Kmflett's Blog

US bomber taking off from RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire on April 6th 2026 (Guardian)

Labour’s Janus faced warmongers from Harold Wilson to Keir Starmer.

Keir Starmer has won plaudits even from some of his many detractors for not backing one hundred per cent Trump and Netanyahu’s illegal war against Iran. Of course the position has limits. US B52 bombers are taking off from bases in East Anglia and no doubt both the RAF and Navy are involved in various ways in supporting the war as they have been with Gaza. Even so Starmer has arguably been partly successful in appearing to distance himself a bit from Trump, a distinct change of policy.

What th altogether more wily politician Harold Wilson did on Vietnam is often mentioned in media coverage but his position was not that different to Starmers.

Unlike Australia and New Zealand, Britain did not commit forces to US efforts to prop up the corrupt Diem regime in South Vietnam from 1962-1975.

If Britain did not commit front line troops in Vietnam, British Government support for American action was largely unwavering. In March 1965 Harold Wilson told the Commons that the Government fully supported ‘the action of the United States in resisting aggression in Vietnam’.

He was echoing a line developed by the Tory PM before him Alec Douglas Home and backed by the Tory PM after him, Heath, as well.

What did this full support mean?

While no troops were officially committed, the SAS fought in Vietnam under the banner of the Australasian forces. Other troops were seconded to the US and fought under those auspices.

These were not rank and file soldiers but specialists and experts in jungle warfare.

Indeed Britain trained US, Vietnamese and Thai troops in its Malaysian facilities in the late 1960s.

It was not just training and expertise that was provided.

The British monitoring station at Little Sai Wan in Hong Kong was used by the Americans to help them target bombing raids on North Vietnam.

All that said Wilson also resisted considerable pressure from Democratic President Johnson to publicly back the US with troops on the ground in Vietnam. He resisted, perhaps because he recognised the potential political consequences and that may well have been related to the strength of opposition to the Vietnam War in the UK.

Tony Benn noted in his Diary on June 13^th 1965 the first of ‘US style’ teach-ins being held at LSE. He felt they would have influence and recorded that each time Harold Wilson’s name was mentioned there was booing.

Wilson also, at least up to the Tet Offensive in Spring 1968 when it became clear that the US was in any case losing the war, associated himself very closely with international negotiations to secure a ceasefire and peace in Vietnam, albeit essentially on US terms.

It might be argued that Starmer has a more difficult task in committing British forces to the war against Iran while maintaining publicly that he is doing no such thing. Firstly in the age of social media it is easier to track what the Royal Navy and RAF are up to, whatever the mainstream media may or may not report. Secondly Starmer has to deal with Trump who simply blurts out often incoherent and contradictory statements on his Truth Social site.

As with Wilson the extent of Starmer’s ability to appear Janus faced on Trump and Iran rests on the strength of opposition to the war.

This no doubt is related to continuing official efforts to restrict Palestinian protest, but it might be recalled that the big anti-Vietnam War protests in London in 1968 saw massive mobilisations of police and the creation of the unit that we now as Spycops

As ever, protest and survive, is essential when it comes to Labour leaders and warmongering

This post originally appeared in the Morning Star

When the English working class made, how change happens & the case of Bank Holidays

E P Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class situated that process between the 1790s and the 1830s. The timespan may have been purely practical. His partner Dorothy Thompson worked on the Chartist period and the book was already nearly a thousand pages long.

Eric Hobsbawm (Worlds of Labour) countered that the hiatus between the Chartist period and the late Victorian one meant that it was more accurate to see the working class being made between 1870 and 1914. Characteristically for Hobsbawm he evidenced statistics on the building of seaside piers and Bank Holiday train excursions as evidence for a mass working class public.

Yet at least some of the institutions that remain characteristic of the working class in 2025 in fact date from the period between 1850 and 1870, for example the Co-Operative Movement and the TUC.

Easter Monday did not become a Bank Holiday until 1871 but evidence suggests that it was taken as a working class break- a practice known as Saint Monday-much earlier. The Chartist Northern Star reported on Easter Monday in London in 1850, 176 years ago, noting it as the ‘great holiday of the labouring classes’ where workshops were comparatively empty and places of amusement inordinately full.

From this it can be argued that the presence of an organised working class after 1850 from the New Model Unions to the Reform League and International Working Men’s Association meant that the State had to act to formalise Bank Holidays that many workers were in fact taking anyway- the traditional practice of Saint Monday.

Research work in progress, thoughts welcome, perhaps in particular whether (and for example) the London practice of observing Easter Monday as a holiday was also to be found in the mill towns of northern England where work-discipline was perhaps different..

Donald Trump’s war on Iran backed inevitably by veteran war criminal Netanyahu whose mission remains a regional war in the Middle East, made a social media post on 5^th April including several expletives. Whether he is insane, suffering from dementia or other issues, I’ll leave to those qualified to make a professional comment (I’m the wrong kind of Doctor for that). It does suggest that Trump is the first President since Nixon to potentially put the future of humanity at risk (of course others- Reagan etc- were contenders).

Trump unlike Nixon does not, as far as we know drink, but other substances are available..

The bottom line here is that Nixon was losing the war with Vietnam and Trump is losing the war with Iran. The experience of defeat is significant.

Will Lloyd writing in the New Statesman (10th April) suggests an interesting distinction between Nixon and Trump. Towards the end of his Presidency Nixon was focused on two things- getting drunk and trying to start a nuclear war. Nixon would however at least be sober in the morning after the night before and Kissinger was available to handle night time issues. By contrast since Trump does not drink, from the moment he wakes up he is a lunatic and since he has surrounded himself with sycophants there is no one to intervene to head off the nuclear war temptation

Hunter S Thompson wrote about the last US President to be as deranged as Trump (thanks to Rick Halpern for posting it)

“The power of the presidency is so vast that it is probably a good thing, in retrospect, that only a very few people in this country understood the gravity of Richard Nixon’s mental condition during his last year in the White House. There were moments in that year when even his closest friends and advisers were convinced that the president of the United States was so crazy with rage and booze and suicidal despair that he was only two martinis away from losing his grip entirely and suddenly locking himself in his office long enough to make that single telephone call that would have launched enough missiles and bombers to blow the whole world off its axis or at least kill 100 million people.

. . . But it was mainly a matter of luck that Nixon’s mental disintegration was so obvious and so crippling that by the time he came face to face with his final option, he was no longer able to even recognize it. When the going got tough, the politician who worshiped toughness above all else turned into a whimpering, gin-soaked vegetable… But it is still worth wondering how long it would have taken Haig and Kissinger to convince all those SAC generals out in Omaha to disregard a Doomsday phone call from the president of the United States because a handful of civilians in the White House said he was crazy.

Hunter S Thompson, Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1976  via Rick Halpern

EP Thompson on polemic, academic rigour & the Matthew Goodwin issue

The socialist historian E P Thompson died in 1993 and certainly never heard of or knew Matthew Goodwin the GBNews presenter and former academic.

It is perhaps worth noting how I came across a Thompson paragraph that relates directly to the issues Goodwin has faced with his latest volume. Namely that while his status has been that of an academic he is currently a polemicist. As critics have pointed out while the polemic may appeal to some (not myself) is it not soundly based academically.

I was trying to check if Thompson had actually delivered a series of lectures on his book Customs in Common (1991) before it was published at Queens University Canada in the Spring of 1998.

A Canadian Professor had pinged me a flyer for the lecture series on BlueSky but other sources seem to suggest that Thompson was worried about how rigorous his research was at this point and perhaps did not actually lecture. I haven’t yet found a definitive answer.

Thompson most well-known book The Making of the English Working Class (1963 and still in print) was a lengthy and well researched book but it was aimed at a general audience and perhaps particularly a left activist one. The book contained ground breaking historical research but also polemic.

Thompson was criticised from the right for doing this and as he noted he made a distinct effort to keep his researches and his polemics separate even if they often informed each other.

Goodwin might usefully ponder Thompson’s words, but I don’t think he will

Thompson wrote in a monograph

I have been invited to say something about the relationship between writing, history and politics, as it comes to me through my own experience. In one sense, there is little to say that is not obvious. Or so it seems to me. One writes history as a historian and engages in political polemic as a citizen, and the one does not exclude the other. Yes, the two roles may sometimes overlap or become confused, but this need not be made into a big deal. It is less a theoretical problem than a practical one, which practical measures can sort out. I am very much against mixing teaching with political (or any other sort of) proselytising, since this is to take unfair advantage of the students. It is my decided impression that this offence is more flagrantly committed from the Right –who sometimes suppose, in all innocence, that its views are the only possible “objective” orthodoxy- than from the Left. But that is no excuse for the Left to imitate the offenders.

I hav3 been invit~d to say something about the relationship

Source Sunday Times 5th April

Former England fast bowler Jimmy Anderson is playing on at 43. The captain of Lancashire this season he took 5-66 on the first day of the season. Brendan McCullum is in New Zealand.

The late socialist historian E P Thompson noted as long ago as 1959 the difference between psephology, the study of political trends, and ephology. The latter practice is designed not to analyse trends but by promoting a particular trend to influence them.

Reform for example are currently posting a series of entirely made up polls which show them leading which come firmly into the Ephology area.

Lord Ashcroft’s polls by contrast are genuine and he publishes tables to back them up. But as YouGov quite recently noted the answer you get to a question depends on what question you ask, and who you ask it of.

Lord Ashcroft’s poll published on 4th April was timed to get publicity over Easter and to an extent it has.. The main news stories are the Moon space mission and an expletive filled post from Trump threatening Easter armageddon.

As Zach Polanski has posted the poll is interesting because it shows the Greens in the lead, as he notes the first time a party to the left of Labour has led. That’s true although opinion polling has a relatively recent history. Were they around in 1848 the Chartists would certainly have led (as E P Thompson also pointed out).

A strong left vote is in my view a good thing but beware Ashcroft’s agenda. He is a Tory and the actual seat based outcome of the poll is to show the Tories with most seats and Labour with 30 odd seats. Clearly Labour is unpopular but so are the Tories. What Ashcroft is doing here is to try and influence political sentiment that the Tories are doing a lot better than they likely are.

Meantime I hope the Greens now have enough money to do some private polling and enough activists to know what is actually happening in the workplaces, communities, clubs and pubs.

175 years ago Marx visited Engels in Manchester where he was working at the family firm. Engels letter of invitation has survived. He explains that there are three trains a day from London to Manchester. The first left at 6.30am and took seven and half hours.

The second was the Parliamentary Train. Under an 1844 Act the train had to travel at no more than 12 mph and could charge no more than 1d a mile in fare. The distance from London to Manchester is 140 miles hence the train took eleven and half hours…

Unfortunately since social media did not exist in 1851 we don’t know what Marx and Engels actually did in Manchester at Easter 1851 but visiting the pub seems likely.

M a n c h e s t e r , T u e s d a y , 15 April [1851]
D e a r M a r x ,
Herewith POST OFFICE ORDER for £ 5 .

If your  wife’s state of h e a l t h and your other circumstances
permit , come up the day after tomorrow , Thursday .  There a r e
three trains for you to choose from: 1. at half past six in the
morning , arriving here at 2 o’clock (has 2nd class); 2. the
PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN at seven in the morning ( 2nd and 3rd class),
arriving at half past six in the evening ; 3. at 12 o’clock midday ,
arriving at 9 in the evening ( 2nd class). Then , from Friday to
Monday we could make a tour of the  neighbourhood
Anyway, write and tell me by return whether you ‘are coming and
by which train; I shall then be at the station. If you can’t come up
on Thursday , although sous beaucoup de rapports that would be
preferable , then come up on Friday. At any r a t e , let me know at
once how and  when . All else I’ll leave for verbal discussion, since I’d better go and
get the POST OFFICE ORDER straight away.

My regards to your wife and c h i l d r e n .
Y o u r
F. E.

The Ambridge Socialist

April 5^th

Tony loses the Angus herd, Brian loses his marbles

Easter seems to be a season of pre-valedictories in Ambridge.

Brian determined to protect Ruairi has fallen out with Miranda and appears to be going through a late life crisis. Miranda, reasonably, has had enough and terminated their relationship. At the moment

Oliver has revealed some of the truth about Brian to Miranda but has also suggested that bad knees may cause him to give up riding

Tony has been trying to say goodbye to his beloved Angus herd but has found that Helen has already put them up for sale.

Health Issues

Dr Azra continues to play a central role. She has been pursuing her mental health awareness campaign, a much needed one, even if resources are scant. She has also referred Pip for a scan after she discovered a small lump in her breast. Again prudent.

The cricket crisis

As if all this was not enough the crisis over the Ambridge cricket team continues. It has warranted a discussion on the Archers podcast with Mark Pougatch. Meanwhile Oliver has made clear that use of the cricket pitch is open to all (including Eddie’s sheep) and Lynda’s control freakery is unwarranted. Robert, revealing an unexpected previous career at ACAS, has brokered a solution which Lynda accepts. There will be Ambridge cricket 2026.

Easter Promises

Not as interesting as when Sgt Knacker Burns was crucified on the village green

Meanwhile there is war in the Middle East although news has yet to reach Ambridge…

Beard Liberation Front

5th April

EASTER MESSAGE TO THE HIRSUTE: AVOID CHOCOLATE-BEARD INTERFACE

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has sent Easter greetings to its followers but urged them to beware any chocolate-beard interface on Easter Sunday.

The campaigners say that chocolate in the beard can lead to a sticky mess which can only be satisfactorily removed with collateral damage to beard hairs and follicles.

Particular caution is urged when eating Easter eggs with creme or soft centres.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, Easter is a traditionally a time of new growth and BLF supporters will now be getting in training for the traditional May Day Beard Waggle. In the meantime we urge enjoyment with care for Easter eggs to avoid beard damage

While Allister Heath is the Editor of the Sunday Telegraph this is a random headline generator produced by the New World. Suffice to say that random and reality are often closely related.