Picture & report @MrBenSellers on Twitter
There is not much good news around at the moment so I was pleased to see a report that Durham Pride today showed a significantly increased attendance after Durham’s Reform Council withdrew funding.
Instead funding was received from numbers of trade unions, include the Durham Miners, and community groups.
As Ben Sellers notes Reforms gesture and culture war politics is a dead end.
Not only is Nigel Farage avoiding public questioning he has not voted in the Commons since March 2026. He is well paid as an MP to do just that, tho admittedly not £5m..
Last orders for the Business University? From Warwick 1970 to 2026 redundancies & financial crisis
Hardly a week goes by without news of redundancies at a University and reports of financial crisis.
The UCU has called for Government action given that thousands of jobs and the education of many students is at risk
It reflects that latest stage of the Business University- a degree factory, where profit rather than learning is the bottom line.
I exist only on the margins of academia as the long-time convenor of the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London School of Advanced Study. Despite the fact that the Government goes on constantly about history, there isn’t much profit to be made out of studying it. The IHR in this context does a great job as the centre of UK research history.
As a socialist historian the current story reminds of a long history. It goes back to Warwick University in the late 1960s. At that point the late socialist historian E P Thompson held a senior post there (not as a Professor- he hated them). When students discovered the links between the University and the local motor industry- which was really running the place- he collaborated with students to publish Warwick University Ltd. It was an expose of the Business University at its beginning and its only gone downhill, learning, research and study wise, since.
The 2024 General Election posed the question of whether a Labour Government might promote the labour’s movement’s long association with the quest for learning and knowledge. After all Keir Starmer has made much of his time at Leeds University.
I think perhaps the organised strength of the UCU provides a better hope for the future. 15,000 jobs were cut in higher education last year. UCU conference this week heard calls for co-ordinated strike action against compulsory redundancies
The latest Government survey of union membership which has been issued since 1892 shows an increase of 192,000 in 2025 to 6.6m. Its a welcome if modest move in the right direction with the hope that the Employment Relations Act, despite some issues, will allow unions to organise to get more members.
This doesnt happen by magic. It requires sustained grassroots work by union members and activists to promote union membership and recruit their colleagues.
Interestingly in an area which has long been a concern union membership in the private sector increased by 76,000.
While the overall increase saw more men than women join a union last year in fact there are 3.7m women in membership compared to 2.9m men. Trade unionists and their wives anyone?
Of course union membership is a basic if important statistic. It depends on what benefits it brings in terms of improvements in wages and conditions and actually, despite what Reform and the Tories think, how much it improves workplace relations.
That said there remain bad employers and the more union members there are, the more effective industrial action will be to counter poor workplace practices.
Trade union membership, UK, 1995 to 2025: statistical bulletin – GOV.UK
Of course brewery closures (and some openings btw) are far too common in what are hard times for hospitality.
Things could be done such as VAT reductions and sorting out access to market for independent brewers but in the meantime the crisis continues.
The news that Tottenham’s Redemption Brewery has entered administration feels personal. It was one of the first of the new wave of craft/indy brewers to open in London in 2010. I marked my 60th birthday at its taproom near Spurs.
The administrators are looking for a buyer (as is normal) and trading continues meanwhile (also normal) but it can be reflected that it wasn’t the excellence of the beers that was the issue here, but a system where Big Beer calls the shots and the genuinely independent community focused brewers lose out.
The move has provided quite a bit of media publicity, much of it AI generated. Redemption was the first brewery in Tottenham for 100 years. It is not 100 years old. It started in 2010 (as above). It has also provided much comment on Government loading costs on to hospitality without a great deal of mitigation. While there is some truth in this, and the Government could do more, there are also agendas running, and not ones that would do much if anything to help small brewers or those who enjoy drinking what they brew.
The Government could act to regulate the beer industry (something |Margaret Thatcher did with mixed results. Gordon Brown also did it, with measures to help small brewers, with better results, which the Tories later partially over turned. Heyho…)
Meanwhile Redemption Big Chief a 5.5% IPA is on the current Wetherspoons seasonal guest list. It appears to be widely available in Spoons pubs, though such is the excellence of the beer, rarely for very long.
Family-owned Tottenham brewer falls into administration as industry pressures mount
Back in the day the front cover most coveted was Rolling Stone but perhaps on 2026 James Watt will be content with the cover of the FT (23rd May 2026) for his mooted Second Best beer adventure.
The FT being one of the few papers that still does journalism notes that Watt plans canned beer project with a couple of pubs
Since the report Watt has returned to Insta and denied reports that the as yet not existing beer would be contract brewed in Germany and solicited thoughts on what beer styles should be made.
The offer for Equity for Punks shareholders to become founders of Second Best (buyer beware etc) seems to be time limited on the Second Best website.
One suspects that Tilray while happy that they got Brewdog for a knockdown price out of administration may also have regrets that they did not pursue an earlier reported buy-out deal which might have tied Watt to not attempting to dump on new Brewdog’s parade for a while
Tony Blair on Benefit Cuts 1997-2026
In his latest rare intervention into British politics Tony Blair has returned to one of his favourite themes, benefit cuts
After the Labour landslide in May 1997 there was a ‘virility’ test over lone parent benefit cuts.
Tony Benn, who was one of 47 MPs who voted against, recorded events in the entries for December 1997 in his diary.
He noted: I spoke for four minutes only. I said I was against the Bill and gave the reasons why and said I intended to vote against the third reading… I was angry at the way the Government had behaved 10th December.
On 12th December after facing angry constituents Benn recorded ‘there is no doubt this has been Blair’s biggest mistake so far’
On 17th December there was a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party addressed by Blair. Again Benn recorded what Blair said. This included the line, ‘there are choices to be made. It is a test of our nerve. The welfare state has got to be reformed’.
The 47 MPs who voted against changes on 10th December comprised left Labour MPs and Liberal Democrats (in their pre-austerity phase). Beyond underlining on 17th December what his project was, Blair felt secure enough to take no action. Starmer with a similar majority took a different view on benefit cuts, later reversed..
July 21st 1994. Blair elected Labour leader. Benn’s Diary reveals the Starmer template
Few readers of this blog will need reminding that when Keir Starmer was elected Labour leader in 2020 his platform was essentially Corbynism without Corbyn. Five years on not a trace is left.
A template can be found in Tony Blair’s election as Labour leader on 21st July 1994 and Tony Benn’s reaction as recorded in his Diary.
Benn writes of Blair’s speech:
It was really quite radical. He talked of ending quangos and ending hereditary peers, about right and wrong, and I think he drew on part on Caroline (Benn)’s Keir Hardie, which he had reviewed very sympathetically… I don’t know he’s going to do any of these things…but he did give people hope and vision.
*Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire (1852)
Farage continues his pretence that Reform is a party for ordinary people but on 29th May he is due to speak at an event at Arundel Castle in Sussex.
The Financial Times (26th May) reported that event is organised by the 18th Duke of Norfolk Edward Fitzalan-Howard.
He was a crossbencher in the Lords and is not a Reform supporter. Rather than the FT. The Duke said that he was interested in any party that supported the protection of nature. That would appear to rule out Reform. However Farage’s attendance is clearly about making wealthy contacts amongst the British ruling class.
For those with long memories it recalls the discussion raised by the late Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson in New Left Review in the mid-1960s which suggested that Britain had not a full scale bourgeois revolution and the aristocracy retained an important position in the ruling circles of the country.
Whether Farage is attempting to raise money for Reform, which seems to have quite a lot as it is, or for his personal projects (of which Reform is actually one however) is another matter.
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