Below is what the 1997 Labour Manifesto said about the first 100 days of a Labour Government.
Changing things bit by bit via reform takes time and can be frustratingly slow as Blair found out. He decided foreign interventions had a more immediate, albeit,disastrous impact.
At Labour’s Business meeting at the Oval on 1st February Starmer also raised the 100 days issue but he is no great communicator and so essentially waffled about setting the tone, as a new CEO might.
Even so Labour did actually do things in the period after 1997 that the Tories did not like such as the introduction of the National Minimum Wage and an Employment Relations Act that made modest progress in rebalancing workplace relations towards workers and unions.
Both of these issues are on Starmer’s agenda still but how long will they remain so. Will they make it to the first 100 days?
That is why we have made it our guiding rule not to promise what we cannot deliver; and to deliver what we promise. What follows is not the politics of a 100 days that dazzles for a time, then fizzles out. It is not the politics of a revolution, but of a fresh start, the patient rebuilding and renewing of this country – renewal that can take root and build over time.
I had a pint of Exmoor Beast on Saturday. A 6.6% porter it cost me £2.63 in one the Cardiff Wetherspoons.
Beast is on the current Spoons guest ale list and is the strongest one on it.
It must be around 20 years since I’d had a pint of it. It was a favourite beer of my late father who died in 2005. He liked strong beers as he didn’t drink in quantity. The drinking was done in the Tollgate, Turnpike Lane. It’s no longer a Spoons though still open as a pub.
Beast was first brewed in 1993 (see Des De Moor’s 2009 commentary below) and although 6.6% might not seem overly strong in the days of DIPAs and imperial stouts then it was regarded as very strong. It was only to be found in Spoons, in London anyway. In those pre-craft days Spoons was by far the best bet if you wanted a cask beer (no craft keg then) that wasnt Big Beer produced.
Anyway my expectations were low. I really tried it for old times sake and I suppose in memory of my father.
To my surprise it was a very enjoyable pint. Highly drinkable with flavours of liquorice and chocolate.
The latest Labour policies to get ditched are revealed in a media statement in the Observer (4th Feb). The scaling back of plans for green investment has been heralded than the plan itself. Meanwhile plans to reform the House of Lords (favoured by Gordon Brown) are also shelved. Blair failed at this and its a reminder that you cant skin a tiger claw by claw.
What then is left? According to the statement the idea is to move (I paraphrase) from the Blairite Things Can Only Get Better to the Starmerite new realism of Nothing Is Going to Get Better.
The one policy remaining it seems is a Workers Rights Bill which Starmer mentioned in his Oval Business leaders speech. Given that the Murdoch Times Editorial attacks this at least once a week its chances of surviving to the Manifesto let alone in Office are remote.
The 1999 Employment Relations Act was the product of a similar process after 1997. I did get a bit of paper certifying me as a trade union official but all the Tory anti-union laws were left in place.
Starmer has moved from a Great Moving Right Show to the Beatles Nowhere Man, who doesnt have a point of view. Not having one is of course highly political but not in a good way
Relative of Clem Attlee hurt in pub car park dog attack. Starmer silent
Richard Attlee a relative of Clement Attlee, who also uses the name Kenton Archer, was seriously injured in a late night attack by a dog in the car park of the Bull this week. One might have thought a message of sympathy from Keir Starmer would be forthcoming but as so often, silence.
Dog attack: can Vince Casey solve it where Sgt Knacker Burns can’t?
The answer is quite possibly yes if he can find a contact of the criminal dog gang that were responsible for the attack on Kenton. Knacker Burns may investigate but this kind of stuff is way beyond his pay grade,
Fashion Show goes ahead
The rewiring of the Bull complete the fashion show organised by Mia went ahead. It reportedly featured Bert Horrobin
Relationships news
Mia and Brad have resumed relations. There was a kiss. No shower in evidence
100 years since the birth of E.P. Thompson (b February 3rd 1924)
Its 100 years since the birth of the historian and peace activist EP Thompson (1924-1993).
I didn’t know Thompson well but I did meet and converse with him particularly when I lived in Worcester (where Thompson also lived at Wick Episcopi) in 1978/79.
He is remembered as one of the key figures in the first new left, the author of the Making of the English Working Class (1963/68) and as a peace activist with CND and END.
His work and some of the concepts he pioneered such as the moral economy remains much referenced and quoted in the current day.
Below is reminder of some of the contents of the security service files on Thompson (those that have been published to date that is).
His correspondence is embargoed at the Bodleyn until 2043 but I continue to be hopeful that much of it which is also in the John Saville archive at Hull will see the light of day before too long
Keith Flett is the Editor of The Making of the English Working Class at 60 (CUP forthcoming)
The National Archives have recently released a number of MI5 files relating to Communists up to the early 1960s.
One set relates to E.P Thompson. He left the Communist Party in 1956 but MI5 bureaucracy took time to adjust.
His file for 1958-62 is slim compared to earlier periods (particularly 1956/7) and as far as can be understood (short of any MI5 or police operative speaking out on the matter) the interest in Thompson during this period was residual.
That is, there was a limited interest in anything that he might do that would disrupt or annoy the CP. Much if not of all this would have been to the left of the CP around the New Left, but it was the disruption not the specific political position that probably interested MI5.
On an initial reading there are four specific issues in the 1958-62 file that have some wider interest:
1] On 14th August 1958 a report was filed from Halifax Police HQ with the subject of Magdaleine Marie Fales. It was signed J Stephens Aliens Officer. Apparently ‘recently’ Thompson’s house in Halifax had been ‘feloniously entered’ and Stephens had accompanied the ‘investigating officer’ for the purpose of sniffing around Thompson’s house. He ( and Dorothy) ‘being away on holiday’. He found a telegram dating back to 1953 relating to Fales, a French national, who had stayed with the Thompsons in that year and had been the subject of an MI5 report. He concludes that ‘Several aliens have stayed with THOMPSON from time to time’. Don’t hold the front page..
2] In June 1961 Thompson appeared in a BBC TV programme about the Communist Party. There is an exchange of letters between Thompson and Howard Hill of Sheffield about this. Hill argues that Thompson had appeared in a programme that had attacked the CP. Thompson in reply noted that he had tried to avoid attacking the CP since the 1956 split, even though he disagreed with its line and leadership. He suggests that he had argued on the programme that the BBC underplayed or ignored left politics including the CP.
3] In the same letter 13th June 1961 Thompson notes that ‘last autumn I volunteered to go to work in Cuba for a year and I know that my invitation was quashed by Communist intervention’. This is interesting because it suggests a perhaps hitherto unknown Thompsonian regard for the Cuban Revolution but also because it would have caused further issues with something he mentioned in another letter
4] On 3rd April 1962 he wrote to Maurice that ‘I’m desperately trying to finish a book on the ‘Making of the Working Class, now very much overdue.
Despite the best efforts of Keir Starmer, the Tories are set to lose the forthcoming General Election.
That is likely to spark a leadership contest with the current PM and others likely contenders.
The Times (3rd Feb, 25th Feb) has revealed some details about the whining and dining that is going on
Sunak: On 1st February Tory backbenchers were invited to dinner with Sunak at a ‘five star London hotel’ The start time of 18.45hrs caused complaints
Kemi Badenoch. Lunches with supporters. More than gathered for warm white wine (but no food) in her Office on 19th February
Grant Shapps. Hosting Schnapps with Shapps drinks for backbenchers & a dinner at the Savoy in December 2023
Liz Truss(claims not to be a leadership contender, but who knows, she’s bonkers). Inviting MPs to drinks at 5 Hertford Place,a Mayfair Club where she dined at public expense when a Minister. Has now revived her Fizz with Liz events
Penny Mordaunt. Sent Christmas Cards to supporters, not revealed if they were edible
Robert Jenrick. No news of hospitality events, may be chewing carpets
The socialist historian and activist E P Thompson was born 100 years ago today. He died aged 69 in 1993.
There is an event to mark the centenary in Halifax which unfortunately I am unable to attend. Partly through transport issues (solidarity to ASLEF) but also a duty of solidarity with Palestinian. Thompson who was a life long anti-imperialist who wrote that the British left has ‘so bloody much to oppose’ would have understood I suspect.
Consulting as I often to the Making of the English Working Class I continue to be struck by how much of an intervention in modern politics it is. Of course Thompson’s intervention was in the post-1956 first new left. However many of the brief but to the point wider political points he makes in the book remain relevant.
Talking of the demise of radical hopes for the 1789 French Revolution and Government repression of activists and writers who supported it, Thompson noted:
there commenced for an intellectual generation that pattern of revolutionary disenchantment, which foreshadows the shoddier patterns of our own century
The spectacle of those abandon the left at the very moment there is need to stay around and organise anew remains familiar.
Later in the book Thompson criticises the Webbs and Fabian histories and defends the tradition of Luddism. He notes that ‘for those who live through it history is neither ‘early’ or ‘late’. Forerunners are also the inheritors of another past. Men must be judged in their own context’
Again it is an historiographical comment with obvious relevance for the present. Ideas and movements should not be written off but understood on their own terms
Greta Thunberg and others were arrested for protesting outside a fossil fuel summit meeting at a Mayfair hotel in 2023. The arrests were made under Section 14 of the Public Order Act which then Home Secretary Suella Braverman had enhanced to make it easier for protesters to be arrested for ‘minor disorder’.
The change was chucked out by the Lords but Braverman found a Parliamentary dodge to make it law anyway.
The case was heard at Westminster Magistrates Court this week and the spendidly named Judge Laws chucked it out too. He noted that the police had no real idea why they were arresting people or where a suitable place for the protest might be.
Suella Braverman is a lawyer but ideological fanaticism rather than attention to detail was the hallmark of her periods as Home Secretary
Rachel Reeves may have a considerable intellect. Her ability at chess and jobs as an economist at the Bank of England and elsewhere point to it. But competence in one or several areas does not guarantee it in others.
To say the jury is out on her role as Shadow Chancellor would perhaps be a little kind.
Gordon Brown’s ‘no return to boom and bust’ ultimately did not work because that is not how capitalism works, as old marxists with beards told him. Even so Brown was addressing an important social democratic aspiration. Namely that a key reason people vote Labour is the expectation that it will temper just a bit ‘red in tooth and claw’ capitalism. That means some effort to make sure that a market economy does not lead to a market society (as it currently has).
Below is a line from Rachel Reeves speech at the Labour business forum held at the Oval on 1st February (New Statesman)
On stage, Reeves agreed that “a market economy thrives on risk, on daring, on leaps into the unknown’
So what does she plan to do about that? I may have misunderstood but I rather suspect, she celebrates it.
February 2nd is the start of Spring in the traditional calendar. Meterological Spring comes later
We’ve taken back control but don’t expect to find Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage tweeting about Candlemas which is the religious name for the day in the Christian Church.
It represents in the Christian calendar the end of the period after Christmas and the beginning of the time when the days are starting to get lighter. That meant, for example, beginning to put livestock out to graze on farm land again after winter confinement.
Of course the weather is often dreadful in February and March but you have to start somewhere.
Candlemas relates specifically to the tradition of lighting candles in churches on the day which was banned after the Church split under Henry V111.
In any case as with many such festivals the Christian Church had appropriated it from other religious and non-religious festivals at the same time of year, notably for example St Brigids’ Day held on 1st February:
Typically while St Brigid’s Day was celebrated with much eating and drinking on 1st February, ahead of Candlemas bread and water was the dictated diet although that was relaxed on the day itself
