Kmflett's Blog

The Tory Blob & North London

The Blob was a 1958 US sci-fi film where a Blob engulfs things and people. Eventually it is frozen and dropped in the Artic where it will stay dormant as ‘long as the Artic stays cold’. Hmmm

More recently however it is a term used by Liz Truss who was Prime Minister for 49 days last autumn.

Truss is keen to blame people and things for her own mistakes. For example she previously complained about people living in North London townhouses. Now it’s the ‘blob’ and the ‘left-wing economic establishment’. The latter is now referred to as ‘blobomonics’.

The term has of course been accused by far right US politician De Santis who specialises in meaningless verbiage and has talked of the Woke Blob.

Currently it is used by Tory MPs who remain part of the Truss cult and use it to refer to civil servants whose professionalism they see as frustrating their extreme free market fantasies.

It was used by Jake Berry as a conference of the Northern Research Group of Tory MPs in Doncaster.

A small amount of actual research took place to write this post but the Red Wall MPs who comprise the Group are not usually noted for their research based insights.

Berry was very briefly Tory Chair when Truss was PM. The link between the Blob and North London in their minds is clear. Senior Civil Servants are often based in London and Blobomonics is obviously theorised in North London Townhouses.

As conspiracy theories go its not the best but what would you expect given who is behind it?

The Ambridge Socialist

11th June

Is Brian endangering ruling class Ambridge?

The fall-out from Brian’s decision to summarily sack farm manager Stella continues to rock ruling class Ambridge. Adam is on manoeuvres claiming that he knew nothing even though his tacit agreement to Stella purchasing some costly new equipment and failure to mention this was a key element in her dismissal.

Perhaps unsurprisingly Justin has stepped in and threatened to call an emergency meeting of Borchester Land over Brian’s failure to plant a contracted field of maize on time. Unless of course that is he reinstates Stella who is an associate of Justin. A band of warring brothers and sisters

George Grundy is the wrong kind of rebel

George Grundy is being annoying again. He is a rebel with the forelock tugging perspective of Will Grundy, his hero being Borchester Land’s Martyn Gibson

Titchener News

Lee and Tom plan a friendly visit to Titchener. There will be trouble ahead

In Other News

The Borchester Echo has revealed David Archer’s real age: 82.Quite young for the Archers

Freddie Pargetter has been DJing as Freddie P

I often note comments that I’ve given up writing Fletters, and they don’t appear for example in the Guardian.

Its true that I write fewer Fletters now. Partly because there are fewer publications to write them to. NME? Time Out? Partly also because in the era of social media there are other ways to communicate.

However I have had two Fletters in the Guardian this week.

The Fletter on Caroline Lucas applauds her decision to stand down as an MP to spend more time, as Tony Benn noted, doing politics.

Of course Parliament is important even in the debased state of Old Corruption that 13 Tory years of Government have left it in.

However extra-Parliamentary politics, what the Victorians called pressure from without, gives people a chance to campaign and change things more often than putting a cross on a ballot paper from time to time.

An obsessional focus on Parliament and only Parliament won’t change the world

Update

Some further Guardian letters(14th June) on the issue. One urging the importance of standing for election, the other on how problematic this can be with the current electoral system

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jun/13/caroline-lucas-is-a-symbol-of-a-better-politics?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

In late Spring 1873 Engels noted Marx was overworking and suffering from insomnia. He visited Engels own GP Gumpert in Manchester who prescribed the following daily regime:

Breakfast and exercise after breakfast

2 hours work

Light wines with soda

1-1.5 hours sleep after lunch

2 hours work in the evening

Plenty of movement

Opening of bowels

Engels to Kugelmann 1st July 1873

Histories of the present: Johnson only ever acts out of self interest

Boris Johnson has resigned as an MP probably to avoid losing a By-Election in his Uxbridge Constituency, the likely outcome of the findings of a Commons Committee on whether he lied to Parliament.

There is much speculation as to what happens next

Boris Johnson is not someone given to resigning. It no doubt goes back to his Eton days when it was noted that he felt that rules that applied to everyone else did not apply to him.

A brief history of Johnson underlines that he has only ever resigned once before and that was because it suited his personal ambition.

Johnson has departed from several journalistic jobs at the Times and the Spectator but he has also been sacked as a politician.

In 2004 when Michael Howard was leader of the Opposition, Johnson was Shadow Arts Minister and Tory Vice-Chair. He had an affair with Petronella Wyatt and she became pregnant. She decided to have an abortion and Johnson tried to keep the matter out of the public domain.

However news of it started to appear in the tabloid press. Johnson tried unsuccessfully to lie his way out of it. Howard decided that Johnson would have to go not over the affair or the abortion but because he had lied about it. He instructed his spokesman Guy Black to speak to Johnson and get him to resign. Johnson refused. After watching a Liverpool football match Howard then spoke directly to Johnson at 6.30pm and sacked him. It was November 13th 2004.

Johnson’s view was that only by being sacked would get sympathy, a resignation would not do it.

There is an exception that belongs in a different category. In July 2018 he resigned as Foreign Secretary in Theresa May’s Government. He had done nothing wrong on this occasion (in fact he had done very little in the role at all). The issue was that he wanted a harder Brexit than May. His resignation was part of the strategy to get elected as Tory leader and get the harder Brexit he wanted.

Many might feel that what he actually wanted was not a particular kind of Brexit but the position of PM which he thought his support would get him- correctly. As ever it was all about Johnson’s personal fortune.

When it comes to his current political position, whether resignation or sacking by his own MPs, the issue is where his personal ambition takes him. If he can’t return as Tory leader is he set on wrecking Sunak’s electoral chances, or famously lazy as he is, does that require too much hard work? Perhaps his focus now will be on making money, his one obvious personal obsession (and he does have a lot of children to support).

Either way with the Tories split and squabbling its an excellent time to pursue action on the cost of living crisis. Something which also clearly impacts Johnson, just on a different planet

Source Sonia Purnell, Just Boris

Boris Johnson: still no sign of the beard of political defeat

This picture appears in the Daily Mirror, 31st May 2023.

Note in this ten days old picture Boris Johnson’s trademark uncombed hair(despite giving his hairdresser a gong) and his shirt hanging out. Unusually he is wearing matching socks.

There is however no sign of Johnson yet growing a beard of political defeat. It is a political fashion first set by Al Gore after he lost the 2000 US Presidential Election.

A Johnson beard will not get him on the shortlist for the Parliamentary Beard of the Year however after his resignation on 9^th June

Beard Liberation Front

9th June

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has sent follicular greetings to Jeremy Corbyn on the 41st anniversary of his election as the MP for Islington North.

He has won the annual Parliamentary Beard of the Year Award more times than any other MP.

He has been a stalwart hirsute presence in the Commons which until quite recently was very clean shaven on the male side. From time to time he has also raised beard related issues such as the EDM about railway beards on 3rd May 1991.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, Jeremy has been a resilient opponent of clean shaven revisionism and we salute him and his beard. If elected on July 4th he may well become the first hirsute Father of the House for many years

June 1983 Election. Eric Hobsbawm on Labour’s Lost Millions

Eric Hobsbawm wrote a lot of very interesting history and as a member of the Communist Party until it dissolved itself he also opined on politics. The history was mostly much better than the politics (though I should I add I was and am a member of the Communist Party Historians Group, now the Socialist History Society).

One point I completely agreed with Hobsbawm on was that marxist historians (myself included) should be ‘historians of the present too’. That is the history of the twentieth century and indeed of Stalinism (or actually existing socialism if you were that way inclined) had to be grappled with.

Hobsbawm did a lot of this in Marxism Today which started life as the CP’s theoretical journal but by the 1980s was more like (as Hobsbawm later admitted) the house journal of New Labour. Note ‘more like’ not ‘like’.

One example was the analysis he wrote after Labour’s defeat in the October 1983 edition of Marxism Today which was titled Labour’s Lost Millions

It is well a worth a read now because so many of the themes he raises and notes featured in the discussion of Labour’s Election defeat on 12th December 2019 and continue to do so.

Hobsbawm argued that Labour had lost millions of votes of people who were working class but did not vote for the Party. His suggestion was that Labour must become the party of workers by hand and by brain, hence a much broader alliance of people,

Hobsbawm’s analysis was not entirely to the point as he often wasn’t politically.

Labour had not finally lost the votes of millions workers. We need only look at the results of Blair in 1997 or Corbyn in 2017 to see it is much more complex than that.

Historically the point perhaps was that Labour had only been a nearly automatic home for working class votes arguably from 1945 to 1979

Hobsbawn was certainly not right to think that Labour was set for a perpetual decline as a party however. It remains the largest broadly social-democratic party in Europe even after losing several hundred thousand members in the Starmer period.

On the other hand he had a point that in 1983 Labour had to grapple with Thatcherite Toryism as a new variant.

This was the variant that didnt see any point in maintaining UK manufacturing capability when this could be done elsewhere but profits still gathered by the Tories friends from it. 40 years on despite Brexit this still applies.

At least Hobsbawm saw the need to understand and to an extent oppose market capitalism rather than get into political bed with it

Caroline Lucas opts for pressure from outside of Parliament

In the nineteenth century, when those who had the vote were limited even after the 1867 Reform Act (and nearly all men) those who wanted to reform or otherwise change things pursued a strategy of pressure from without.

The view was that campaigning outside of Parliament through meetings, petitions and campaigning was likely to be more effective than trying to get radical MPs elected. Some were elected and even Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor had a seat at Nottingham in the 1840s, but in reality change whether on the Corn Laws (which kept the price of bread high)or Ten Hours on working conditions was something that originated from and was successfully pursued from outside of Parliament.

Caroline Lucas decision to step down as the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion at the next Election seems to be determined by Tony Benn’s view that doing so will allow her to spend more time on politics. She has mentioned in particular the need for campaigning on climate change and cited the tactics of Just Stop Oil as an example where protest can have at least as much impact as plugging away on the Parliamentary back benches.

Caroline Lucas was a stalwart of the stop the War Coalition in opposing the Iraq War and was often to be found amongst the small minority who backed radical measures in the Common. While there was some common ground with the Labour left, in reality, Green politics often have a rather different trajectory. Sometimes this was unpredictable as Lucas joined various centrists on Brexit when it might have been thought that a Europe wide focus on climate politics might have worked better.

Still these are issues of tactics and it will be interesting to see how Caroline Lucas pursues pressure from without

After Roger Waters: The Labour Right has a long history of intolerance

Labour leader Keir Starmer has demanded that Roger Waters concert tour of the anti-fascist epic The Wall be cancelled because he finds certain content ‘Anti-Semitic’. Starmer does not appear to have seen the show and Waters has been very clear that his impression is wrong.

It is one thing for Starmer to disagree with Roger Waters or find aspects of his show offensive but another to actively demand its cancellation. Perhaps needless to say this particular variant of Cancel Culture has not attracted the concern of the self-styled Free Speech Union or a Times Editorial.

It is a reminder however that the Labour right have a long history of taking action against those whose views they find challenging.

Disciplinary action against those advocating policies to the left of what is usually a right-wing Labour leadership has been a consistent feature of the Party since the 1930s.

Nye Bevan and several other MPs were expelled in March 1939 for advocating a popular front against Hitler and working with the Communist Party and others. His ‘crime’ was to appear with some on the left who were proscribed from Labour. A modern day echo is the purge of North Tyne Mayor Jamie Driscoll because he appeared with Ken Loach to discuss a film.

 Bevan was re-admitted in December 1939 after agreeing to break his connections. However he remained a left-wing critic of the Government (when not a Minister himself) and came close to expulsion again on several occasions in the 1950s.

His biographer and successor to his Parliamentary seat in Ebbw Vale Michael Foot had the Labour Whip withdrawn by right-wing leader Hugh Gaitskell for voting against military spending estimates in 1961. It was not restored until Harold Wilson became leader in 1963.

In recent times Jeremy Corbyn has been banned from being a Labour candidate at the next Election, while Diane Abbott remains suspended for writing a letter to the Observer.

As Aditya Chakrabortty says in a Guardian article (8^th June) the Labour right has few ideas but is certainly very keen to try and take action against those that do have them.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/08/jamie-driscoll-labour-keir-starmer-north-of-tyne-mayor?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other