Southgate’s beard is just fine by the way, whatever may be thought of his football management skills.

Keith Flett, Beard Liberation Front

Tom Usher, The Guardian

Beards, it seems, aren’t quite as sexy as they used to be. You may have heard people talking about the “hot rodent boyfriend” – the conventionally good-looking, high-cheekboned, non-bearded skinny guys, all looking as if they could be “the Sensitive One” in any given boyband. With the likes of Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi in Saltburn, Jeremy Allen White in The Bear and Timothée Chalamet (in everything) taking leading roles as today’s screen heartthrobs, you might wonder whether the moment when beardedness was synonymous with attractiveness has long gone.

It was only two years ago that journalists were declaring beards to be the “trend that will never end”, and only five years ago we were opining on how celebrities all look better with beards. But recent research suggests that even if people are split over whether beards are attractive or not, men with them still hold the court as the measure of manliness, as well as commitment in relationships.

Researchers at the University of Silesia in Poland and University of Padova in Italy surveyed 400 men between the ages of 18-40, who wore a range of facial hair, about their “social motivations”. These men were given brief descriptions of “life goals” (such as “staying with a partner long term”, and “spending time with and helping parents and siblings”) to rate in terms of how much they valued them.

The researchers found that men with more facial hair were more likely to value keeping long-term partners and taking care of family than clean-shaven lads. This led the study’s designers to conclude: “[Men with beards] are likely to engage in the kind of prosocial ‘alpha’ behaviour that helps women fall in love with them and for other men to trust or fear them.”

Sounds like a bit of a stretch – but then again, I’m just a generic bald guy with a beard (still waiting for my “BGWAB summer”). As such, I’ve never really thought of my beard as immediately signalling anything about me, other than that I simply cannot be arsed to shave at the moment (although occasionally I do find myself drinking an oat milk latte and wearing a Carhartt beanie with a North Face jacket, and realise my beard has heralded an incoming gentrification apocalypse to the local area).

Such is the complexity of beards now that they can be anything from pejorative (neck beards, bearded hipster) to exalted (alpha male), all while the men sporting them look roughly the same.

It’s nice to pretend my beard signals some deep-rooted biological message, and I can dress like a lumberjack as much as I like – but, in reality, I type out words on a laptop for a living. I know I’ve often felt completely useless as a man when hunched over at my desk, hungover and struggling with some arbitrary deadline. That sense of being unable to adequately provide is often cited as the reason why so many men are depressed, listless and angry at nothing in particular.

It’s easy to grasp at shallow concepts of manliness (such as beards, which are far easier to grow than, say, a strong sense of purpose, good relationships or life satisfaction) during these times. “I should be out hunting for wild boars to bring back to my cave,” I think. (Someone else would have to kill and skin and cook the boar for me, of course, because I’d find that all quite gross.)

At last, the British army may allow beards – prepare for a culture war

Keith Flett

Read more

In such times, we are more conditioned than ever to want quick gains with minimum input. And what better way to gesture towards such an elusive concept as masculinity than to grow a thick, lustrous beard. I still get to eat my overnight oats and wear tracksuits, but at least now I look and feel a bit more manly doing it, with zero boar blood on my hands.

But I can’t help but wonder whether it’s all a bit meaningless. Grasping at the idea that facial hair can get you the type of life you want, or that it creates an impression about you that you wouldn’t be better off trying to make yourself, with your words and actions, is like opting for another useless armour in a time where dragons no longer need slaying and women are no longer damsels in distress. Like most of modern life, it’s all a strange cosplay. Everyone is to some degree pretending to be something they’re not, to overcompensate for insecurities that in all likelihood no one else even cares about.

Maybe that’s why modern women are looking for a rodent boyfriend as opposed to an alpha male. The old world is dying, and, as the new world struggles to be born, now is the time of rat boys.

Tom Usher is a freelance writer

Protesters jailed, but as with the battle for a free press in the 1820s, more will appear.

Five Just Stop Oil supporters have been jailed for four and five years at Southwark Crown Court for conspiracy to organise non violent direct action on climate change. The aim was to disrupt the M25. The previous Government criminalised such action.

The point has been made that if protesters were jailed more would come forward. This seems likely and there is a well-known precedent in British history.

Around the period of Peterloo in 1819 the (Tory) Government was determined to crack down on radical opinion and calls for democratic rights. Prosecutions for seditious libel were common and the taxes on knowledge(levied on newspapers) saw the rise of an unstamped, illegal press. Many who published it went to jail, but that didn’t stop publication.

One of the best known was the freethinker Richard Carlile. In the early 1820s he ran a radical bookshop in Fleet Street known as the Temple of Reason. Carlile was frequently jailed but he had an important principle: THE SHOP IN FLEET STREET WILL NOT BE CLOSED AS A MATTER OF COURSE’

It wasn’t. Before the Government gave in 150 volunteers, shopmen, printers, newsvendors, had been jailed and served over 200 years of imprisonment between them.

Whose were these people? E P Thompson noted in the Making of the English Working Class:

The men and women who came forward were, in nearly every case, entirely unknown to Carlile. They simply came out of London; or arrived on the coach from Lincolnshire, Dorset, Liverpool and Leeds. They came out of a culture.

Interestingly though Thompson was also clear that while those who broke the law and fought for press freedom were part of the rise of a radical working class movement, they themselves were not usually workers, with the power to organise and challenge capital at the point of production, but artisans.

However the reading culture they promoted and developed fed into the rising working class movement and was one of the motors for Chartism from the later 1830s.

Perhaps the protests of Just Stop Oil wont change the world but they might help create a movement that does.

The BBC has reported that some attendees at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee are wearing ear bandages apparently in solidarity with Donald Trump

Trump’s ear was injured after an attempted assassination attempt. However he later played a round of golf without a bandage and it seems likely that the current bandage is performative.

Even so the ear bandage could be the right-wing fashion statement of the summer, particularly if Nigel Farage and Liz Truss who are both in Milwaukee are spotted wearing one.

The Electoral Commission has reported on political donations during the 2024 Election campaign

Labour raised £9.75m in the six week campaign (£5.4m in 2019)

The Tories raised £1.87m (£19.4m in 2019)

LibDems raised £1.6m

Reform raised £1.6m

Labour’s total was comprised of 24% of union donations (2019 90%). UNISON donated £1.49m. The GMB and FBU donated £100,000 each. Unite did not contribute. Labour relied more on wealthy individual donors. Lord Sainsbury gave £2.5m and Gary Lubner £1.49m

Of the 248 donors who contributed to Johnson’s 2019 campaign only 6 did so in 2024 and the Tories raised only 10% of the money they did in 2019

After the King’s Speech, Keir Starmer was to be found at Chequers meeting Irish PM Simon Harris. They are pictured with pints of Guinness, although Starmer is known to drink IPA at the Pineapple his Kentish Town local.

Guinness is of course eminently quaffable but Starmer missed a chance to promote Anspach and Hobday’s London Black even if it is brewed in Sarf London.

Considering the fact that Liz Truss is no longer an MP, having lost her seat to Labour on 4th July, and is currently at the Republican Convention in Milwaukee, she has had a lot to say about today’s King’s Speech.

She tweeted her list of concerns about Labour’s programme. One was of a certain niche interest. Truss criticised Stalinist housing targets. However one understands Stalinism house building was not at its core. Truss seems to have confused Stalinism with Stakhanov. He was a model Ukrainian worker (when Ukraine was part of the USSR) who exceeded production targets. His labours were used to encourage others. He was not of course building houses but the point was to promote economic growth (something Truss along with most others is keen on)

Stakhanovism and Stalinism can be seen as related but in reality Stakhanovism, in essence encouraging productivity, is not a unique characteristic of the old USSR.

Truss who came from a left-wing family background, may well have picked up the terminology from her parents. When at Oxford she is reported to have had a brief engagement with heterodox Trotskyism before departing for the LibDems. Clearly as with much else her understanding of left terminology is superficial

The State Opening of the Parliament elected on 4th July 2024 took place on 17th July with the King’s Speech.

We need to go back 27 years to 14th May 1997 for a State Opening of Parliament with a very similar Labour majority. Tony Blair plays the role of Keir Starmer and Queen Elizabeth that of King Charles

Tony Benn wrote a brief account of the occasion in his diary. He appears to have swerved the Queen’s Speech but was in Parliament for the opening of the debate on it.

The motion of address was moved by Gerald Kaufman, a very amusing speech, I can’t stand the man but he was very funny. And then Chris Mullin made another very good and funny speech. John Major replied; it was quite reasonable, repeating some of the anxieties of the Tories in the election. Then Blair made a very confident speech-it was really a new President Kennedy, more so even than President Clinton. Kinnock, by the way, was in the Gallery.

graphic: BBC

King Charles is opening a new session of Parliament on 17th July (together with Camilla) and in case anyone forgets that Britain is a Constitutional Monarchy his headwear for the occasion is the Imperial State Crown. The Crown is full of diamonds stolen on a range of historic British imperial endeavours, although that is the kind of history those who demand that all of British history is told prefer to gloss over…