Kmflett's Blog

Do the Tories face electoral oblivion or will they morph into a hard right Faragist Party

Rishi Sunak won the Parliamentary vote to give his latest plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda and it is now in the Lords. Only 11 Tories voted against and they did not include Lee Anderson. He had resigned as Tory Deputy Chair to vote against his own Government but in the end didn’t so because he said Labour MPs were sniggering at him

However the crisis for Sunak is just getting worse. He may be preoccupied with bomb out to help out Netanyahu but a YouGov poll showed the Tories would be reduced to a rump at the forthcoming Election. Sunak is the second unelected PM the Tories have had since 2019 and now some want a third. Hard right Tory MP Simon Clarke has called in the Telegraph for Sunak to go

The crisis in the Tory Party which saw Johnson and Truss depart is intensifying

During the summer 2023 recess the Tories ran a series of weekly campaigns on issues like asylum seekers and crime. All ended up causing at least as many problems for the Tories as they did for the opposition.

The Tories remain at least 20% behind Labour in the polls and are badly split. Nadine Dorries resignation letter to Sunak was partly farcical but partly sharp in pointing to numerous Tory policy failures.

Meanwhile former Home Secretary Suella Braverman on the hard right of the Tories has renewed calls for Britain to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights.

In 2005 Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote a book arguing that the Tory Party had reached the end of its historic existence. As the years since 2010 have unfortunately demonstrated he was wrong. However in a recent Guardian article he has returned to the point, arguably more persuasively.

The Tories as a party representing ruling class interests have been ‘shapeshifters’ pragmatically shifting positions and policies to fit the demands of the moment. So the Tories resisted demands for an extension to the vote with force at Peterloo in 1819 and in Parliament with the 1832 Reform Act. However in 1867 they passed a further Act extending the suffrage.

Likewise they were the party of the landed aristocracy but in 1846/7 repealed the Corn Laws because this was in the interest of the rising industrial manufacturing class. In much more recent times Tory leader Edward Heath took Britain into was is now the EU in the early 1970s. 50 years on the Tories are focused on Brexit and staying out of the EU.

The problem they have is that beyond making money for their mates and sometimes themselves they no longer have a coherent view of what a ruling class politics which can also win elections is. There have been five Tory leaders since 2015 each seemingly more incompetent than the last.

Boris Johnson personifies the crisis. He was not a supporter of Brexit and notoriously only became so not out of some great principle or understanding of ruling class interests but because it served his personal ambition to be Prime Minister.

However I don’t agree with Wheatcroft that it is certain that the Tory Party is finished as an absolute certainty.

There are several factors which might see it survive in some form.

The first is Labour. Despite huge majorities in 1997 and 2001 Blair while tinkering with reforms determined that his real focus was illegal wars. Then in the financial crash of 2008 Gordon Brown decided that the key thing was to save the market economy and in doing so ushered in an era of austerity. Unsurprisingly Labour votes declined significantly and the Tories who had looked finished made a return

Starmer of course has his own variant on this. If the Tories are busy making themselves redundant then perhaps the way forward is to move Labour into that space. His own version of the Great Moving Right Show. So hapless are the Tories at the moment that this strategy might work, if only briefly.

The Tories however might shapeshift again and move themselves further to the right still, around the racist politics of Suella Braverman, Lee Anderson and others. Nigel Farage and the Reform Party while a minority have the capacity perhaps to mobilise votes around such a grouping.

There is scope for a political reconfiguration on the hard right mirroring developments across the rest of Europe. Opposing it rather than joining in the Great Moving Right Show is essential.

There is speculation that after an election defeat Farage could emerge as the leader of a reconstituted hard to far right Tory Party. Perhaps but that would also mean the end of the existing Tory Party with various strands of ruling class strategies within it.

For the left while ousting the Tories electorally is important the real response to this is in workplaces and on the streets. Strikes and protests won’t win Starmer’s support but they can exert real political pressure from the bottom up

New Book recovers some of Raphael Samuel’s historical writing

A new volume from Verso edited by John Merrick collects together some of the harder to find historical writings of the socialist historian Raphael Samuel, who died in December 1996. The book includes classics such as Workshop of the World  and Comers and Goers, hard to find unless you had a copy of the original and could remember where you had put it.

The book is a reminder of the important place that Samuel has in the post-1945 ranks of British socialist historians.

My obituary of Raphael Samuel that appeared in Socialist Review, January 1997 is below

Obituary: Artisan of history

Raphael Samuel, who has died aged 61, was a youthful member of the Communist Party Historians’ Group in the 1950s when its leading members included Eric Hobsbawm and E P Thompson. However, he left the CP in 1956 and as a socialist historian he was very much a child of the `new left’ and the upheavals of the 1960s.

Samuel studied under Christopher Hill at Balliol College, Oxford, in the early 1950s, but, unlike the older generation of Marxist historians, Samuel never sought academic advancement. His published work, usually under the banner of the History Workshop, was invariably a collaborative exercise, and for more than 30 years from 1962 he remained a tutor at Ruskin College, Oxford, encouraging mature trade union students to take an interest in historical research. History Workshop collections edited by Samuel, such as Village Life and Labour and Miners, Quarrymen and Saltworkers, opened up a focus on the history of ordinary working people, and the essays were usually written by `worker historians’ ­ often students of Samuel at Ruskin. So 13 History Workshop pamphlets including Stan Shipley’s Club Life and Socialism in mid-Victorian London were published between 1970 and 1974. Shipley had been an AEU branch secretary in Walthamstow.

Perhaps ironically, shortly before his death Samuel was persuaded to take a long overdue and much deserved professorship at a new centre for the study of community in the East End of London at the University of East London.

Samuel was a key figure behind the rise of the History Workshop movement which began life at Ruskin College, Oxford, in 1966 as an informal seminar on the English countryside in the 19th century. The principal, Samuel has related, almost closed it down, worried that students were listening to each other rather than to the lecturers. History Workshop Journal followed in 1975. The Workshops in particular brought together large numbers of rank and file socialist historians committed to recovering the past from the viewpoint of ordinary people. Early sessions famously included topics such as `A Day With the Chartists’ which sought to recreate the ideas, experiences and conditions that the Chartists had encountered. The Workshop in particular became very much a product, as Samuel recorded in People’s History and Socialist Theory [1981], of the events and enthusiasms of 1968. Ruskin was out on strike days before the Paris events of May 1968.

Raphael Samuel was one of the most prominent historians in the country to support history from below ­ the attempt to actively recover the history of ordinary people and their movements. In many ways this was a step forward from the sometimes rather rigid orthodoxies of more mechanical Marxist histories. It fed in directly, too, to the resurgence of socialist ideas after 1968 and to the birth of the women’s movement in which the History Workshop Conference of November 1968 played a central organising role.

Samuel could be fiercely critical of socialists with whom he disagreed. Debate has raged, for example, about whether a series of articles he wrote about the Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s in New Left Review under the title `The Lost World of British Communism’ was an attempt to write an affectionate history from below of what it had been like to be a CP member before 1956 or an attack on any kind of left wing political activism.

He was nevertheless a great enthusiast for history and a great encourager of people engaged in socialist historical research. His energy and productivity knew no bounds, whether it was in organising meetings or producing articles.

With his untimely death socialists can make a preliminary attempt to draw a balance sheet of what Raphael achieved. The History Workshop movement, of which Samuel published a 25 year history in 1991, has declined and become, to an extent, sucked into academic respectability. In recent years it has dropped its masthead describing it as a journal of `socialist and feminist historians’ as it has reflected the pessimism of some on the left about the prospects for change after the collapse of Stalinism. Certainly the early, welcome, focus on working class history and movements and direct links to political activity in the present have largely gone. Gone too is the commitment to `worker historians’. In its place has come a certain attraction to the ideas of postmodernism. Both the History Workshop ­ where it still functions ­ and History Workshop Journal, however, remain battlegrounds, in historical terms, for many of the ideas, good and bad, which are current on the left. Their influence, and that of Samuel, has been immense. Groups and publications inspired by them exist in many countries.

History from below as practised by Samuel and others has also met its limitations. In many cases it has led towards an interest in ephemera and detailed micro-histories which, while of interest to the historian, are certainly not about changing the world. Samuel himself in recent years became increasingly interested, as his 1994 collection of articles Theatres of Memory indicates, in recovering the popular history of culture, cultural objects and artefacts. Samuel saw this interest in heritage as a real living people’s history, genuinely democratic and open to all. It is as a people’s historian rather than as a socialist historian that he would probably wish to be remembered.

Even so socialist history in this country would have been and will be much the poorer without Raphael. He kept his commitment and his ability to argue to the end. I came across him at the Bishopsgate Institute, opposite Liverpool Street station, which was to be the centre of his new chair, weeks before his death.

Despite being terribly ill he found time not only to enquire into my own research but to have a spirited debate about whether Charles Bradlaugh’s National Secular Society, formed in 1866, was a proto-Labour Party. That was Raphael, argumentative and passionate about his history to the end. He was ­ and remained ­ a real product of the 1960s with all the good and bad points that flow from that.

Beard Liberation Front

23^rd January

Luke Littler heads Beard of Winter Shortlist

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that teenage darts phenomenon Luke Littler heads the Beard of Winter shortlist.

Beard of Winter focuses on two areas:

Organic beards designed to withstand the winter weather

Beards that have been in the public eye in the previous couple of months

There will be two preliminary Close Shave Rounds with the top two from each going to a final Beard Off. The Winner will be announced on 31^st January

Beard of Winter Shortlist

Luke Littler, darts player

Gary Lineker, podcaster

Alexei Sayle, broadcaster

Idris Elba, actor

Cameron Norrie, tennis player

Steve Bell, cartoonist

Amol Rajan, University Challenge presenter

Sean Dyce, football manager

23rd January is National Hand Writing Day. Like all traditions its invented. In this case in 1977 by the US based, Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association, presumably to promote the sales of pens.

Judging by social media it has much wider currency than just the US in 2025

Above is an example of Karl Marx’s handwriting which was barely readable. My handwriting is similar although that and the beard are the only direct links with the great North Londoner.

That said I do find myself committing more to pen and paper than I have done for some years. Maybe it is just a certain ennui with constantly looking at screens. Equally it may be that as an historian there is a growing awareness that something not committed to paper but left only in e-form may disappear completely before too long

22^nd January marks the 100^th anniversary of the first Labour Government and the 133^rd anniversary of the birth of Antonio Gramsci. Which has had the more lasting legacy for the left?In 1977 New Left Review 1/100 Perry Anderson published a major essay the Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. It was notable for looking at the relevance of Gramsci for a revolutionary politics in the mid-1970s, focusing on the concepts of wars of manoeuvre and position.In 2017 Verso republished the essay in book format with a new introductory essay by Anderson.

In the concluding paragraph he suggests a balance sheet between reform and revolution:

Viewed world-historically, the difference (social democracy) has made has not been
great. The welfare state attributed to it exists in countries where it has
never enjoyed significant power- Japan, Switzerland, Ireland, Canada, even in
its fashion the United States-as well as those in which it has. In favourable
conditions, it has yielded a set of small societies in Scandinavia markedly
more civilised than the bourgeois median, even if these too are now subject to
erosion. The balance sheet of what was once reformism is not negligible but it
is modest. Of the revolutionary tradition, that cannot be said. Europe was
largely saved from Nazism by the Red Army, and China today looms larger in the
scales of growth and power than the Soviet Union ever did. The crimes and
disasters, not to speak of the ironies and reversals, of the communist record
are plain. But that it changed the world as the Second International never did
is equally plain. Not coincidentally, the legacy of its ideas, for those with
any interest in ideas, is much richer. Gramsci alone is sufficient testimony to
that.

It is an interesting balance sheet even if I wouldn’t agree that Russia was part of a revolutionary
tradition after the late 1920s or that modern day China can be included in
that. But of the classic theorists of the 1920s and 1930s, Gramsci included,
Anderson surely has a point about an important legacy. There may be political
lessons to be learnt from the 1924 Labour Government but in terms of relevant
ideas for the left Gramsci is the person to study

The left and the 1924 Labour Government

On 6th December 1923 Britain faced a second General Election in a year. The governing Tory Party were seeking a fresh mandate for a number of imperialist policies they wanted to pursue after the First World War.

Things didn’t work out as planned. While the Tories won most seats they did not have a majority. Labour with 191 seats and the Liberals with 158 could out vote them. The two ruling class parties had fallen out and the Liberals eventually determined to support a minority Labour Government. The anniversary of that is 22nd January 2024.

An event to mark the December 1923 General Election was held at the People’s History Museum in Manchester on 2nd December 2023 and was attended by Deputy Labour Leader Angela Rayner. It is quite rare in recent times for Labour to acknowledge anything much about its history. Keir Starmer was unavailable due to being at COP28. It was a convenient absence since Starmer appearing at an event which marked the appointment of Ramsay MacDonald as Prime Minister might have led to awkward questions.

Turning however to the Election itself what role did the left play? MacDonald had only recently been elected leader again in a contest with J R Clynes. MacDonald had not supported the First World War and lost his seat at the 1918 General Election. He returned to Parliament for Aberavon at the 1922 Election.

The Tories had been dismissive of MacDonald as being too extreme to be a real threat at the polls.

This seems odd to socialists who know MacDonald primarily for his disgraceful role in the 1931 National Government.

However in 1923 the Tory media saw MacDonald as a pacifist someone who was opposed to the Empire and indeed someone who might even be something of a Bolshevik.

The Election was dominated by media and Tory promoted hysteria around Bolshevik plots which led the following year to the notoriously forged Zinoviev letter.

Writing in 2019 the commentator Andrew Marr noted

‘the bigger picture was that MacDonald’s Labour showed it could govern. In many ways, that winter election of 1923 was an essential precursor to 1945’.

Be that as it may that first minority Labour Government was hardly a beacon of socialist practice.

Another Election was called for October 1924 and on this occasion Baldwin won a clear majority. Labour lost 40 seats but gained a million more votes.

It was not a surprise for the left however that MacDonald’s Government didn’t last.

J T Murphy writing in the December 1923 Edition of the CPGB’s The Communist argued that the Election was really about promoting a new drive to imperialist war and that Labour needed to harness the power of the international working class to address this.

He argued that The utter failure to do anything in this latter direction, owing to Parliamentary and bourgeois obsessions, lands the Labour Party’s proposals into the same category as those of Baldwin, Smuts and Wilson. What is the use of Labour holding aloft the banner of Socialism if its deeds are the deeds of imperialism?

Even so the article called for support for Labour as a class vote.

The parallels with 2024 are striking. The Tories may accuse Labour of radical policies that Starmer and Reeves have long since purged from the agenda. Even so many will be pleased to see a hard right Tory Government ejected from Office at the General Election.

For the left the problem is clear. A century ago as now in terms of socialist advance this represents only the most limited of progress.

An earlier version of this post appeared in the Morning Star

The 1924 Labour Government & the Free Breakfast Table

The first Labour Government which took office on 22^nd January 1924 was not in Government long enough to achieve much of significance.

One achievement however was the promotion of the Free Breakfast Table. This didn’t mean free breakfasts but rather the reduction of taxes on items that were thought to be essential parts of it.

In his Budget in late April 1924 Labour Chancellor Philip Snowden cut taxes.

Sugar duty was cut, taxes on tea were halved and there were also cuts in the cost of coffee, chicory, cocoa and dried fruits (mainly prunes).

The demand for a free breakfast table had originated with the Liberals in the 1860s and became an important part of their programmed. Snowden was a member of the Independent Labour Party but had been bought up with Liberal politics in Halifax

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Breakfast_Table

The Annual Register called it ‘A revolution in British politics as profound as that associated with the Reform Act of 1832’. Churchill called it ‘a national misfortune such as has usually befallen a great state only on the morrow of defeat in war’.

Nothing so romantic

Lenin d 21^st Jan 1924. The beard as a revolutionary tactic

It is the 101st anniversary of the death of Lenin.

He was one of the founding influences of the Beard Liberation Front, the politics perhaps, but the beard definitely. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky had beards while Stalin could only manage a moustache.

Lenin’s image with the goatee beard became a sort of cult in Russia, only after his death. This to the extent that the razor which he allegedly used to shave his beard on one occasion remains preserved in a museum.

The reality of course was different. For Lenin the beard was a revolutionary tactic. He usually wore one but he also often worked in conditions either of political illegality or, before the revolution in 1917, where he risked arrest or possible serious personal injury from opponents.

On such occasions Lenin shaved his beard off and disguised himself. The beard was characteristic of Lenin’s image but a workers revolution even more so and he knew, when it came to it, which was the more important.