In 2024 Lords Cricket Ground took the perhaps surprising step of announcing Brewdog has their beer partner for the ground in the 2025 season. Reportedly things went well and 750,000 pints were sold.
However subsequently things did not go so well. Brewdog went into administration on March 2nd 2026 and was bought by US outfit Tilray. At this point Lords opted out of the agreement and announced they were going out to tender for a new beer partner. Who that will be has yet to be announced.
Brewdog went under with £550m of debts. The administrators have now filed a (long) list of creditors on the Companies House website. Among them is Lords cricket ground which is owed £420,000. Since the debt is unsecured Lords are likely to get less than a penny in the pound back of what they are owed, around £4,000.
Another London sporting venue where Brewdog got the beer franchise (and still have it) is West Ham’s London Stadium at Stratford. Here the debt, £12,000, is much smaller….
CAMRA conference weekend. Drinking a beer I first had in the 1970s
It was the Campaign for Real Ale AGM and Conference this weekend in St Albans. Like many social movements there are issues and membership is falling. Not by much however and the current level is about the same as in 2018.
Anyway I attended virtually and will comment once I’ve configured my thoughts.
To mark the occasion I’m drinking a 440ml can of Theakston’s Old Peculier. It might be argued that its continued existence owes something to the campaigning work of CAMRA down the years. I joined in 1975 and remain a member.
I first drank it in the Middle House in Marske when I was a student at the then Teesside Poly from 1975. Its Adrian Tierney Jones beer of the week in the Daily Star and he too harks back to those times. Its 5.6% strength is nothing out of the ordinary now but 50 years ago it was one of the strongest beers around.
As a Vice President of the Student Union at Teesside (yes I was agitating for socialism even then as a student organiser of NOISS) we organised Freshers Week coach trips to Masham to make sure that new students became acquainted with Old Peculier.
Theakstons were eaten up by then Scottish and Newcastle (now part of Heineken- I think) but managed to escape and regain their independence. That is just as well since I doubt OP would have survived a lengthy spell of the Corporates particularly at 5.6%.
The beer is more regularly available on cask now (not least in Spoons) than it was 50 years ago but its also in cans and bottles in supermarkets. Despite all that, while taste memory is questionable (one of the lesser byways of historical research) it seems to me more or less the same beer I drank in my early twenties as I’m drinking now in my late sixties.
That makes it not just Peculier but distinctly unusual and as above don’t forget the impact the presence of CAMRA has had on that.
Documents filed at Companies House have revealed those were owed money when Brewdog went into administration in early March with debts of £550m. The debt was almost equally split between the brewery operation and the bars.
Brewdog’s main lender HSBC was a secured creditor and is owed £98.4m while the HMRC should get £5.8m.
There are around £400m worth of unsecured debts where creditors are likely to get only 1p in the pound back.
Channel Four aired a three part documentary, The Tony Blair Story, in mid-February. It was a history of the present back to the 1980s, albeit other histories are available. One person, close to Blair, who was interviewed in each episode, was Peter Mandelson. Each episode also concluded with a disclaimer that Mandelson had been interviewed before the full details of his connection to Jeffrey Epstein was known.
It was however a reminder, needed by the few if not the many, that Mandelson was central to the New Labour project and remained so until very recently.
Mandelson first appeared in the Labour Party when Neil Kinnock became leader in the 1980s and Tony Benn noted in his diary at the time that he was not good news for the future of Labour. John Smith shunned Mandelson, but after his death, he became closely associated, using the codename ‘Bobby’, with Tony Blair’s successful attempt to become Labour leader.
Mandelson’s political methods are well known but it was the politics he promoted that was and is really key. In 1996 he published a book, The Blair Revolution, with former SDP activist Roger Liddle.
Seamus Milne then a Guardian journalist reviewed the book in the London Review of Books in April 1996 and had this to say about what Mandelson and Liddle were proposing:
coalition with the Liberal Democrats, public sector no-strike deals, workfare for the long-term unemployed, expansion of private pensions and scepticism towards universal benefits
Mandelson held various Ministerial positions in the early New Labour years from 1997 and he was also sacked twice by Blair for actual or alleged breaking of Ministerial rules
Thanks to Government papers released by the National Archives at the start of 2022 we do have a record of Mandelson’s vision for Labour at the time he was Minister Without Portfolio (May 1997-July 1998). Effectively this meant he was policy advisor to Blair and the papers contain a note he sent to him about what he thought New Labour should be. It read in part:
Its political genesis is a synthesis between the historical position of left and right. It is too simplistic to say it adopts ‘left’ values but is rightward in how to achieve them. It is probably more accurate to say that it has left values but is open about to achieve them and recognises that it was the right, not the left, that up to the end of the 80s was prepared to think more freely. Privatisation of certain industries or the sale of council homes or greater autonomy for schools could have been left ideas
National Archives File PREM 49/244
We can see here the practical impact of the New Times policy pursued by Marxism Today. Understanding that Thatcherism had become a hegemonic project on the right, Mandelson and Blair sought to emulate it with a few tweaks. As Stuart Hall later noted in a sharp criticism it wasn’t the hegemonic project that was the problem it was the failure to see, likely deliberate, that it had to be built on the left not the right.
Mandelson’s influence was minimal when Ed Miliband became Labour leader and as Jeremy Corbyn underlined in a recent Commons speech non-existent during his leadership. Mandelson however was still promoting his project and this time hit upon Starmer, someone with no specific left politics, to head it up.
At a party held in a central London pub in 2022 to celebrate 25 years of New Labour Mandelson was reported as leading a chant of ‘Viva New Labour’.
Recent events suggests the end of this 40 year affair. Understanding why it existed and what it meant is essential for the left.
Peter Mandelson failed security vetting before he was appointed to the job of US Ambassador a Guardian report has revealed.
Keir Starmer, a well known Arsenal fan, has deployed what is called the Wenger Defence. Legendary Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger never managed to see on field incidents in which Arsenal players were involved.
Starmer has claimed that he was unaware that Mandelson had failed vetting until this week.
The issue here lies with politicians not civil servants as Mike Clancy General Secretary of Prospect, the union that represents vetting workers has made clear
‘It is deeply unfortunate that following the resignation of Morgan McSweeney Downing Street allowed the impression to circulate that the vetting of Peter Mandelson had not been done correctly by UK Security Vetting.
‘Not only were UKSV put in an invidious position by being asking to conduct vetting after an appointment had been announced, but now deeply troubling reports have appeared in in the media claiming that UKSV advice was overruled.
‘Civil Servants, particularly those working in the most sensitive parts of government cannot speak publicly, and deserve ministers to take responsibility for the decisions they take and not to seek to deflect blame onto them.’
VAR may be needed to review the matter, but beyond this the matter raises troubling questions
In another political stunt Nigel Farage has posed leaning on the statue of Keir Hardie in Aberdare, South Wales. With him is the former Tory leader of Barnet Council.
Farage’s knowledge of labour history is risible. If he was better informed he’d know that Hardie was a temperance campaigner and hardly a kindred spirit for Lunchtime O’Booze Farage.
Keir Hardie’s original base, from the late 1870s, was amongst first the Lanarkshire and then the Ayrshire miners in Scotland. He was a trade unionist, a full time organiser, with a Lib-Lab, that is a trade unionist within the Liberal Party, perspective on the world that focused strongly on issues of respectability such as temperance and religious observance.
Hardie stood as an independent labour candidate election in Lanark in April 1888 and in August of the same year he became the first Secretary of the new Scottish Labour Party.
In 1892 he travelled to the East End of London, another centre of a newly organising working class, to stand, without Liberal opposition, as a small ‘l’ labour candidate for Westminster. Hardie won and in August 1892 took his seat as an MP.
Questions were asked about where Hardie’s campaign funds came from. While Hardie presented himself as moving beyond his trade union background, as Caroline Benn’s definitive biography underlines, unemployment was even more of an issue in West Ham than it was in Ayrshire. The Scottish miners understood the link well enough and certainly gave some of the money for Hardie’s election.
The following year he was one of those who formed the Independent Labour Party.
When it came to the 1900 General Election Hardie, in era when it was possible to stand in more than one seat, was nominated in Preston and Merthyr in South Wales.
Preston was never likely at this point, on a still restricted franchise, to return a labour MP.
Hardie’s chances in Merthyr weren’t thought to be too good either. After all he was a Scot who had held a seat in London’s East End and was largely unknown in the area.
Hardie however had two things going for him. Firstly he had been a miner and a miner’s union official. Merthyr was a mining seat, but one which remained firmly Lib-Lab. This though was the period when the new Trades Councils were being formed in the area, and they were often a bedrock of support for independent labour politics
In a two member seat Hardie was elected MP and in the 1906 General Election was re-elected with an increased majority.
Hardie’s politics remained as they had developed from his background. A pacifist, he opposed war, and the First World War on that basis, not that of anti-imperialism. He was a determined advocate of an independent labour politics (although one that did deals early on with the Liberals) and a supporter of women’s suffrage which at that time placed him on the left of the labour movement. On the left, but certainly no revolutionary as Victor Grayson the MP for the Colne Valley was
The central historical point is that Hardie’s trajectory as a union and labour activist demonstrates that while issues of national independence are important ones, class politics transcends boundaries.
The spectre of united working class internationalism that Hardie in a way personified, continues to not only haunt the right but be of great relevance for the labour movement.
Thornbridge are based in Bakewell but while Jaipur IPA is an omnipresent beer the opening of the Wild Swan in Fetter Lane is a first appearance of the brewery as opposed to its flagship beer in central London.
The area is well known to me. I had a summer holiday job in nearby Bouverie St in 1971 (the school leaving age was raised to 16 in that year- I didn’t leave btw) with Post Office telecoms who in a privatised format remain my employer 55 years later. That is another story.
I still have an office nearby in \Queen Victoria St but that also is another story.
Anyway for those wondering where the pub actually is its equidistant between Holborn Circus and Fleet St- a 5 minute walk either way- might be a bit quicker it depends how fast you walk- in central London most people except tourists do fast.
The Wild Swan has step free access (the gents are downstairs but decent). These are important matters for some.
Anyway there are six handpulls and two banks of keg taps. The pub has the luxurious feel of another Thornbridge outlet the Colmore in central Birmingham. The beer range on 14th April was fine but not of specific interest to beer tickers (or whatever they are called now). Whether six handpulls works in the location I’m not sure (the Law Courts) but time will tell on that. I had a pint of 4.5% Hirondu Spring ale on cask. At £6.10 that was an Ok price for the area and it was a well-conditioned pint.
The food much like the Colmore is mostly pizzas, again reasonably priced for the location.
There is a bit of a history of breweries from Oop North appearing in a pub or two in London and not quite capturing the zeitgeist. However Thornbridge have a done a good bit to define the beer zeitgeist over the last 20 years so I hope the White Swan does well.
Ralph Miliband published the Parliamentary Road to Socialism in 1961 a study of the then six decades of the existence of Labour Party. His key point was that Labour was much more interested in procedures and Parliament than it was in socialism.
One of Ralph Miliband’s sons Ed is currently a Labour Minister and to his credit (recent New Statesman interview) he hasnt entirely forgotten what his father wrote.
Ralph Miliband however could never quite decide if socialists should be in or out of the Labour Party.
The recent decision of the Your Party CEC to exclude anyone found to be self identifying as an organised socialist is somewhere in that area. If, say, Andy Burnham rather than Starmer was Labour leader might they not call it quits and re-join?
Time will tell, although no doubt there remain some good activists in Your Party and uniting to fight the right is more important than pondering internal processes.
