E P Thompson on the electoral drift away from Chartism since 1848
Working under his inspir-ation, a team of ” New Reasoner ” researchers can now show that there has been 0.5% per annum drift from Chartism ever since 1848,and this can be correlated with the increase in public education
It took a large team, subsidised by the Milord Foundation, much arduous statistical fiddling to get this result. However, summarised on the back of an envelope it can be seen that: (a) 66.5% of the population in 1848 were Chartists and/or wholly sane, (b) the only wholly sane, and therefore Chartist, candidate in 1959 (Coun. Lawrence Daly)polled 11% of the total, (c) this gives us 1% per annum drift, with an error of 0.25%, probably attributable to leap-years. For a full sum-mary of our conclusions, see our forthcoming article in the ” American Journal of Communicational Guphology.
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has barred Boris Johnson from any association with the campaign after a video of the Tory leader wearing a sort of beard appeared on the Daily Mail website.
Johnson has been seen wearing a proto beard on several previous occasions but this is the first time he has appeared with something approaching a beard.
The campaigners say it is a clear intervention in the Election and is designed to damage the chances of hirsute candidates who may be now be associated with Johnson.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, our message to Boris Johnson is a simple one: shave it off now!
The Ambridge Socialist is standing Sid Grundy for South Borsetshire on 4th July. Our leading election focus will be Free Palestine,Free Ambridge. More details of the campaign and manifesto to come. Sid Grundy, aged 30, is a distant relation of the Ambridge Grundys, living in North London and working for an NGO.
D-Day in Ambridge: Jingoism avoided
The Archers handled D-Day a lot better than Rishi Sunak. No one left early and there was no jingoism on display
Casey Meats Update
Jason has been sacked for stealing meat although there were mitigating circumstances he went unrepresented at a less than properly convened disciplinary meeting. Subsequently Vince and Freddie tracked down Marky selling stolen meat from a van in a pub car park. Marky may well be nasty but he is clearly a small time not a big time crook. He has now been arrested for being rather dodgy
Mick
Mick has parked his motor home in the car park at Grey Gables which will add a touch of much needed class to the place
In Other News
The horse crisis at the Stables continues
Fallon and Knacker Burns have re-established relations, for the moment
Rishi Sunak went to Winchester one of the top 3 public schools but not Eton. 20 British Prime Ministers have come from Eton and one from Winchester. It appears that Wykehamists are viewed as dependable and capable chaps but not top officer material (by those who went to Eton).
There seems to be an element of war breaking out at the top of the Tory Party on this basis. Not the shooting wars they all love but class war. Sunak as a Wykehamist is simply not up to the top job traditionally filled by an Etonian. Admittedly the last two Etonians, Cameron and Johnson havent been exactly great.
Some figures of the left went to Winchester. Hugh Gaitskell was one and Seamus Milne another. I do know Milne in passing but we’ve never discussed what school we went too (politically Alexandra Park in the 1970s trumps Winchester in my view) but then why would we?
A reminder from Farage to the left: pressure from outside Parliament works
Nigel Farage is having his eighth attempt at winning a Commons seat. An important piece by Aditya Chakrabortty in the Guardian reminds that the success of Faragist politics has rested largely on political pressure bought on Parliament from without.
He notes:
Over the course of his career, Farage has shown time and again that you need not win Westminster elections to change Westminster politics. As a politician, Farage is no Boris Johnson; yet, as a mode of politics, the power of Faragism is vast.
In nineteenth century Britain there was no independent working class political representation in Parliament, although individual MPs who represented workers interests such as the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor were occasionally elected even on the very limited franchise then used.
Rather there were two bourgeois parties, the Tories and the Whigs (from 1859 the Liberals). However significant political change did occur. The suffrage was extended to include rather more working men in 1867 and 1883. Trade Unionism was given a legal status and the right to strike guaranteed in the late 1860s and early 1870s.
These changes which went through Parliament were achieved by what is known as pressure from without.
The term has an interesting history. It was the title of a 1974 volume edited by the feminist and socialist historian Patricia Hollis. She went on to become Junior Minister in the Blair Governments. The book clearly represented an historical intervention into what was an earlier period of working class upsurge against a right-wing Tory Government with policies similar to the present one.
Reviewing the book Dorothy Thompson was critical, arguing that its chapters failed to address the range of activities that made up pressure from without.
The Anti-Corn Law League, run by Manchester industrialists, was perhaps the prototype for modern campaigns. Well organised with membership cards, regular publicity and lobbying of Parliament it succeeded in getting the Corn Laws scrapped. That reduced the price of bread. This allowed its core support of business owners to reduce wages, something working class members of the League, of which there were numbers, no doubt reflected on.
A rather different form of pressure from without, aimed at the very types who ran the Anti Corn Law League was what some historians have called ‘collective bargaining by riot’. Here organised crowds, or mobs as the media still call them, gathered to pressure those who sold essentials like bread and beer to do so at affordable prices. Actual riots were rare. The pressure of the crowd was usually sufficient.
A combination of the efficient organisation and lobbying of the ACCL and the mobilisation of the protest crowd suggests pressure from without can still work today.
Farage knows this, Starmer refuses it, the left needs to re-learn it
Historians renew solidarity to Goldsmiths as educational vandalism continues
The London Socialist Historians Group, which organises the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, has offered renewed solidarity to the UCU branch at Goldsmiths College.
UCU members at Goldsmiths are in the middle of a two week strike that concludes on 28th June
Goldsmiths has seen a series of redundancy exercises in recent years which staff in the UCU and students have contested.
The latest proposed cuts which currently put over 130 people at risk of redundancy focus once again in the areas of arts and humanities. While Goldsmiths claim they are committed to these areas the continuing cuts suggest otherwise. They appear to echo the current Government’s view that degrees in the humanities do not lead to high earnings potential.
That is contentious in itself but it also throws out of the window any idea of a liberal education and learning and research as part of the general good of society.
A previous plan in 2022 was for a business University where the tune was called not by educational priorities but by banks including Lloyds and NatWest who drew up a business plan for Goldsmiths. What is taught was to be determined by what was profitable not for any intrinsic educational value.
LSHG Convenor Dr Keith Flett said, what is being attempted again at Goldsmiths is a prototype of Tory plans for the future of higher education. Any idea of a liberal education valued in itself is out. In future value will be judged on a profit and loss basis. We offer solidarity to Goldsmiths UCU in continuing to resist this. That they succeed is vital.
the last hirsute Prime Minister Lord Salisbury (Tory) left Office in 1902
Beard Liberation Front
7th June
Contact BLF Organiser Keith Flett 07803 167266
Beard Liberation Front won’t stand in Election but will endorse hirsute candidates
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that it has decided not to stand candidates in the July 4th General Election. It says the surprise timing has made it difficult to agree suitable constituencies where a hirsute intervention might make a difference.
However it will endorse a range of hirsute candidates cross a range of parties and independents.
These will include former Beard of the Year Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North and the Tory candidate for Clacton Giles Watling.
A full list of endorsed candidates will be available nearer the Election after lists of nominated candidates are scrutinised. The BLF is not party political but will not support racist candidates or those likely to bring the hirsute into disrepute such as Jonathan Gullis and James Cleverley
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, its clearly a very clean shaven election, with a clean shaven man in a suit set to be PM again after July 4th. That underlines how important the work of the Beard Liberation Front is in promoting Beard Power in British politics
Marketed as ‘NOT The Dimbleby Lecture’ following BBC management’s political spiking of that invitation, Thompson’s Beyond the Cold War (1981) elaborated his vision of a non-aligned pan-European peace movement. ‘I think, once again, of 1944 and of the crest of the Resistance. There must be that kind of spirit abroad in Europe once more. But this time it must arise, not in the wake of war and repression, but before these take place. Five minutes afterwards, and it will be too late.’
It is hardly time to forget all about the second world war. Rishi Sunak may now be reflecting on that after he turned up at the 80th anniversary of D Day commemoration and that cleared off earlier.
My late father, Graham Flett,was not at Normandy byt fought at Monte Cassino in 1944 and saw some of his comrades die there. That made him of course a D Day Dodger. It was a series of bloody battles that tied up fascist troops that might otherwise have been at Normandy
A lifelong socialist, he would invariably wear a poppy on Remembrance Sunday. He wasn’t interested in Tory flag-waving and would not have been surprised at Sunak. His concern, as when he was to be found on Anti-Nazi League protests in his later years, was to make sure that the industrial scale of murder represented by the Holocaust was both never forgotten and never repeated.
Its clear that is a battle that still needs to be fought eighty years on even if Sunak has ‘better’ things to do
Narendra Modi has been re-elected as Indian PM this week although with a reduced majority. His BJP party can be characterised as far right to fascist, although India itself is not a fascist State. It is in fact one of the world’s biggest and fastest growing economies, albeit a country with huge disparities of wealth.
In a global market economy trade with India is not just unavoidable but important. However that is different to the welcome that both the Tories and Labour gave to Modi’s re-election.
Its a reminder that when it comes to the West and perhaps in particular the UK and US it is not the unpleasantness of the politician that dictates sentiment but whether they represent something that is found to be useful.
A reminder too of the line from the Clash’s White Man in Hammersmith Palais:
If Adolf Hitler flew in tonight they send the limousine anyway
Modi is not Hitler btw, the line remains a to the point comment on who the West does business with if it fits.
