Liz Truss was responsible for 51% of Government spending on air travel in 2022
The political debacle that is Liz Truss continues to confound.
The Mirror has reported that Truss was responsible for 51% of all Government spending in 2022. During that time Truss was Foreign Secretary, campaigning to be Tory leader, PM for 46 days and then a backbench MP.
The £1.8m cost including £370K on a trip to a G20 meeting in Indonesia in July 2022. The 18 hour trip resulted in the briefest possible stay by Truss as she flew straight back to begin campaigning for Tory leader after Johnson resigned.
A trip to Australia in January 2022 on the official Government plane cost £454K
Cheaper alternatives were of course available even allowing for the point that in the age of a climate crisis joining some events virtually might have been a more responsible option.
Liz Truss remains a Tory MP and a confirmed Tory candidate at the next Election.
Truss One Year On: Her Oxford Tutor noted ‘unusual angles even when facts showed they were wrong’
It’s a year since Liz Truss was appointed Prime Minister after being elected Tory leader by 80,000 members.
Marc Stears(now at UCL) wrote about the time he was Liz Truss’s tutor during her time as an undergraduate at Oxford in the Murdoch Sunday Times (31st July 2022)
According to Marc Stears Truss’s time at Oxford was marked by an ability to come up with unusual angles on issues and stick to them even when informed that facts showed she was wrong. Secondly an ability to fiercely argue a position only to drop it and equally fiercely promote something different.
There are many MPs, both Tory and Labour, that fit that description, but unlike Truss they never became Prime Minister, even briefly
Douglas Murray is a far right Old Etonian controversialist. Writing in the Telegraph (4th Sept) he argued that people in the North London Borough of Islington were well disposed to what he terms ‘illegal migrants’ they should be ‘dumped’ in the area.
Of course for someone like Murray all migrants are ‘illegal’ even though most have legal claims to asylum based on Government figures.
In recent times Islington has been the home to some well known Tories such as Boris Johnson although Murray probably regards him as a Trot.
North London’s communities themselves owe a lot to wave of migrants who have come to the area fleeing persecution since the late nineteenth century. They have always been welcome and remain so, notwithstanding of course that racists have tried to divide and have failed to do so.
Murray is too ignorant of Islington’s history to know about some former residents. The details are below
Lenin and Krupskaya set up house in two rooms situated on the first floor of № 30, Holford Square, and stayed there until the beginning of May 1903. This Square is situated in the borough of Finsbury, about 10 minutes’ walk from King’s Cross Station. The house where Lenin lived was destroyed in the early bombing raids during the Second World War. Opposite the house, a Memorial to Lenin erected by the Finsbury Borough Council was unveiled by the Soviet Ambassador Mr. Maisky, on Lenin’s birthday, April 22 1943. On the house itself, Mr. Maisky unveiled a plaque of commemoration to Lenin, which was placed there by the London County Council in 1942. It is now placed in the Finsbury Town Hall.
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that Keir Starmer’s latest Shadow Cabinet reshuffle has left him with more clean shaven revisionists even than Tony Blair.
Blair was prepared to tolerate beard wearers such as David Blunkett, Robin Cook and Frank Dobson.
By contrast Starmer’s Cabinet contains just one and half beards- that of Jonathan Ashworth and on occasion Darren Jones.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett, one of the reasons the BLF was founded in the mid-1990s was to oppose Blairite clean shaven revisionism. However compared to Starmer, Blair’s Cabinet’s appear positively beard friendly by contrast
On 5th September 2022 Truss won the Tory leadership on 47% of membership vote. She was elected as Tory leader and hence appointed as PM (on Tuesday 6th) beating Rishi Sunak by 57% to 43% of the 141,000 votes cast. The turn-out was 82% (it was largely an e-ballot) meaning the Tory membership was then 172,000. Its now thought to be under 150,000.
The 80,000 votes Truss got did not pass the 50% threshold of those entitled to vote which currently applies to trade union ballots. Truss got 47% of the vote on this basis and were it a union ballot it would have been declared invalid as the TUC noted.
As much to the point she had no mandate from the electorate for her policies. Six weeks later she was out of office and in short order replaced by Sunak the man she had beaten just a short period before.
Two years we can only look back in anger except of course for the five remaining Tory leadership candidates who have had nothing at all to say about it, despite four of them serving as Ministers under Truss
The life of Marx featured on Mastermind on 4th September. A musician with a beard successfully answered ten questions the last of which was about Marx shaving his beard off. Why he did so remains unresolved and there are no extant photos of the shaven Marx
Mystery of Marx Algiers beard shave photographs remains
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said it believes it has resolved the long running mystery about why Karl Marx had his beard shaved off while in Algiers in April 1882 and whether a photograph of him without the beard actually exists.
While there is no doubt that Marx did visit an Algerian barber to have his beard shaved and hair trimmed the reason for this has remained obscure.
While in letters to Engels from Algiers in April 1882 Marx describes the weather as very changeable with rain and high winds he notes in a letter to Engels on Friday 28th April 1882:
‘Apropos; because of the sun I have done away with my prophet’s beard and my crowning glory (but in deference to my daughters) had myself photographed before offering up my hair on the altar of an Algerian barber. I shall receive the photographs next Sunday (30th April). Specimina will be sent to you from Marseilles.
The photograph was taken by E Dutretre on 28th April 1882 and is in the archive of the International Institute of Social History. It is thought to be the last one to be taken of Marx while alive.
Another purporting to show Marx clean shaven is a fake, probably a photomontage of what he might have looked like.
Intriguingly Marx wrote to Laura Lafargue from Monte Carlo on 6th May 1882 stating ‘I enclose one photo for you another for Fred; no art can make the man look worse
This suggests that a photo of the clean shaven Marx may exist but is not extant.
Marcello Musto who is at York University Toronto tweeted on 28th November
He wrote to Engels: “I have done away with my prophet’s beard and my crowning glory but had myself photographed before offering up my hair on the altar of an Algerian barber”.
In 1882, when he visited Algiers, Marx surprisingly shaved his beard.
Musto has written an excellent study of Marx’s last years but the precise reason for his Algiers beard trimming remains an open historical question.
Reshuffle: Starmer’s Great Moving Right Show moves on. Some historical contexts
Keir Starmer has reshuffled his Shadow Cabinet in changes which the Guardian notes represent a further shift to the Blairite right of the Party. A narrow church it definitely is.
Two Blair era veterans Hilary Benn and Pat McFadden return. Their competence is hardly in doubt. The politics are rather different matter.
Others on the hard right of the party get new jobs including Thangam Debbonaire who will do well to hold her Bristol seat, Peter Kyle and Liz Kendall who got 4.5% in the 2015 leadership vote.
Lisa Nandy becomes the last of those who stood against Starmer in 2020 to be purged and is despatched to shadow a Government department that does not exist. Rosena Allin-Khan is also out. While generally a Starmer loyalist her insistence on principles and reality meant she had to go.
Does any of this make any difference? I doubt it.
As Harold Wilson noted in the 1960s Labour Conference could decide whatever it liked and he would get on and do whatever he liked, albeit he faced a Cabinet with a lot more political heft than Starmer’s team. The last period should have made clear that Starmer’s Labour Party is run by Starmer and no one else.
Angela Rayner takes on a new levelling up role but retains the New Deal at work job as well as being Shadow Deputy PM. She herself has compared the role to that of John Prescott. That is someone with working class roots, albeit by now distant ones. Blair a far more adept and competent leader than Starmer will ever be managed to peacefully co-exist with Prescott, more or less. We shall see if Starmer manages the same with Rayner in the next period.
Keir Starmer has a habit of making promises that somehow turn out to be a bit less than that or as Marx noted ‘all that is solid melts into air’.
However an Election is nearing and Westminster politics is back for the autumn so promises now may be sightly more meaningful.
The promises are rather general. While its nice to know that Starmer won’t hammer workers like the Tories I’m sure people on the office floor will be saying, so we’ll still get hammered but a bit less. Indeed and that is putting a rather positive spin on Labour’s current version of social democracy.
There is a more fundamental point. What does Starmer mean by workers? It is ‘by hand or by brain’? The words are from Clause IV of Labour’s 1918 Constitution that Blair scrapped.
We can at least hope that Starmer is not recalling his sub-Trotskyist youth and starting a policy discussion on productive and unproductive labour.
Keir Starmer affirmed when he became an MP rather than took the oath,a right won by the late nineteenth century MP Charles Bradlaugh.
The right-wing media sometimes describe him as an atheist which suggests a positive affiliation to not having faith. Its also sometimes aligned with political currents that don’t align with the labour movement at least historically.
A description of secular or humanist might work better although they can also have positive affiliations.
Beyond this the Church of England has long been known as the Tory Party at prayer. It’s a sign of the fracturing of the base of the Tories that this is no longer the case. A Times survey of CofE clergy found that 36.1% would vote Labour at an Election and 17.9% LibDem. Just 13.2% would vote Tory.
Expect the Telegraph and the Mail to come out in support of the Disestablishment of the Church of England as the Election nears..
Somewhere on social media this week, the question was posed whether any of the men in Ambridge are capable of looking after themselves without female assistance.
It was perhaps slightly harsh since Adam and his partner the Pizza King clearly are. However amongst the proletarians of the village Neil, Eddie etc there is definitely an expectation that their meals will be cooked for them. The ruling class is not that much different. Daveed’s adventures in cooking are well known. Brian has dabbled but no more. It’s the kind of largely traditional English village that Roger Scruton promoted. In this respect at least.
Pip & Stella
The liaison continues, although we still await a shower scene. Daveed struggled to grapple with the reality that Pip might have a special friend who was a woman but at least he didn’t try to ban it. Meanwhile Pip has annoyed Stella by hiding her from Roooth. To be continued..
Jazzer & Tracy: Proletarian Wedding of the Decade
Perhaps not exactly as it was late in a Registry Office but it still deserves to be celebrated. Mia was of course right to point out that marriage was not a good idea, just in case Brad was having the idea..
Is Grey Gables bankrupt?
Work has stopped on the Grey Gables refurb and Ardil wants Lynda to organise a November opening event for free. The signs of bankruptcy beckon. As the Ambridge Socialist has previously noted it would make a decent Wetherspoons
