Kmflett's Blog

Rishi Sunak, one of the two contenders for the Tory leadership has been speaking to Charles Moore at the Spectator. Most of the interview is about the economy but towards the end history is briefly touched on.

The Guardian has already raised the issue of Modi and Culture Wars and Sunak tells Moore he wouldnt cross the road to start one.

On history,while Sunak is not Johnson’s preferred leadership candidate he takes a distinctly Johnsonian line. British history is a glorious procession with a few issues we can briefly mention before moving on.

Others may have a different view

CM: Part of that depends on how you understand British history. As someone of Indian heritage, what would you say about the historical role of Britain in India? How would you regard that?

RS: No country’s history is free of blemishes, but there’s an enormous amount of history to be proud of. In India, there were many things that were done that may well have ended up being beneficial, not least language. But of course there were episodes that were appalling. Winston Churchill said that when you talk about things like the Amritsar Massacre, no one can say that that was anything other than absolutely appalling. Of course, as a British Indian, I’m going to feel that type of stuff acutely. But I’m very proud of our history as a country, enormously proud of it.

I recently spent a prolonged period in hospital (now recovering at home). When you are nil by mouth water tastes great. On discharge due to medication I couldnt drink alcohol for a few days. I was however keen to become reaquainted with the world of malt and hops.

No/Lo alcohol beer is a big and growing market globally and Big Beer sees profit. Of the four beers I tried (criteria- ease of buying them) one the Guinness was Big Beer (Diageo). The others werent.

The Lucky Saint was a Pilsner style lager and both drinkable and recognisable as what it said it was.

Big Drop, Citra IPA certainly had a good Citra Hop taste but tomy taste lacked a little body on the finish

Adnams Ghost Ship 0.5%, a Citra pale was both hoppy but with a malt balance drinking more or less as a 4.5% beer does. Certainly my favourite

Guinness AF I liked although it tasted to me like a good dark mild rather than Guinness. Again it depends on taste and palate.

Overall though compared to even a couple of years ago there are some good,drinkable no/lo beers out there, and they can be found easily in shops(and sometimes bars). If you need to or want to giving them a try will be worthwhile

Sam Tarry sacked. We need to talk about Starmer (again)

The sacking as Shadow Transport spokesman of Sam Tarry for joining RMT picket lines and speaking to the media is a disgraceful act by Keir Starmer whatever sophistry ‘Labour Source’ deploys about it.

If Labour cant stand up for workers defending jobs and safety what is it for?

Of course those of us on the left have no great expectations of Labour leaders. Harold Wilson, the first I remember, came from the left. However, to give one example, he attacked the 1966 Seaman’s strike as politically motivated (one of the leaders was John Prescott). That led to the Donovan Commission on trade unions which in turn became Ted Heath’s Industrial Relations Act. Returned to Office in 1974 a social contract between the Government and union leaders was agreed. It aimed to curb the militancy that had returned Labour in 1974 along with wages. The result was the election of Thatcher in 1979.

Blair never claimed to be on the left (once leader) but didn’t concern himself overmuch with the left either. It was the Iraq War that caused the schism.

The case against Starmer is damning. He has a great moving right show on policy the ten pledges he used to get elected leader long ditched. When the issue was raised with him by an interviewer this week he claimed this was because of the pandemic. Starmer is a lawyer and he really needed a better brief. Do Sunak or Truss use the pandemic as a reason why they can’t advance a raft of right-wing policies?

Finally there was Starmer’s visit to Liverpool. Around a million have seen the video of veteran socialist Audrey White confronting him about his moving right show. Starmer does not respond but rather looks as if he wants his nanny. One other recent party leader and PM would probably have done the same, Theresa May

Does any of this matter in the wider scheme of things. It will have an impact but given the debacle of the Tory leadership contest, where Starmer has made some good points, not as much as we on the left might hope.

It would still be better to have a Labour Government to argue with, about what it had done or not done than the Tories.

The real job now though as Sam Tarry understood and Starmer does not is to stand with those putting the heat on the Tories this summer, the RMT, ASLEF,CWU and others

Beard Liberation Front

30^th July

Contact BLF Organiser Keith Flett, 07803 167266

Lord Lebedev will not feature in August’s London Beard Week

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has confirmed that Lord Lebedev will not feature again in London Beard Week at the start of August.

London Beard Week is an annual celebration of all things hirsute in the Capital. Lord Lebedev owns the London Evening Standard, the Capital’s daily paper and the decision has not been taken lightly.

Lebedev has appeared in Beard Polls on occasion over the last decade. He was on the Beard of the Year shortlist in 2011 and a contender for Beard of Spring in 2018. In neither case did he attract many votes.

The campaigners say that Lebedev is not banned from future contests. However while he maintains a magnificent beard a key criteria of any Beard Liberation Front activity is that beard wearer must be promoting a positive image of the hirsute. Recent controversial events suggest Lebedev could struggle to meet that criteria in the view of a significant number particularly in respect of his relations with Boris Johnson

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, Beard Liberation Front events are about beards and not judgements on people’s character or politics. That said they are designed to promote a positive image of the hirsute in the public eye. At the moment at least some may judge that Lord Lebedev might be bringing the hirsute into disrepute.

Marmite Defence League

Media Release

26th July

Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

Campaigners call on shops to hold price of Marmite after Unilever 11% price hike

The Marmite Defence League, which defends it against critics but also against the actions of its owners, has called on shops to hold prices as they are after Unilever announced an 11% price hike.

The TUC has highlighted that Unilever has increased its profits by £4.5bn while implementing a real terms pay cut for staff.

The campaigners say that Unilever cant be allowed to get away with maintaining its profits at the expense of those who produce and eat it.

The Marmite Defence League is calling on shops to absorb the price hike

Where shops increase the price the MDL is calling for a boycott

• MDL organiser Keith Flett said, there is a moral economy of Marmite. We have no objection to Unilever making a profit but it needs to be a fair one based on a fair price for Marmite and decent wages for its employees. An 11% price hike is free market economics gone mad.

Bernie Steer d. July 21st 2022 Pentonville Five & beyond

Bernie Steer the last survivor of the Pentonville Five dockers who successfully defied 1970s Tory industrial relations law died on July 20^th just days before the 50^th anniversary of the event itself. In the end it was unofficial strike action that got the Government to unearth the Official Solicitor who determined the dockers had been wrongly jailed. The TUC had called a General Strike for the 31^st July.

While Bernie Steer is rightly remembered for that glorious moment he continued on in labour movement activity.

In the 1980s times had changed and with the Thatcher Government and mass unemployment the TUC encouraged the setting up of a network of unemployed workers centres. Bernie Steer was involved with the one in Haringey which had premises in West Green Rd Tottenham near Seven Sisters tube.

The centres were generally under the auspices of the local Trades Council. In Haringey this was controlled by the Communist Party. However it was the beginning of the period when the CP split and reconfigured. At the same the extra-Parliamentary Labour left was making an impact in the area through young activists like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Grant.

The Unemployed Workers Centre was politically disputed territory. The idea was to offer advice to workers and to point them into involvement with the official movement. The Right to Work campaign based to a degree on the experiences of the 1930s preferred marches and protests. At the same time local libertarians and anarchists wanted a much more activist focused approach.

It wasn’t Pentonville but Bernie Steer stuck at it, and although I might have had the odd disagreement with him myself the spirit of keep on keepin on shone through

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/e/pentonville-five-offer-valuable-lesson-when-workers-are-organised-they-can-win

Beard Liberation Front

Media Release

26^th July

Contact BLF Organiser Keith Flett 07803 167266

Beard Campaigners press Sunak & Truss on Beard Friendly policies

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, that campaigns for a Beard Friendly Britain, is to press Tory leadership contenders Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss on how beard friendly their policies will be.

The campaigners say that while Boris Johnson was a noted pogonophobe it is estimated that around 20% of Tory members now wear beards.

The BLF has several areas where it would like to see more beard friendly policies:

A luxury shaving tax on all items such as razors, shaving cream, balms. Shaving is environmentally unfriendly

A crack down on the proliferation of barbers shops on High Streets

A specific Beard Friendly policy in the Civil Service

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, these are modest measures, but we think the Conservative Party is now ready to embrace beards. After all the last Prime Minister to wear a full beard Lord Salisbury was a Tory

Asked by Michael Foot in Parliament in the early 1980s which economists supported her policies she responded Alan Walters and Patrick Minford. She is reputed to have said afterwards that it was just as well Foot hadnt asked for three.

Patrick Minford is still around based at Cardiff University and he remains a free market economist,a supporter of the ideas of Adam Smith and Ricardo on the capitalist economy. He was a supporter of Brexit and remains a Tory too. He is often named by Liz Truss as an economic authority.

In the eighteenth century as noted by E PThompson there was in many areas a moral economy which meant that the staples of life had a regulated fair price. There was still rich and poor and profit but excess was controlled.

As industrial capitalism developed underwritten by Adam Smith and the free market as Thompson recounted in the Making of the English Working Class, Parliament might as well try to regulate the wind as wages.

Truss plans to let the free market rip but with one key qualification. As Stuart Hall argued in his 1980s analysis of Thatcherism the counterpoint to that was a strong State. So Truss plans to abolish a raft of laws and regulations that allow working people to challenge the unrestrained free market.

It can still be challenged it will just be even harder. Patrick Minford will be applauding anyway

181 years since the 1842 General Strike

The Tory version of British history allows for only one General Strike in 1926. General Strikes are for other countries. Except they aren’t. There was a Scottish General  Strike in 1820 and there was a brief one in 1972 around the Pentonville Five dockers.

The months of July and August see the 181st anniversary of the 1842 General Strike. Where mainstream histories mention it, they refer to the ‘plug plot’. Flying pickets moved from mill to mill across the north disabling the power that allowed them to run.

There remains only one study of 1842 by Mick Jenkins. The strike itself was ultimately brutally repressed by the army leaving numbers dead and injured not least in Preston.

Debate continues about how far the strike was a major industrial dispute and how far it was influenced by Chartist politics to produce a wider change in society. The links below provide ways in to that discussion.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/the-great-strike-of-1842-halifaxs-peterloo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1842_general_strike

A current theme in the Tory leadership crisis is what school to the two contenders went to.

Let’s start with the easy bit. Liz Truss went to a 11-18 mixed comprehensive school in Leeds. She claims she wasnt delighted with the experience but she still ended up at Merton College Oxford. I too, as the first year in London not to sit the 11+ exam went to a similar school, Alexandra Park in Muswell Hill between 1968-75.

It was a combination of a secondary modern and a grammar school and as I’ve noted before it was effectively run by the Communist Party (I am not now and nor have I ever been. OK I do write for the Morning Star..) I was suspected even then of having leftist tendencies and progressed to being custodian of the school’s copy of the Guardian.

Anyway I got lots of O and A Levels and headed not to Oxford but to Teesside Poly wanting to see what life was like Oop North (cold). AP taught me a lot about life but didnt give me a brilliant grounding in French or Spanish which I wanted. One day..

Rishi Sunak went to Winchester one of the top 3 public schools but not Eton. 20 British Prime Ministers have come from Eton and one from Winchester. It appears that Wykehamists are viewed as dependable and capable chaps but not top officer material (by those who went to Eton).

Who knew or cares? The ruling class does it seems. Some figures of the left went to Winchester. Hugh Gaitskell was one and Seamus Milne another. I do know Milne but we’ve never discussed what school we went too (politically Alexandra Park in the 1970s trumps Winchester in my view) but then why would we?