Kmflett's Blog

26/7^th February 1900. 124 years since the Labour Representation Committee was formed. What did the first Labour MPs read?

by George Charles Beresford, sepia-toned platinotype print, 1905

The Labour Representation Committee was formed at a conference held in Farringdon St, central London, on 26 & 27th February 1900. Its aim was to secure Parliamentary representation for the interests of working people, that is ‘labour’. It was not to obtain a majority Labour Government. Such a matter was un-thought of at the time.

The building still stands (much modernised)and the Memorial Hall is marked by a plaque. I covered the offices it now accommodates as a union officer for many years.

In 1906 29 MPs were elected under the LRC banner and the Parliamentary Labour Party was formed. The vote for who should lead it was tied on the first round and on a subsequent vote Independent Labour Party member Keir Hardie just edged ahead.

Naturally there was a good deal of interest in who the 29 Labour members were.

Many were from Lancashire- where the Liberal vote had been weak but anti-Tory feeling still strong. There were also trade union officials and leaders with a minority being ILP socialists like Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden,

There were no women- female suffrage did not yet exist. The split between moustaches and beards in the ranks of the LRC MPs was more or less even with Philip Snowden clean shaven.

W T Stead Editor of the Reviews of Reviews sent a questionnaire to the 29 MPs asking them about their reading habits and favourite books.

Stead and more particularly the only significant commentary on Stead’s piece by Bealey and Pelling (1958) are quite condescending about the responses received, unjustifiably so.

Hardly any of the 29 had read Marx and only a few any work by a well-known socialist such as Robert Blatchford.

Will Thorne, a Marxist and an SDF member had read Marx while Charles Duncan an ILP member had read Blatchford’s Merrie England and George Barnes was familiar with the work of William Morris. Some had read Fabian Tracts

Leading ILP member Philip Snowden meanwhile said he had been influenced by an American critic of socialism, Richard T Ely.

I’m not sure that it is really a huge surprise that few of the 29 LRC MPs of 1906 could be called committed and well-read Marxists.

What is perhaps more interesting is the depth of their, at least professed, reading across more general works. Some had consulted the Bible which is hardly a surprise as nearly all the 29 MPs were Methodists. It’s fair to say that from its pages they had taken some kind of radical thoughts.

Others had read Henry George- who wrote on land nationalisation- and numbers were familiar with Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle.

Overall those 29 MPs- the first to represent the Labour Party in Parliament were a well-read bunch. They were mostly not well up on the Marxist critique of capitalism but they had certainly read widely on what might be called the ‘human condition’, about poverty and the struggle to survive in a profit led society.

Most were union officers who most on the left nowadays would regard as being uncomfortably close to the interests of the employer.

However, as with Taff Vale, the employer wasn’t always interested in having a close or any relationship with unions. Those MPs did at least have a reasonably good grasp, through experience and reading, of the conditions those who voted for them experienced, even if they didn’t always do much about it.

Lee Anderson as part of his Islamophobic attacks on London Mayor Sadiq Khan claimed that hundreds of people had been arrested for racist abuse on the huge Palestine marches in London since October 2023.

These marches have been very heavily policed and the Met Police have imposed all kinds of restrictions meaning that getting arrested for inadvertently breaching one is a possibility.

Even so the numbers arrested, given the numbers attending are far less in proportion than might be found at a Premiership football game or outdoor music concert

The numbers actually arrested for racist abuse are 30* and these may well be far right racists in some cases. It appears to be the case that most of those arrested are eventually not charged.

Anderson possibly doesnt really know what he is getting himself into but its likely Farage and GBNews do, as does the far right of the Tory Party.

The figures below are from BBC Verified on 26th February

How many have been arrested at marches for racist abuse?

Suspended Conservative MP Lee Anderson has criticised London Mayor Sadiq Khan over the policing of pro-Palestinian marches in the capital.

“Hundreds of people had been arrested for racist abuse on these marches and we barely hear a peep from the mayor,” Anderson said in a statement on Monday, in which he doubled down on his criticism of Khan.

According to the figures from Metropolitan Police, there were:

• 43 arrests in October
• 89 arrests in November
• 19 arrests in December

The figures include arrests of pro-Palestinian protestors as well as counter-protestors, but there is no breakdown for this.

Religious/racial abuse has been listed as the reason for arrest in a total of 30 cases:

• 11 in October
• 11 in November
• Eight in December

Other reasons for arrest include violent disorder, criminal damage, possession of a weapon or possession of drugs.

The data for January and February has not been fully released yet. However Met Police Boss Mark Rowley said at a briefing in early March that of 360 arrests so far, 90 were far right protesters (the Cenotaph mob inspired by Suella Braverman).

The Guardian (8th March) has an update

Claims of rampant criminality at the demonstrations, often attended by hundreds of thousands of people, also appear to be at odds with the facts on the ground. At the last pro-Palestine march in London there were just 12 arrests. This compares with 36 arrests at the Glastonbury music festival in 2023.

According to the Metropolitan police, of the 238 arrests made by police at pro-Palestine protests between October and December last year, only 35 have been charged, while three penalty notices and four cautions were also issued.

Jude Lanchin, a solicitor for Bindmans who has represented 23 people arrested at the protests, said that many of the cases were “questionable and not based on sufficient reasonable suspicion that an offence has actually been committed”.

“Out of 23 cases from October to date, only two of my clients have been charged,” she said. “A number have had the investigation dropped and others are subject to unreasonably long bail periods, although charges are unlikely to be brought. Other clients have been threatened with arrest when their actions clearly do not constitute a criminal offence.”

My thanks to my trade union colleague John Ferrett for alerting me to the point that Liz Truss managed a reference to the Chartists in her speech to the hard right CPAC Conference near Washington a few days ago. I can find no text version of her speech but she has posted a clip which contains the Chartist reference on Twitter.

Its likely that the far from huge crowd listening to Truss were baffled by her reference where she noted that movements of popular democracy such as the Founding Fathers (US) and the Chartists represented the will of the people against vested interests (of whom she has an ever increasing list)

Indeed if a Sunday Times report of the conference (25th February) is correct the audience had no idea who she was beyond ‘that British lady’

Truss studied PPE at Oxford where its possible the Chartists got a mention, although she is just as likely to have picked it up from her parents who were somewhere on the left.

It has been pointed out that Chartists activists and leaders suffered persecution and prosecution in their fight for democratic rights including jail sentences and deportation. While some might feel Truss should stand trial for various things that happened in her 49 days as PM in reality she remains at large and- hence the conference appearance-has a book coming out

The reference to vested interests has some potentially awkward connotations since the far right sometimes use it to refer to Jewish capitalists. Its of course unclear if this was in Truss’s mind.

In the nineteenth century as E P Thompson points out in the Making of the English Working Class it was a term used by William Cobbett to attack the Old Corruption of the pre-1832 political system. Cobbett focused on particular groups (rather like Truss’s Woke list) rather than develop a theory focused on overarching political or economic power

The Chartists by contrast focused initially from 1838 on political power, the Six Points of the Charter, the right for men to vote, secret ballot, equal electoral districts and so on. After 1848 they added the Charter and Something More a focus on economic and political power.

The point is that the Chartists were a genuinely popular movement, able to mobilise thousands in a range of tactics and strategies. Truss by contrast has no obvious popular base. The Chartists worked from below, rather she works from above, if it came to it, the politics of a coup d’etat rather than a social revolution

The Tories, Hate, Mobs & Crowds

Before she was sacked Suella Braverman said Palestinian protests are ‘hate marches’ and protesters an ‘intimidating mob’, which is also more or less what the reactionary thinker Edmund Burke said about the French Revolution.

Since then Sunak has talked of ‘aggressive mobs’ and apparently Parliamentary democracy is threatened by hate marches

Braverman previously echoed what Edmund Burke said about the French Revolution  determining that those who march in support of Palestine in London were an ‘intimidating mob’. She doubled down on this with a comment piece in the Times on 9^th November 2023. Here she summoned up far right and fascist groups who duly appeared and attacked police at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day.

Meanwhile a crowd of many hundreds of thousands marched peacefully calling for a ceasefire in Gaza elsewhere in central London.

Historically speaking, not a phrase likely to be found on Braverman’s lips, one person’s mob is another person’s crowd

For example protesting outside the house of someone who has transgressed many people’s understanding of what might be termed a ‘moral economy’ is a British tradition stretching back over many centuries. It was not however by any means always politically progressive, so controversy over it is also something not recent. An anti-war crowd was to be found protesting outside President Biden’s private house on Saturday reflecting deep tensions being caused by Gaza in the US.

The use of the term mob to characterise popular protest dates back at least to Edmund Burke’s view of the French Revolution. As the great historian of nineteenth century protest George Rude underlined what reactionaries thought was a mob was in many cases simply a peaceful crowd making reasonable points. If one wants to look for a mob, the activities of the Bullingdon Club are a good place to start.

While George Rude saw in a protest up to a riot the work of the crowd, and broadly progressive intentions and outcomes, E.P. Thompson was less happy with this formulation. He suggested that riots could also contain reactionary elements and the crowd involved in the Gordon Riots would be an obvious example.

I would take Thompson’s side in that debate (if only just) but underline the point above that while we may accept that there may be reactionary elements in crowds which can get involved in riots this doesn’t alter the fact that they happen and need to be understood

E.P. Thompson’s work on food riots points to the reality that the threat of a riot was often more effective than an actual riot. It could cause a reduction in the price of bread or the distribution of hoarded food. When riots did occur very much the same impact was to be found. Hidden food was seized and distributed at low price.

There were other, more obviously political riots, often associated with the Chartists. The Chartists were an organised political force that most certainly did not support riots. It was rather the wider Chartist crowd that participated in such activities, often after provocation from the authorities.

There has been a lot more research and wider perspectives on the crowd since Thompson and Rude looked at the matter in the 1960s and 1970s. Crowds are looked at from the perspective of safety risk management and from psychology as well as history.

Historical research however can provide useful context by looking at who the individuals were involved in mob or crowd protests, what their intention was, how this turned out and what the reaction of authority was. Perhaps needless to say such research is limited because often the only people who can be identified are those who are arrested and any who make public statements about their activities.

Of course the democratic crowd will usually make it clear what it’s about so a lack of clarity may suggest a mob with less clear intent. The Palestinian protests in Londonand around the UK have made it perfectly clear what they are about even if Braverman, Sunak & Co don’t like it. That’s democratic politics,  something else Braverman and other Tories doesn’t like.

Stephen Reicher is to the point on mobs and crowds in the Guardian (26th Feb)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/25/protests-crowds-police-mps-violence?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Sgt Knacker Burns, having checked the record, has found that Harry Chilcott has a series of drunk and disorderly offences and one for drunk driving. Knacker coming across Chilcott in a pub with his car parked outside, had some advice. Chilcott threatened to tell Knacker’s bosses, while Knacker eventually told Alice about Harry’s drinking. The mutual destruction of the contending parties beckons

The Bull Car Park Lights: Can Dave & Vince Fix Them?

Dave and Vince have been trying to fix the lights in the car park at the Bull. Could they fix it? Of course they couldn’t. It needs a professional

Ed, Emma & trees

The bank has refused a loan, with Emma making some suitable remarks about bankers. Will however will raise a mortgage on One the Green to cover the £20K costs. The moral economy of Ambridge still exists

Cow Hide at the Tea Rooms

Vince has suggested that the tea rooms need cheering up a bit and Natasha has agreed that the way forward is to hang Bridge Farm cow hides on the walls. Hmmm

Markie & the Bull

Markie has had another chat with Jolene in a cafe where he could be seen and overheard and quite probably caught on CCTV etc and told her not to say anything. The Ambridge Socialist thinks Mr Markie needs to take care out there

Oliver Dowden: there’s no success like failure

Oliver Dowden is currently the Deputy Prime Minister, a post that does not officially
exist, which is entirely appropriate

Dowden has nasty right-wing politics but these are invariably trumped by the
bigger reality that he is an idiot.

He appears on Kuenssberg on Sunday morning from time to time to ‘defend’ the Tory line. A recent visit saw him declaring that Tory bigot Lee Anderson could have remained as a Tory MP if he had apologised for making Islamophobic remarks, while he felt only very slightly concerned about similar
views expressed by Truss and Braverman. Former Tory Co-Chair Sayeeda Warsi
tweeted that Dowden’s comments were ‘mealy mouthed’ amounting to an acceptance
that Islamophobia is OK in the Tory Party.

On April 7th he claimed that selling arms to Israel wasnt illegal even though it became clear that he didnt know what the actual legal advice was (Dave Cameron’s dept)and defended now ex-Tory sex pest William Wragg

Dowden has form

When he was Culture Minister (February 2020-September 2021) Oliver Dowden
opined on his then favourite subject-culture wars. He wrote in the Sunday
Telegraph (16.5.21) that he was not a Maoist but a Moreist.

By this he meant (he claimed) that he was in favour of more statues not less
and more history. Dowden’s statements are sometimes amusing. There seem to have
been very few (if any)statues erected on his watch any more than, despite his
insistence, there was any great move to take statues down. Further the ‘more
history’ Dowden wanted most definitely does not include any more detail about
British imperial activities.

Dowden also noted that he believed that museums and cultural institutions
should be free of Government meddling and to make sure he set up a committee
to, er, well meddle. Its primary purpose was to promote Dowden’s Moreist
perspective.

He purged the wrong kind of person from Trustee Boards. Indeed so blatant
was he that Charles Dunstone, who is believed to be not unfavourable to the
Tory Party, resigned as Chair of the Royal Museums, Greenwich in protest.

In one of many Tory re-shuffles Dowden was replaced as Culture Minister by
Nadine Dorries and he then became Chair of the Tory Party (September 2021-June
2022) In this role he produced a range of baffling waffle although in context
this was during the latter days of the Johnson Premiership.

He was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster on 25^th October
2022. He has certainly cultivated the Tory Hard Right particularly when he was
Culture Minister but his Ministerial career suggests someone promoted far
beyond his competence who can only last for a limited period in any role before the sack
occurs.

He faced Angela Rayner at PMQs on 24th April and John Crace’s analysis of his performance is here:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/24/down-down-deeper-and-dowden-how-can-rishis-stand-in-be-so-useless

With luck and determination a pending General Election may mean he
has to look for his next job outside of Parliament even though his Hertsmere
seat appeared until recent Tory polling to be a safe one

Their Plots & Our Protests

According to the lead story in the Times on 24^th February there was a plot by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign to pressure MPs during this weeks non-debate on a ceasefire in Gaza.

Reading further on page 2, it actually reports that the PSC was encouraging supporters to lobby their MPs on Gaza and also holding a related protest in Parliament Square attended by several thousand people. The protest was entirely peaceful, although the Speaker who bungled the whole debate for possibly less than the best of reasons, seemed to imply that there was some kind of terrorist threat.

I’m not an historian of Parliamentary lobbies but they have been a feature of Parliamentary politics for generations. If not perhaps from the 1832 Reform Act which began the process of constructing the present Constitutional Monarchy we have, certainly since the time of the Chartists- where in effect a mass petition was the instrument of lobby to the rise of the organised labour movement from the 1850s.

The Speaker’s words set off Islamophobes (not that they needed it)but in one of those interesting contradictions led to Lee Anderson having the Tory Whip suspended after yet another outburst.

The Times grasp of Our Island Story is unreliable but here is short guide to plots

Guy Fawkes 1605: plot

Plug Plot 1842: not a plot, General Strike

Chartist Rally,Kennington, April 1848, mass protest

Chartist Rising London August 1848, plot

The distinction between plot and protest is that the former is secretive, involves limited numbers and is uncovered, invariably by State informers and spies, while a protest involves thousands openly and is not in anyway secret

This seminar is free IN PERSON ONLY.Room 301, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet St, London, WC1.

Please book at the link:

https://www.history.ac.uk/events/transnational-perspectives-french-anarchism1880-1918-biography-networks-and-print-culture

Further Details

Transnational Perspectives on French Anarchism (1880-1918):

Biography, Networks and Print Culture

In the past 20 years or so, the history of the anarchist movement has been ‘transnationalised’, through a set of new approaches and methodologies probing the cross-border connections between organisations, groups and individuals and the functioning, fluctuations and limitations of anarchist networks through which activists attempted to make the foundational principle of internationalism a lived reality. This ‘transnational turn’ has involved, among others, a focus on individual mediators, cosmopolitan exile/ migratory settings as places for strategic discussion and exchange, as well as the key role of publications in connecting these communities, sharing information and debating ideas on multiple scales. These themes form the core of this paper, which examines the transnational (and, to a lesser extent, trans-partisan) dimensions of the French anarchist movement between 1880 and 1918, through the history of the French-speaking anarchists exiled in London in the 1880s-90s and the intense transnational networking of the Paris-based editor, writer and publisher Jean Grave.

Constance Bantman, University of Surrey

Minette Batters the first female President of the National Farmers Union is stepping down and has offered her thoughts on Tory Ministers she has dealt with to the Times (24th Feb)

On Liz Truss she noted that she ‘never did any detail. She was just obsessed with Instagram. And cocktails and cheese’

Truss’s obsession with image over substance is well known and possibly prudent as there is no substance as is her cheese fetish. The cocktails point seems to be new.

Lee Anderson. The Great Lurching Right Show

Earlier this year Lee Anderson resigned as a Deputy Chair of the Tories after a year in post. He opposed Sunak’s Rwanda Bill because it wasn’t racist enough. But instead of voting against it he abstained because Labour MPs were sniggering at him.

It suggested that he doesn’t have the moral fibre to be part of a far right grouping associated with Braverman and Jenrick. Anderson then  said he wanted his Deputy job back and quite likes Rishi really. It didn’t happen.

Rishi Sunak had a minor reshuffle in early February 2023, or as many saw it, re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Someone who did have that you view- as he had recently made the comment on WhatsApp- was Ashfield MP Lee Anderson.

‘Red Wall’ MP Anderson who sits for Ashfield will almost certainly lose his seat at the next Election but in the meantime he had almost a year as Tory Deputy Chair.

Anderson who was a Labour member until 2018 is a hard to far right Tory MP who has  frequently made comments many would see as racist about asylum seekers, is transphobic and was warned not to use the Anti-Semitic phrase ‘cultural Marxism’.

He was at it again last week making racist comments about London Mayor Sadiq Khan that led to Labour calling for him to be sacked.

It might be noted though that it was Labour manoeuvres over the Parliamentary vote on Gaza that helped to create the political climate for Anderson to lurch even further to the right. Eventually he was suspended from the Tory Parliamentary Group with Sunak saying on 26th February that is comments were unacceptable. This simply caused Anderson to underline he would not apologise and renew his attack on Sadiq Khan.

Anderson come to public attention for his views on food banks. He is on record as saying that they are an ‘industry’, that they are used by people who don’t know how to cook and that a budget of 30p a day is enough to buy food.

The last comment related to the cost of food for an individual in a mass collective cooking project which sounds a bit socialist for Anderson.

Sunak who is the richest MP in Parliament probably doesn’t fully grasp the Anderson, food bank, cost of living issue. Many others will have so it’s no surprise the deckchairs on the Titanic need further re-arrangement.

After his appointment Anderson lost no time in shooting his mouth off in his new role by calling for the return of the death penalty because it is deterrent. Like other Anderson sayings this is of course evidence free. It is not currently Tory policy

The contradictions of Anderson were laid out in an Editorial in the Murdoch Times over a year ago on 10th February 2023. Headed ‘Loose Cannon’ it noted the last thing Sunak needs ‘is another personality focused distraction’.

Anderson leads a group of hard right Tory MPs the Blue Collar Conservatives who claim to represent working class voters. Don’t expect to see them supporting strikes or opposing anti-union legislation though.

Anderson now sits ranting as an independent on th back benches. If current polling is reliable he will soon be losing his seat as well. After which one suspects his GB News show will disappear as well. Perhaps he will accept cash reportedly on offer from Reform UK and depart even farther rightwards. Particularly as he has now lost the Tory Whip. Certainly his comments appeared to be motivated by Farage and Reform Party leader Tice has again invited him to join.

Given the Telegraph (26th Feb) suggests that Anderson has the support of some Tory ‘Red Wall’ MPs who are very likely to lose their seats at the Election and so have nothing to lose,a Tory split to the far or further right may be in progress.

Christopher Chope who does politics for the Telegraph and GBNews (perhaps they will have the same owner soon..) has tweeted

Former Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson held private ‘one to one’ talks with Richard Tice, the leader of the Reform UK party, at a Holiday Inn hotel, at junction 28 of the M1 in South Normanton, Derbyshire on Sunday, 24 hours after he lost the Tory whip.

Chope mainly makes mischief for Sunak’s Tories but unlike nearly everyone else on GBNews he does have a journalistic pedigree

The ramping up further of his right-wing rhetoric is unlikely to end well for either the Tories or him. The problem is those that will get caught up in the collateral damage of Islamphobia it may well provoke.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Anderson_(British_politician)