Kmflett's Blog

London Socialist Historians Group

23^rd October

Contact Dr Keith Flett 07803 167266

Historians say graffiti on Thatcher statue is ‘living history’

The London Socialist Historians Group, which organises the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, has said that ‘Tories Out’ graffiti which has been added to a statue of Margaret Thatcher in Grantham represents not vandalism but a living history.

Statues have become part of a Tory Culture War with Ministers determined to defend those of slave traders and colonialists.

The statue of Thatcher in her town of Grantham has been and continues to be controversial. However the ‘Tories Out’ slogan is on the plinth and does not impact the figure of the late Tory leader. Rather it gives a sense that while Mrs Thatcher had much support as Prime Minister she also generated a large amount of opposition.

London Socialist Historians Group convenor Dr Keith Flett said, just as Margaret Thatcher was a controversial and contested politician it seems reasonable that a statue of her should also have the same status. She was certainly venerated by some but many others she was hated. That is an historical reality that should be reflected.

Beard Liberation Front

PRESS RELEASE 23rd October

contact Keith Flett 07803 16726

THE SCARIEST HALLOWEEN BEARD POLL. Round Two

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, which campaigns against irrational prejudice against the hirsute, has said that the crypt has creaked open on the Scariest Beard of Halloween 2022 poll with the second round of the poll now open.

Laurence Fox and Ted Cruz won the first round and go forward to the final Follicle Frenzy round

The title, awarded each year on October 31st, takes a wry look at Halloween festivities by identifying the scariest beard in the public eye. The winner is likely to win by the narrowest crack of a squeaky floorboard.

The BLF does not generally believe that beards are scary, a view promoted by generations of pogonophobes.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, facial hair is part of Halloween tradition. We aim every year to subvert some of the pogonophobia that lies behind that,  while looking in a light hearted way at ‘scary’ beards.

Scary Beard of Halloween 2022

James Corden

Richard Branson

Laurence Fox

Ted Cruz

Neil Hamilton

Jonathan Gullis MP

Antony Worrall Thompson

David Warner

Cost of living crisis? What Boris Johnson did on his holidays

Johnson has returned from his third holiday since being given the boot by Tory MPs in July for incompetence, lying and so on. He hopes to regain the Tory leadership and the PM’s job after which exertions it will surely be time for another holiday, paid for by someone but definitely not Johnson.

His first two post-boot holidays were during the Parliamentary summer recess. His latest jaunt to the Caribbean was while Parliament was sitting. He remains an MP and is paid to represent his constituents in the Commons not in the Dominican Republic.

The Guardian has the story of where Johnson stayed. What cost of living crisis?

They are understood to have stayed at the Casa de Campo luxury golf resort, where celebrity guests are said to have included Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jennifer Lopez, Jay-Z and Beyoncé.

Rooms cost from $766 (£683) a night, including taxes and fees, while a five-bedroomed villa will set guests back $3,204 a night, according to the hotel website. Villa guests enjoy a personal maid and butler service, a breakfast freshly prepared in their villa, and the use of three golf carts to transport them around the sprawling 7,000-acre (2830-hectare) resort.

Described by the Dominican Today news website as a “refuge for millionaires and celebrities”, it is located in the historic sugar mill town of La Romana. The Forbes Travel Guide writes: “Here peace, quiet and privacy are important tenets and you’ll find professional, discreet staff.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/21/boris-johnson-returning-to-fray-after-three-post-resignation-holidays

The Ambridge Socialist

23^rd October

The Jack Woolley window: deflected class struggle

Alan the vicar has finally taken a decision and rebuffed attempts by the Godmother via her representative Natasha to replace the Jack Woolley window at St Stephens (which he broke while pigeon hunting) with an Archers Dynasty memorial. Encouraged by the Professor the vicar clearly wants the church to be for the many not the few. Expect class war

Mia, George and Brad

Nothing of any note to report here

New cat in Ambridge

Cats in Ambridge tend to get a bad press as it were. Helen and Lee had temporary charge of Joy’s cat Ena this week and nothing Truss like took place

Hot tub news

A fault has developed in the hot tub thanks to vandalism by one of Helen and Lee’s kids. Fortunately future hot tub scenes are safe- it’s been fixed

New receptionist at the vet

The latest receptionist at the vets, Paul, is a bit  upbeat for miserabilist Alistair and pragmatic Jakob. The Ambridge Socialist backs Paul. Also kudos to Alistair (a very rare thing for the Ambridge Socialist to say) for calling out Martyn Gibson’s homophobia to Paul while at Berrow Farm and underlining that cancel culture works both ways.

A Woman’s Right to Choose

Chelsea has chosen and the Archers handled this well although some readers of the Mail and Telegraph probably don’t agree

The Financial Times (22nd October) has published some statistics on the brief period of Trussonomics,now ended. They make grim reading. As the relentless centrist Matt Chorley notes in the Times (22nd October) it will mean people cant afford to pay their mortgage or rent.

Trussonomics was at the behest of the hard right Institute for Economic Affairs whose funders remain obscure. Based in Tufton St near Parliament it is surely time to restrict their influence in Whitehall and the media

One Dimensional Media: Boris Johnson has 100 backers on PM ballot*

One-Dimensional Man is a book by the late Marxist critical theorist Herbert Marcuse. You don’t need to sign up to his entire argument to grasp that the way official society and media present what is happening in the world tends to exclude dissent and the possibility of alternative perspectives.

Earlier this year a good deal of the media spent time informing us that Liz Truss was destined to be the next Tory leader and that her main rival Rishi Sunak had no chance. The actual vote was 57% to 43% a gap Sunak might have made up had we not had weeks of him being presented as a loser.

I hold no brief for either. My concern is the one-dimensionality of the media. Now that Truss has resigned there is significant support for a General Election rather than yet another unelected Tory leader. The Mirror echoed this on a front page but elsewhere all you will find is pages and pages of articles on which Tory will replace Truss.

The media is eating itself however when the BBC, Sky and Reuters all reported that according to a ‘source’ Johnson had 100 backers to stand in the Tory leadership ballot. The publicly declared number is 43. As with Truss it looks like an effort to promote Johnson as the only possible winner.

To be fair to BBC political correspondent Chris Mason he did note in an analysis piece that Johnson’s relationship with the truth is ‘patchy’. He is being too kind. Johnson faces the Commons Privileges Committee next month on charges most of which relate to lying.

*lie

London Socialist Historians seminar Mon 24^th Oct. The British Left & the Defence Economy

Mon 24^th October 5.30pm. Keith McLoughlin. The British Left and the Defence Economy: competing visions of social democracy.

Kevin presented some of the research involved in his new book (MUP 2022)

Britain spends as much on defence as the US and China. Not so much in terms of people but on ‘toys for the boys’ (and some girls nowadays). This however is not a new thing. Since 1945 Keith McLoughlin argues that defence spending has been key to the British economy.

The left has often been anti-war but at the same time, as at the TUC in Brighton this year, trade unions have backed defence related manufacturing jobs.

A history of the present that demands attention

Boris Johnson & booing. It’s a great British tradition

Boris Johnson has been booed again

As Johnson endeavours to return to British politics after another holiday (he remains an MP at the moment) reports suggest he was booed while getting on the plane. It’s a great British tradition

One name for this is Rough Music, a community custom, where transgressors against a generally held moral code were singled out for ridicule. It was by no means a universally progressive tradition, as E P Thompson study into it (Customs in Common) made clear.

A tradition of effigies and sometimes the burning of them fed into the wider area of charivari or rough music a wider form of protest, involving discordant music and general uproar.

According to the social historian Robert Storch in reaction to the 1872 Licensing Act it was almost decided in Exeter to burn an effigy of the Home Secretary but instead there was a chorus of groans. From the 1870s Storch notes shopworkers burnt effigies of employers who refused to join in with early closing times

As late as 1887 an inmate of Chelsea Workhouse was charged with making an effigy of the master as a protest about poor food. The judge in the Police Court, aquitting the inmate, told the master ‘public characters like you don’t mind a little ridicule. It’s the penalty of greatness.

Perhaps Boris Johnson, great or not, will grasp the point. But probably not.

Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jersusalem (Virago)

The founder of Virago publishers Carmen Carlill died this week aged 84.

Particularly in its earlier years Virago published some feminist history books

One that perhaps particularly stood out was Barbara Taylor’s Eve and the New Jersusalem about women, feminism and Owenite socialism in the 1830s and 1840s. The book was published in 1983 and republished in 2016.

As someone who was researching Chartism for a PhD when the book was published it had a significant impact. Chartism which campaigned for adult male suffrage seemed very male dominated. This was not entirely true as research by Dorothy Thompson and others began to underline.

Even so Taylor’s book was a revelation noting that Owenite socialists had talked about and to some extent practised birth control, free love and equality.

Taylor’s 2016 introduction provides much context. She notes that her interest in the period came from the early History Workshop and the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. The book sought to prove that the demands of socialist feminists at that time had a previously unsuspected history.

Taylor notes that the basis of the book was 24 evening classes under the auspices of WEA at the then Essex Rd Women’s Centre in Islington. It’s a world we have lost and one that could very usefully be reclaimed again today.

A return of Johnson, Carrie & Old Corruption?

Following the overdue departure of Truss as Prime Minister the sycophant and idiot section of Tory MPs (a significant number of the Parliamentary Party) is said to be considering whether Boris Johnson should return as PM.

Johnson has spent the last few crisis ridden weeks not in Parliament doing his job as an MP but on holiday in the Caribbean. He broke off only to trouser £135,000 for a 30 minute speech to insurance brokers in Colorado.

Johnson is synonymous with a politics of Old Corruption, of sinecures, favours for mates and so on. Below is one of the last instances of this before he was booted out by Tory MPs in early July 2022

If you follow social media you may have seen a story about Boris Johnson trying to appoint Carrie Symonds as his Chief of Staff when he was briefly Foreign Secretary in Theresa May’s Government. It didn’t happen and the story, though apparently not denied, was pulled from early editions of the Times (19^th June 2022).

A recent biography of Johnson by Tom Bowker notes that Johnson was already fed up because Symonds had been fired by Brandon Lewis as Head of Tory Comms and assumed this was May’s work

Why is this story of any interest? Because it plays to what we know of how Johnson goes on in Government. Jobs are given not on merit but as sinecures and favours to those who back Johnson. It’s the world of pre-1832 Old Corruption where democratic oversight and accountability had little influence