Kmflett's Blog

Tory MP Richard Drax who owns a Barbados sugar plantation refused to back Black Lives Matters protests

The Observer has revealed that the Tory MP for South Dorset Richard Drax, whose ancestors were paid £3m (in 2020 money) in compensation when slavery was abolished in the 1830s has inherited and now farms the same Barbados sugar plantation.

When the compensation payment was revealed in 2013 Drax made no comment but he has now told the Observer that it was all a very long time ago and nothing to do with him

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/12/wealthy-mp-urged-to-pay-up-for-his-familys-slave-trade-past

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-21591814

Strangely however when asked to support Black Lives Matter’s protests in the summer, Drax declined. His response is clearly in the ‘all lives matter’ area refusing to recognise the realities of racism from which his family benefited in the past.

The group (Weymouth Stand Up to Racism) also asked Dorset’s MPs to sign a call for the House of Commons to support the Black Lives Matter campaign, and a call for the UK to stop selling teargas, riot shields and rubber bullets to the United States, where police forces have been clashing with protesters following the killing of Black man George Floyd by police.

Both Richard Drax MP and Chris Loder MP said they would decline, each saying that they “do not sign Early Day Motions.”

Mr Drax added: “I should not have to say this because any decent-minded person would already think and act on it, but I will always stand up against discrimination, wherever it is found and whoever it is directed at.”

Dorset Echo 18^th June 2020

In an opinion piece in the Dorset Echo two days later Drax refers to a Black Lives Matter in London and claims that ‘rioters’ defaced the Cenotaph. This did not happen on that protest or any other BLM protest. There was an occasion in 2010 when it did about another matter entirely.

It suggests that Drax the plantation owner is keener on attacking anti-racist activists than he is in promoting anti-racism.

https://www.dorsetecho.co.uk/news/18523827.stand-racism-dorset-calls-councillors-mps-take-action/

The Ambridge Socialist

13^th December

It’s No Deal Ambridge

In so far as we know what Ambridge residents think about Brexit we do know that Brian Aldridge and Adam Macey are Brexiteers. Presumably they will be welcoming No Deal with a drink or two  down at The Bull this week (Ambridge is in Tier Minus Zero). Whether the more plebeian residents will have a view we shall see. Eddie Grundy may be concerned about the impact of chlorinated turkeys on his seasonal trade…

Kirsty marries Gangmaster Philip Moss

After resisting marriage to Kirsty for a good while, despite earlier planning for it, Philip Moss suddenly decided to get married to Kirsty Miller this week at a Registry Office with Helen and Gavin as witnesses. What is behind Moss’s change of mind is as yet unclear. We can be sure however that it is not what it seems and that it certainly won’t be in the interests of Kirsty

Alice: never trust an Archer

Alice has returned from her de-tox but husband Chris is increasingly paranoid about whether Alice is telling the truth about abstaining from alcohol, whether she really did do the de-tox and generally whether what she says is a actually true. Chris who is a Horrabin should follow his class instincts. No Archer ever tells the entire truth about anything. That’s how they got to be Ambridge’s ruling dynasty

Slavery News

Philip Moss’s key business interest now appears to be selling the three slave workers he ‘owns’ to fund his move to Wales. Gavin reports that he has heard more concerning stories about how ‘Victoria’ the slave worker dealer treats people. Philip of course is not concerned business is business even when it involves illegally selling people.

In Other News

Eddie Grundy is still not in the Christmas Show

Lily has been refused  admission to a casino

Beard Liberation Front

12^th December

One Year on from Labour’s Election defeat. Did pogonophobia play a role?

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said it is looking at claims that one reason why Labour lost the General Election on 12^th December 2019 was that voters feared then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s beard.

Pogonophobia, or fear of facial hair, is a well-known condition. Sufferers often think that beard wearers are hiding something under their beards and not just the remains of their breakfast either.

The campaigners say that while the post-1945 world has seen political leaders with beards this is a rarity.

There has not been a US President with a beard since Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893) and pogonophobia rules at the highest levels in US politics.

The UK has not had a Prime Minister with a beard since Lord Salisbury in 1902.

The Beard Liberation Front which campaigns for being to able to dress and appear as they want commensurate with the role people may play in society, has long had concerns that any male politician steering away from the image of clean-shaven suit wearing faces prejudice.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we take claims that Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat may have been in part due to media campaigns against his appearance seriously. It is striking how Boris Johnson invariably looks a dishevelled untidy mess, but there is little commentary about this

Measuring Labour’s Vote on 12th December 2019: Some Historical Perspectives

Labour suffered a significant Electoral defeat a year ago on 12th December 2019 while the Tories achieved a large majority, their first for three decades.

The media, which at best, is not great when it comes to history have noted that the 203 seats that were won was the lowest total since 1935. Of course there are always other figures. One is that Labour now has the largest number of female MPs in Parliamentary history. Important progress

One interesting measure is the total number of votes cast for Labour. This (fairly obviously) is not a guarantee of Electoral success but it does in a very broad way reflect a class vote and the depth of a Party’s support.

Here Labour’s 10.3 million is well down on what Corbyn achieved in 2017 but beyond that the second highest Labour total since 2001, Tony Blair’s 2nd Election victory.

Another is the percentage of the vote- vote share achieved. This varies quite a bit. High vote share is not an automatic guarantee of Election victory (see 1970) but low vote share certainly isnt (see 1983). The 32.2% achieved on 12th December is on the lower side of the historic stats. Not as low as 2010 and 2015 and in that sense the 40% achieved by Jeremy Corbyn might be seen to be against recent trends. If so, the question that needs to be answered, as much as how bad the 12th December result was, is why 2017 was such a good result (albeit not good enough to win, although it would have been in some other Election years)

One thought might be that this support needs to further engaged with and organised to help secure a future Labour win. Its surely not about Westminster but about the grassroots in workplaces and communities across the country.

Labour votes. Number & percentage share of vote

2019 10.3m   32.2%

2017 12.88m  40%

2015 9.35m    30.4%

2010 8.61m    29%

2005 9.55m    35.2%

2001 10.72m  40.7%

1997 13.52m  43.2%

1992 11.56m   34.4%

1987 10.03m   30.8%

1983 8.46m     27.6%

1979 11.51m    36.9%

1974O 11.46m  39.3%

1974F 11.65m   37.2%

1970 12.18m     43%

1966  13.07m   47.9%

1964  12.01m   44.1%

1959 12.22m    43.8%

Source

House of Commons: UK Election Statistics

Beard Liberation Front

12^th December

Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

Jeremy Corbyn loses Parliamentary Beard of the Year vote by a whisker to Tory MP Stuart Anderson

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that Jeremy Corbyn has lost the Parliamentary Beard of the Year vote by a whisker to Stuart Anderson, the Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South-West.

Over 1700 people voted in the annual on-line poll with Stuart Anderson getting 48.1% of the votes to Jeremy Corbyn’s 43.7%.

The lead swung about in the final hours of voting between Anderson and Corbyn but ultimately the Conservative MP gathered enough support to beat the former Labour leader by a whisker.

The campaigners say that 20 years ago Jeremy Corbyn was one of the very few MPs with beards and comments were sometimes made in the Commons about his appearance. In 2020 the idea that male MPs must be clean shaven suit wearers is declining and there has been a significant rise in beard wearing amongst MPs of both main parties

However the Parliamentary Beard of the Year is not about the politics of MPs but about the positive impact their beard has made in public life during the year.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we congratulate Stuart Anderson and hope his beard continues to flourish. He only has another seven victories to go to equal the number of times Jeremy Corbyn has won it!

For those who make their living from fishing Boris Johnson’s Brexit ‘negotiations’ on fishing rights with the EU are a serious matter.

Johnson though is not someone noted for taking things seriously

He has previously waved a kipper in the air as part of a stunt in a political speech

When he had dinner witn EU President Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday evening he reportedly dined on scallops followed by turbot. Both are fished in UK waters with scallops being a previous source of dispute.

In October 1939 Winston Churchill’s Parliamentary Private Secretary Sir Geoffrey Shakespeare received the following memo from Churchill.

One morning I found on my desk a pink tab with a memo to this effect: “I am concerned about the shortage of fish. Parliamentary Secretary will immediately take up the matter with the Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff and the head of the Mine Sweeping Division to see if any trawlers can be released for fishing. We must have a policy of “utmost fish.” Parliamentary Secretary will report to me by midnight with his proposals. WSC.

Knowing Johnson this explains a lot…

E P Thompson on Trump & Brexit

Obviously E P Thompson who died in 1993 has opined on neither Brexit or Donald Trump. However as an article in the US radical magazine Mother Jones notes, his analysis of the work of William Morris does suggest some parallels

Aditya Chakrabortty has a typically thoughtful piece on Brexit in the Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/09/brexit-grassroots-movement-elitist-takeover-2016-referendum

I entirely agree that Brexit has remodelled the Tory Party in the likeness of Cummings and Farage and to that extent the Brexit that engaged working class voters was fake. It never had any intention of dealing with the issues they have. That doesn’t mean however that those issues weren’t both real and complex. Ranging from the impact of austerity to public services, housing and jobs these issues remain both live and unresolved.

There is some link with working class support for Trump. Of course Trump never planned to help the working poor, but he focused on many of the issues that they had and still have. One wonders if the mild social democratic politics of Biden (to be kind to his project) will address them from 2021?

E P Thompson identifies in William Morris’s work an understanding of the complexity of how class identity and forces are made and re-made. A battle not just of the economy but also in the moral and cultural sphere too

Just as “capitalist society was founded upon forms of exploitation which are simultaneously economic, moral and cultural”—that’s E.P. Thompson, drawing on the 19th century socialist and textile designer William Morris—so are the politics of living in such a society being worked out along multiple axes at once, at different tempos. This is something people understand on an intuitive level, then seem to forget somewhere between the street and the CNN studio. Maybe you have a shitty job and a shitty wage, but in the roiling mix out of which you make your politics there are also all the rationalizations for the shittiness, the privileges you earn for accepting them, the larger sense that your freedoms, however meager, gain strength in contrast to the unfreedoms of others, and so on.