The speaker here is veteran socialist historian and peace campaigner E P Thompson who died in 1993 when Paul Mason was still a member of Workers Power. The banner is of course photoshopped. The original belonged to another left group, the Workers Socialist League
The media is generally not great at history but most have noticed that Keir Starmer’s launch of a six point pledge card is rather similar to Blair’s 1997 pledges, although he had five.
A useful, if certainly unreliable, source for the process which led to the New Labour pledge card are Alastair Campbell’s Diaries.
He recorded on June 18th 1996 that Gordon Brown felt the pledges were too small and ‘lacked ambition’.Campbell notes that the ‘public are tired of grand promises and want to be able to believe the promises that are made’. He goes on ‘trade union reform was obviously a bit sensitive’, and suggested it wasnt clear where John Prescott and Robin Cook stood on the matter.
Rights at work did not appear on the 1997 pledge card (1999 Employment Relations Act) anymore than the New Deal appears on Starmer’s 2024 pledge card
Beard Liberation Front
16th May
Contact BLF Organiser Keith Flett @kmflett
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that Labour’s pledge to crackdown on anti-social behaviour must include putting a stop to rude comments about beards and beard wearers.
The campaigners say that far too often the hirsute are subject to abusive language with insults such as ‘beardie’ and ‘get a shave’. The claim that beard wearers have the remains of their breakfast in their beards is also widespread.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett, anti-social behaviour towards beard wearers is widespread. We hope Labour’s pledge will finally take action to put a stop to it
London Socialist Historians Group
Monday May 20th 5.30pm on Zoom
Benjamin Schoendorff The Socialist Alternatives experiment: an 1980s attempt to search for a new revolutionary subject
Free: Book at this link
the then Editor of Socialist Alternatives Benjamin Schoendorff looks at what the project was trying to achieve and reflects on the input of its most well known contributor, Keir Starmer
Keir Starmer, Socialist Alternatives July/August 1986
Trade Unions in a Wapping World
The struggle for workers control means.. effective defense of the unions, supporting national and local pickets and a principled advocacy of solidarity action.
The only reason for the creation of the Hundred was to establish entities that were not member owned (15 of the 18 Counties are member owned) and therefore to establish vehicles for private investment. An injection of private capital was always the intention
Michael Atherton, The Times 15th May 2024
Spurs & Eric Hobsbawm on class & football
I’m a lifelong Spurs fan, living in central Tottenham near enough to the stadium to hear the crowd cheer, or more often groan, when Spurs are playing.
On 14th May Spurs played Manchester City at WHL. As usual I wanted Spurs to win, while doubting on recent form if this was likely. As it happened Spurs had a decent game although they ended up losing 2-0.
Like much else in life there were wider contexts. The Manchester City victory meant they were almost certainly Premiership winners. A defeat would have given Arsenal a chance at that.
Some Spurs fans, tribalists, appeared to be supporting Manchester City because of the Arsenal angle.
The reality is that while the rivalry between Arsenal and Spurs is genuine there is more that unites North London than divides it. Arsenal winning the Premiership would have dented Manchester City’s hegemony at the top. Not something Man City fans would have liked but the hegemony is leading to the Premiership eating itself.
Still London, the North West, South Wales, and parts of Yorkshire and the North-East are the main working class and Labour voting areas in England and Wales (historically, this is not about a current Labour vote). So there is a wider unity here too.
Eric Hobsbawm made the point that football in London from the start has been about class and tribalism, while arguably part of that, is not the best of it
There is not and has never, I think, been a football team bearing the name of London. All the celebrated teams of the capital are named after neighbourhoods, except Arsenal, which moved to North London from its original location as a works club in Woolwich. They belonged to Queens Park, the hills round Crystal Palace, to Charlton, Leyton and Tottenham, or to West Ham—another team which began as a works club.
Now, this way of defining communities is directly relevant to labour movements. Out of the twenty-three metropolitan branches of the Amalgamated Carpenters and Joiners in the 1870s, eighteen actually had the same locality names as either music halls or football teams or both. And if we take an area like Woolwich, it was by general consent a town within a city, a defined community whose working class was based on the great Arsenal, which generated both the football club and the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society which eventually colonized other parts of London. (The other metropolitan cooperative society of importance, the London, was originally based on the railway workshops in Stratford.) And if we take West Ham, whose Thames Ironworks generated the famous ‘Hammers’ team, its character as a separate proletarian community was so marked that it was the first district in Greater London to elect a Labour majority on its council, having already, in 1892, elected the socialist Keir Hardie to Parliament by means of a coalition of the Irish with the local Left.
From New Left Review No 1/166 November/December 1987 Labour in the Great City
Picture: PA
The above picture accompanied an FT article on 14th May underlining that the reasons the Tories are doing so badly at the polls is their own policies.
Sunak gave his latest culture wars speech on Monday and the growing list of global enemies suggested that a real shooting war was the key Tory policy for the period to come.
His list of enemies that the UK faced was nowhere near as entertaining at that provided and frequently added to by Liz Truss. He did not of course mention the Tories record in Government since 2010 or try to defend it. Perhaps even he understood that no one would listen to that even most Tory MPs.
The central problem the Tories face however are the three Prime Ministers they have had since 2019, Johnson, Truss and Sunak. Each of their periods at No.10 has been chaotic in quite specific ways and all the while policy has slid every rightwards.
The result is that YouGov has the Tories under 20% in the polls and the Guardian has reported that the Tories election focus has shifted to seeing what they can salvage from seats where they currently have a 20,000 majority or less.
If amongst all that can’t also be detected the possibility of a reconfiguration of ruling class politics it would be surprising but not without historical precedent, albeit not since 1945
In the M&S craft beer section..
When it comes to drinking at home I either order beer directly from breweries (i.e small indy breweries) or buy from bottle shops.
If I’m in a supermarket I’ll glance at the beer shelves, but wouldn’t be going in specifically for beer, unless it was one of Lidls Belgian or German beer weeks.
The range of beer in supermarkets has improved significantly with the arrival of craft beer. Of course big craft beer- Brewdog, Camden, Beavertown dominates(I swerve) and as Tim Martin regularly points out the price points usually undercut even Wetherspoons prices.
Waitrose arguably has the best beer selection and give that it is perennially in competition with M&S for a certain type of customer so does the latter.
I don’t go in M&S as much as I used to thanks to its continuing focus on shutting stores. M&S foodstores are not so interesting that I need to make a special visit when other supermarkets are nearer. Who knows if that thought has occurred to M&S suits at their Paddington HQ.
On Tuesday I stopped by M&S in Central Cardiff- a three storey shop with a food shop on part of the ground floor. I was actually buying cat sticks (the cat has a particular preference here) but also checked the craft beer range.
As everywhere else there is Brewdog and Camden. M&S continues its welcome focus on bottled beers from Adnams and Oakham. When It comes to craft cans change seems to be taking place. With the takeover of Brew By Numbers and Brick their beers had gone. Northern Monk and Vocation remain as do Pollys and for the moment Fourpure (a 7.4% dipa at £3.50). Beers from London brewers Gypsy Hill and Two Tribes have appeared as had 500ml bottles of Five Points Best, as what was an exceptionally reasonable price.
I’d more often be drinking some beard friendly niche craft beer in a bar or at home but its interesting to see what there is beyond the niche
Controversial histories: Revisiting E P Thompson & Women’s History
Barbara Taylor has an important and thought provoking piece on E P Thompson, gender and women’s history on-line at History Workshop
As she points out the writing and understanding of the history of working class women remains very much a work in progress.
Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class focuses on men, and criticisms of the absence of women as active makers did make an impact on him as Taylor notes.
Two points stand out for me in particular.
Firstly that while Thompson did come to engage with women’s and feminist histories he was less enthusiastic about actual socialist feminist activists (particularly in North London it seems!) in the 1970s and 1980s. It might be suggested that without such activists there would be a lot less of a focus on women’s history today.
Secondly Taylor refers to Thompson’s essay on Wife Sales which can be found in his collection Customs in Common. Thompson argued that these were essentially a means of divorce before it became legal.
There followed an exchange of letters in early 1990s editions of History Workshop- the last was in 1994 just after Thompson had died. Raphael Samuel argued that Thompson had ignored the reality that wife sales often had a background of rape and adultery. Thompson in a response justified his research.
I was also part of the exchanges, though understandably Taylor passes over my Fletter. Thirty years it only just about stands to be revisited. A summary of my argument is that Thompson might have found other matters to research balanced by the point that socialist historians should not avoid the awkward questions of history. From a 2024 angle this looks like some uncomfortable fence system. Samuel’s criticism had weight and one of the reasons Thompson didn’t accept it I suspect was precisely because he was not open enough to the research and arguments of socialist feminist historians of the 1970s and 1980s. His perspectives had been formed in earlier generations and it just did not compute..
Spurs play Manchester City on 14th May and this is an occasion which unites North London. If Spurs win they make progress towards a Champions League place, and they also help Arsenal’s chances of winning the Premiership.
Of course there will be splitters who want Spurs to lose even if that result only unites North London in the experience of defeat
Key to the battle will be which manager has greater Beard Power, follicles will be fundamental
View more by category: Uncategorized (10,519). .
Kmflett's Blog 