Is a university education still of value?

 

Both Peter Hitchens and his brother Christopher Hitchens were middle-class boarding school boys who were never likely to be seen dead wearing a pair of overalls. Both of them were former Trotskyists who talked a lot about the proletariat while secretly despising them.

Peter Hitchens has made a living as a journalist writing angry jeremiads that lament the state of society and its moral decay. Peter Hitchens is an English middle-class snob who thinks the only people who should go to university are people like himself and his brother. I much preferred Christopher Hitchens who intellectually stands head and shoulders above his brother.

In 1958, less than 2% of the population of Britain went to university, whereas today, it is around 39%.  Personally, I don't care for this utilitarian view of education that sees education as only having value if it leads to a job. I think that education as value as entity in itself. The type of people who read novels like Middlemarch by George Eliot, don't generally become delinquents or become members of Tommy Robinson's pitchfork mob. It stands to reason that a university degree will have less value when you have more people having university degrees, but that's no reason why you shouldn't study for a degree.

Today, many university students are using AI to write and research their essays and hardly read at all. I gather that many university students write using text language and that university tutors will accept an essay written using AI, provided the student acknowledges this. They’re the cut and paste generation. The British universities are just churning out semi-educated nincompoops and clever conmen.

Orwell and flawed characters.

 

Eric & Eileen Blair

We need George Orwell more today than ever. Orwell should be compulsory reading for all British school children. What would Orwell have made of Britain's surveillance state of CCTV, facial recognition technology, and mobile phones that track and profile you? For surveillance, Starmer's Britain is beginning to resemble something out of the Minority Report. 

What would George Orwell have made of a UK Labour Prime Minister, who wants us all to collude in a fiction, that 99.9% of women don't have a penis? What would Orwell have made of the 10,000 people arrested each year by the thought police in Britain, for comments they have made on social media? 

In his essay, 'Politics and the English Language' (1946), Orwell noted that political language "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind." 

I read his novel 'Down and Out in Paris and London' (1933) many years ago and it's a cracking little book. Had it not been for a woman called Mabel Fierz, who had literary connections, it's probable that book would have never have seen the light of day. The novel was rejected a number of times by publisher's and on one occasion, Orwell flung the manuscript at Mabel Fierz saying to her, "Burn it and keep the clips." It was eventually published by Leonard Moore who became his agent for life. 

Neither Orwell or his biographers ever paid much attention to the women in his life and this a theme that is taken up by the feminist writer Anna Funder, in her book 'Wifedom' about Orwell's wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy. Orwell was brought up by women and helped by women, but he rarely ever acknowledged this in print. He was eight years old before he ever really knew his father, Richard Blair. 

When Orwell spent 18-months in Paris, he often visited his mother's elder sister, Aunt Nellie, who helped him financially and connected him with agents and publishers. Aunt Nelly knew important writers like Chesterton, Barbusse, Nesbitt and H.G. Wells, but she isn't mentioned in his book Down and Out in Paris and London. Likewise, there's no mention of his wife Eileen in his book 'Homage to Catalonia' even though she was with him in Spain.

Anna Funder says in her book, "How is a women made to disappear"? She says that these links are not made by Orwell because it's impossible to attribute to women the environment of ideas and politics that made him. She says that the biographers are helped by Orwell erasing or obscuring the women in his life. Yet, his publisher, Frederic Warburg said of Orwell that "He was as secretive about his private life as any man I ever knew." Having read 'Wifedom', I thought that Anna Funder had set out to do a hatchet job on George Orwell. When she was doing research for her book, she travelled to Barcelona with Orwell's adopted son, Richard Blair, and his friend Quentin Kopp, the son of Orwell's commander in Spain, Georges Kopp. Quentin Kopp has said that Funder told her young daughter that she thought that Orwell was an "arsehole."

It seems to have become fashionable these days for feminist writers to destroy the reputations of male writers. They have done it with Charles Dickens and Arthur Koestler. 

Funder appears to be obsessed with Orwell's sex life and can't quite make her mind up whether he's a repressed homosexual or a priapic serial seducer of women. He might be both, but the American Charles Orr, who knew Eileen in Spain, said she "Just could not stop talking about Eric, her hero husband, whom she obviously loved and admired." Eileen did refer to her husband's "remarkable political simplicity." Orr thought that Orwell needed a socially extrovert wife as a window to the world. "Eileen helped this inarticulate man to communicate with others.” Charles Orr came to respect Orwell and described Eileen as beautiful, outgoing and gregarious. 

Eileen's friend Lydia Vitalevna Jiburtovich, considered Eileen to be "sophisticated, fastidious, highly intelligent and intellectual.” She thought that Eileen was a very good listener. "She doesn't suffer fools and doesn't spare anyone. Can give you a tongue lashing." Funder says that Orwell tried to force himself on Lydia at Wallington Cottage while Eileen was in London. 

Eileen Blair used to say "I don't care if I live or die." She died on 29 March 1945, in the operating theatre while undergoing an operation, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She was just 39 years of age. Later, George Orwell succumbed to TB.

George Orwell dealt with question of how good artistic work can come from flawed people. He thought Salvador Dali a "dirty little scoundrel" but also a great artist. He thought Dickens's mistreatment of his wife shouldn't affect how we read his work. We could say the same thing about Orwell, Caravaggio, Cellini, or Oscar Wilde. All four were flawed characters, like the rest of us.   

Somerset Maughan & the 'Homintern'.

 

W. Somerset Maugham

Christopher Hitchens said that W. Somerset Maughan, "turned out third-rate prose by the yard, or the furlong." 

He was brought up in France. Both his parents died when he was young and he was brought up by relatives who sent him to monastic boarding schools where according to Hitchens, he was bullied, beaten and buggered. This left him with a speech impediment and a staunch commitment to homosexuality. 

Somerset Maughan qualified as a doctor, delivering babies in the socially deprived areas of Lambeth. He did marry a woman called Syrie Welcome partly as a cover and had a daughter with her. The Villa Mauresque where he lived was known as the 'Homintern'. Hitchens says the villa was a magnet for spongers and toadies and social climbers of all sorts. 

Two guest who came to stay at the Villa Mauresque, were Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. Hitchens says they were slightly aghast when staff at the villa, unpacked and laid out all their belongings, including lubricant and the powder for warding off crab lice. Apparently, Maughan was always finding his bookshelves and wine cellar and bric-a-brac, had been subjected to shameless pilfering. 

The Burnham Conundrum.

 

Andy Burnham

By: Andrew Wallace

If government and politics are a necessary evil then it is also said to be the art of the possible, reflecting the messy real-world intrusions and limitations of human autonomy. Politicians must invariably broker against a bewildering array of mutually irreconcilable demands and attempt to balance ideological partisanship with realism whether through constructive ambiguity or other means of temporarily placating the perpetual instability at the heart of governance.

Andy Burnham arguably resides within this realm of constructive ambiguity, a relatively unsullied Labour politician who by dint of his popular mayoral sabbatical from Westminster enjoys a unique net positive approval rating (Nurse 2026). Burnham appears to have refreshed his political persona at different stages in his career, from an enthusiastic Blairite to an affable soft leftist presence and corrective to the inept and centre-right leaning Starmer government. Naturally there is suspicion that Burnham’s pivot to the left could prove to be a disingenuous ruse similar to Starmer’s ten pledges. Burnham is already giving cause for concern on immigration, the EU, electoral reform and public ownership (Jones 2026). Politicians are accustomed to giving themselves sufficient wiggle room in their policy statements, linguistic sleight of hand allows them to backtrack accordingly in the service of realpolitik.

Allowing for the fact that Burnham may be a good faith actor, just what is going on between camp Burnham and Josh Simons, the previous director of Labour Together and ally of Morgan McSweeney who deployed dirty tricks against his critics? Why would Simons stand down as an MP to enable a possible transition to a new soft left Prime Minister? Some commentators are suggesting that Simons is on a redemption arc in atoning for previous misdemeanours. Others suggest a conspiracy may be afoot and that Burnham is walking into a trap in a gig that is far from certain that he will win. Simons resigned as a Cabinet office minister back in February this year when he felt his position had become untenable due to the emerging scandal of the dirty tricks campaign against journalists investigating financial irregularities as Simons’s thinktank Labour Together (Dyer and Sabbagh 2026).

Perhaps having felt a once promising ministerial career was no longer tenable it seems an opportunistic Simons decided to cut his loses, especially given the defenestration of Peter Mandelson (September 2025) and McSweeney (February 2026). Could it be that Simons is hedging his bets having realised that Starmer is on borrowed time? Whilst Burnham is far from assured of victory in the June 18th by-election, Simons probably enjoys something of a win-win situation whatever the outcome. Either Burnham fails which seriously weakens Labour’s soft left or he wins and provides a compensatory lifeboat for a key operator of the Labour right.

Dyer H and Sabbagh, D (2026) ‘Labour minister falsely linked journalists to ‘pro-Kremlin’ network in emails to GCHQ’

Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/20/labour-minister-falsely-linked-journalists-to-pro-kremlin-network-in-emails-to-gchq

(Accessed 30 May 2026)

 Elgot, J and Stacey, K (2026) ‘Burnham to back Shabana Mahmood’s immigration changes, allies say’

Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/may/20/burnham-to-back-shabana-mahmoods-immigration-changes-allies-say

(Accessed 30 May 2026)

 Jones, O (2026) ‘After the painful ruse of Starmerism, the left should be cautious about Andy Burnham’ 19 May 2026

Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/19/painful-starmerism-left-cautious-andy-burnham-greens-labour

(Accessed 30 May 2026)

 Nurse, A (2026) ‘Andy Burnham: what has made the king of the north so popular?’ 19 May 2026

Available at: https://theconversation.com/andy-burnham-what-has-made-the-king-of-the-north-so-popular-283231

(Accessed 30 May 2026)

 https://www.clpd.org.uk/resource/keir-starmer-10-pledges/

(Accessed 30 May 2026)​Burnham Conundrum.docx

Blair the derided carpetbagger.

 

Diavolo incarnato - Tony Blair

Tony Blair is a derided carpetbagger. After leaving Downing Street, all he did was line his own pockets and enriched himself, usually by getting into bed with dodgy dictators. He lied us into a war in Iraq with all that crap about Saddam Hussain's WMD's and then dragged us into a hopeless war, in Afghanistan. 

The author of the ‘Flashman’ stories, George MacDonald Fraser, hated Tony Blair. He said of Blair, "It makes my blood boil to think of the British soldiers who've died for that little liar."

Starmer, Mandelson and Blair, have led Labour to a cataclysmic fall. Labour has nothing to offer and is beyond its sell-by date. Blair and New Labour were always obsessed with cutting welfare benefits. The former poverty professional, Frank Field, was appointed by Blair as the "minister to think the unthinkable" when it came to cutting state benefits. Then there was James Purnell of the "prawn cocktail offensive", (who used to babysit for the Blair's), who wanted claimants to pay interest on a social find loan. Even the Tories were disgusted at the way he put the boot in on the poor. Purnell forced the unemployed to work for their dole and then people looking for paid work, found that they were competing for jobs with people from the Jobcentre, who were offering to work for nothing, so they could keep their unemployment benefit. 

Today, around 39% of people receiving Universal Credit (UC), are in work. They claim UC to top up their low wages. According to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, the UK ranks among the lowest of OECD countries for welfare generosity, with the poorest UK households worse off than those in Slovenia and Malta. 

It was the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition who introduced the triple lock in 2010. Blair says the country can't afford the triple lock on state pensions, so he wants to make Britain's state pensioners poorer. I can't see Britain's pensioners voting for that. The New State Pension is well below the weekly National Minimum Wage and the Old State Pension, is even less generous. How many billions of pounds have the UK government saved by increasing the women's state retirement age from 60 to 67, and how many billions have they saved, by increasing the state retirement age to 67? 

Margaret Thatcher did say that Blair and New Labour were her greatest legacy to the country. She said that Blair was a "patriot who would protect her legacy." When Blair got elected the Labour Prime Minister in 1997, Henry Kissinger, wrote to Thatcher saying:

"I never thought that I'd congratulate you on a Labour victory in the British elections, but I cannot think what would confirm your revolution more than Blair's program. It seems to me well to the Right of that which preceded yours (the Callaghan government)." 

It's Tony Blair who's behind the barmy national ID scheme that Starmer wants to introduce and what most people don't want. Many of Blair's financial backers are tech billionaires like Larry Ellison of Oracle who have a financial vested interest in the surveillance state. 

Adam Smith & Moral Sentiments.

 

Adam Smith was not an economist. He was a professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University. 

I have read his Wealth of Nations and I am currently reading his book 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments'. He mentions the "invisible hand" just once in Wealth of Nations and once in Moral Sentiments. Smith never used the term "capitalism" and he was in favour of free education and poverty relief. He was deeply concerned about the inequality and poverty that might remain in an otherwise successful market economy. He believed the purpose of political economy was to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply a state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public service.

Smith believed that man can subsist only in society and that all members of human society, stand in need of each other's assistance and are likewise exposed to mutual injuries. In Moral Sentiments, Smith says:

"This disposition to admire and almost worship the rich and powerful, and to despise, of, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments..."

Although Adam Smith saw that people pursuing their own self-interest did produce a beneficial outcome for society that was not their intent, he would have recognised that a society made up of an aggregate of self-interested egoists, is no society at all. 

Society works as well as it does, because we co-operate and are not necessarily just interested in our own self-interest. If we were all self-interested individuals, we wouldn't have life boat crews or the Samaritans. 

Many people who cite or quote Adam Smith are highly selective in what they choose to quote and what they choose to leave out. Some of the things that Adam Smith says do not fit in with the neo-liberal capitalist narrative. 

Imagined Communities.

 

Many people today are obsessed with borders and regaining control of their borders, but before the late 18th century, there were no real nation states to speak of. Before Napoleon's conquest, what we now call Germany, was part of the Holy Roman Empire and it consisted of 300 to 360 semi-independent principalities, duchies, and free imperial cities.

There was time when If you travelled across Europe, no one asked for your passport at borders; neither passports or borders as we know them, existed. What wealthy people carried were ‘Letters of Recommendation ’and ‘Letters of Credit’.  People had ethnic and cultural identities, but these didn't really define the political entity they lived in. 

In the 18th century, the Dutch and Swiss needed no central government at all. Many eastern European immigrants arriving in the U.S. in the 19th century, could say what village they came from, but not what country, because it didn't matter to them. In 1800, almost nobody in France thought themselves French, but by 1900, they all did. 

The revolutions in the U.S. in 1776 and in France in 1789, created the first nation states defined by the national identity of their citizens rather than the bloodlines of their rulers. At the Revolution in 1789, half the residents of France did not speak French. In 1860, when Italy was unified, only 2.5% of residents regularly spoke standard Italian. The leaders of the Risorgimento spoke French to each other. One of them famously said that, having created Italy, they now had to create Italians.

People in England had an earlier sense of 'Englishness', but it wasn't expressed as nationalist ideology. Great Britain is really a political construct that came into being with the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707. 

The Anglo-Irish political scientist, Benedict Anderson, coined the term "imagined communities", to describe nation states. Anderson argued that mass market books, standardised vernaculars and newspapers, allowed people to learn about events of common concern, creating a large 'horizontal' community that was previously impossible. A national identity was also fostered by state funded education and the development of far reaching bureaucracies, needed to run complex industrial societies, aided this ideological process of a national identity. 

People have always had a sense of belonging to numerous different groups based on religion, background, and much more. There's no doubt that what we understand by a Scottish identity, is very much tied up with writings and imagination, of Sir Walter Scott.

Burnham and the Bee Network.

 

I am a regular user of buses, so I do have some idea about the standard of service that is being provided in Greater Manchester. 

Before the Bee Network was introduced in Greater Manchester, many buses didn't turn up and were unreliable. I have seen numerous instances of people sat in a cold bus shelters having been waiting for a bus for an hour. Many services were cut or stopped altogether. Bus deregulation did initially introduce a measure of competitiveness between bus companies, but it didn't last long. Stagecoach and First dominated bus transport in Greater Manchester. 

Things have improved since the Bee Network but many of these bus services that were cut or ended, have not been reinstated. Buses are still not that punctual and on Sundays, many bus services are operating on a one an hour basis, as they do on Bank Holidays. At Christmas you can't really get anywhere. 

With the Bee Network we are seeing more strikes. TfGM doesn't employ the drivers and there aren't that many bus operators, so this has given the trade unions more clout. If there is a strike it can be difficult in some areas to find an alternative bus service that isn't on strike and is operating. 

Many of the bus drivers don't know the area and some get lost. I once got a 330 bus that runs from Stockport to Ashton and the driver didn't know where the bus station was and we finished up at the top of Mossley Road. I had to give the bus driver directions to the bus station.

There have been a number of instances where bus drivers in Greater Manchester have tried to drive a 14'6" high bus under an 11'6" bridge. On one occasion the upstairs passengers on a bus were nearly decapitated. Some passengers were slung into the road.  

All the Prime Minister’s Men: A Nixonian case study of Starmer’s corrupt government.

 By: Andrew Wallace

Anarchists contend that the idea and practice of government is a folly as it places individuals within a coercive framework instead of an otherwise naturally spontaneous free association of self-directed citizens. To govern is to betray society’s true interests as it inevitably falls prey to corruption and the self-interest of a ruling elite. The absence of government might also be thought problematic in giving rise to the Hobbesian dilemma of the state of nature, a “war of all against all”. The majoritarian view largely concedes that government functions as a necessary evil to avoid calamitous anarchy, but it also understands that checks and balances should place distinctive limits on the respective office holders.

Starmer’s government is yet another classic case study of how liberal governments are prone to betray their lofty ideals. Indeed, its malfeasance was already in operation before government in the post Corbyn opposition years (Holden 2025). The illicit resort to dirty tricks in order to undermine opposition from within and without the ruling Labour clique closely follows the mid-1970s scandals from across the Atlantic of the Nixon administration. Not for nothing is Watergate now invoked as the template with the illegal deployment of government functionaries, slush funds, think tanks and surveillance with a purpose to defenestrate perceived enemies both inside and outside the ruling regime.

The Labour Together think tank founded in 2015 became integral to the so-called Starmer project. This involved a fundamentally hostile operation to destabilise the then current Corbyn leadership and prepare Starmer to succeed as Labour leader under an initial bogus platform that promised to carry over much of the left-wing policy development. Suspicions subsequently arose over undeclared donations and Labour Together were fined accordingly by the Electoral Commission. However it also emerged that the rogue think tank had commissioned private investigators as part of a concerted smear campaign against journalists researching irregularities of the organisation (Gierson and Stacey 2026). The plot thickens when we learn Labour Together’s director at the time (2023) was Josh Simons who subsequently became a Labour MP the following year (Mason 2026). Simons who initially emerged as a Corbyn adviser (whilst secretly briefing against the left) was soon heavily entwinned with Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s notorious chief of staff and Simons’s predecessor as director of Labour Together (Boffey 2026).

 

Boffey, D (2026) ‘Starmer’s top advisers knew about ‘indefensible’ journalists probe, documents reveal’, The Guardian, 20 May.

Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/may/20/keir-starmer-advisers-journalists-investigation-thinktank (Accessed 21 May 2026).

 

Gierson, J and Stacey, K (2026) ‘Labour thinktank close to Morgan McSweeney paid firm to investigate journalists’, The Guardian, 6 February.

Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/06/labour-thinktank-close-to-morgan-mcsweeney-allegedly-paid-firm-to-investigate-journalists (Accessed 21 May 2026).

 

Holden, P (2025), The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy. OR Books

 

Mason, R (2026) ‘Who is Josh Simons, the Labour MP who quit for Andy Burnham?’, The Guardian, 14 May.

Available at:https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/may/14/who-is-josh-simons-labour-mp-andy-burnham (Accessed 21 May 2026)

Manchester Power House or Manchester Doss House?

 

Lampwick Quay, Ancoats

Manchester city centre has been dubbed 'Dubai on Deansgate'. It's rather obvious that there has been a lot of public money and investment in Manchester city centre but this has not really spilled over to the benefit of other areas of Greater Manchester. Greater Manchester is an area characterised by low wages and precarious employment. 

In 2016, a year before Andy Burnham was elected the Mayor of Greater Manchester, the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, published a report. The report dealt with Manchester's transformation over the past 25 years. The report outlined how Manchester councillors and officers using private property developers, had built a 'parallel Manchester' of office blocks and adjacent one-and two-bedroom flats. Manchester's transformation has attracted an in-migrant workforce of 25 to 34 year olds who live in these flats. Around 34% of these were born outside the UK and Ireland. Some 10% are from Europe and 24% are from outside Europe. This in-migrant workforce, of 24- to 35-year-olds, who live and work in Manchester, are heavily dependent on public sector jobs - local government, health or education, or they work in retail, restaurants and hotels. 

The reports says that central Manchester is not like London which relies on people commuting by public transport to work in central London. This is because Manchester city region combines cheap central flats with low wages. Some 21% of Greater Manchester neighbourhood's are in the top 10%, most deprived in England, and Manchester city, has 41% of Greater Manchester's neighbourhood's in this category. 

The report says that the people who live within Greater Manchester are heavily dependent on public sector jobs because the former industrial districts of East Manchester and the northern boroughs, have never really recovered from the deindustrialization of the 1980s. 

Many people who live in Greater Manchester are employed in mundane activities and the report says that the Greater Manchester private sector economy, has a very limited capacity to generate good jobs which pay higher wages. In the ten borough's that make up Greater Manchester, around 80,000 people are on the housing waiting list. 

Some wiseacres do argue that Manchester's growing inequality is a good thing because like London, it's proof that it has managed to create well-paying jobs for at least a minority of its population, whereas in other areas, they may be more equal, but this is because everyone is poor. 

The report says, "The continuous building by developers of extra office work spaces and adjacent one- and two-bedroom flats in Manchester city, occupied by young people that does not benefit most people in Greater Manchester, is likely to lead to an unpleasant crash." 

The authors of this report argue that there should be a move away from property development that has only benefitted the city, towards "inclusive growth" that spills over into other areas of Greater Manchester. The report says that welfare-critical goods and services should be provided for the whole population along with affordable transport, accessible broadband, and social housing that should take precedence over ostentatious tower blocks. The authors say that they need to improve the foundational economy - food distribution and processing, education and health, adult care, pipe and cable Utilities and public transport.

Tameside Labour gravy train hits the buffer.

 

It was fairly predictable that voters in Tameside were going to give Labour a bloody nose. One councillor who lost his seat after 42 years, said that people made it clear to him when he was out on the stump, that they hate Starmer and his Labour government. 

Angela Rayner who was until recently, part of Starmer's despised Labour government, campaigned in Droylsden, and both Labour candidates lost their seats. It would have been more helpful to both candidates if she had kept away because her name is so toxic. Rayner has become something of a semi-detached MP and I believe she's rarely seen in her constituency these days. Most of her time is now spent at her luxury £800,000 sea front property in Brighton & Hove, which she shares with her "soul mate", Sam Tarry. 

There were also local issues. The closure of Ashton baths has cost Labour votes as well as councillor Eleanor Will's expenses paid jolly, to the South of France. Ashton town centre is full of beggars and rough sleepers. The disruption they've caused to Armentieres Square, in Stalybridge, has also cost Labour votes. It seems to be taking Biblical ages to lay a bit of tarmac and this has disrupted public transport. 

I am surprised that the Tameside Labour gravy train lasted as long as it did. The Borough has been a Labour one-party state for the last 47 years and that's not good for democracy. Labour politics in Tameside had become incestuous and nepotistic. There were far too many husbands and wives on the council. The current Labour leader, Eleanor Wills, is the third member of her family to be a Tameside Labour councillor. 

Reform UK councillors have "zero political experience" says Tameside Reform UK Chairman.

 

Rob Barrowcliffe

The chairman of Tameside Reform UK, Rob Barrowcliffe has just told us that the new Reform UK councillors who have been elected to Tameside Council, have "zero political experience” but he sees that as a positive thing and not a negative thing. 

A Reform UK councillor in Hylton Castle ward, in Sunderland, has just been suspended because he called for Nigerians to be melted down to fill potholes in the road. 

If Reform UK are serious about tackling problems in Tameside, then there are two major issues that need to be looked into urgently and it's not potholes. Tameside is one of the hardest places to acquire an affordable rented home in the social housing sector. Why are young urban professional couples and essential needs workers being prioritised for housing in Tameside?

Second, Tameside must be the HMO capital of Greater Manchester. Everything is being turned into a house of multiple occupation. Like many areas of the North West of England, Tameside is an area in terminal decline. These areas have never really recovered from the deindustrialization of the Thatcher years. 

Tom Paine and Monarchy.

 

There's a singular lack of hostility shown towards the privileged aristocracy by people living in Britain and the Republican movement, is quite small. 

Many British people don't seem to find anything anomalous or odd about Prince William selling the Big Issue and raising the issue of homelessness in Britain, while his uncle Edward and his family live in the 120 room Bagshot Park, and Windsor Castle contains 1000 rooms, which are mostly unoccupied.   

Lady Bracknell says in Oscar Wilde's play 'The Importance of Being Earnest',

"Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square." 

King Charles III, is descended from the usurping House of Hanover. The English radical Tom Paine said, "I have an aversion to monarchy as being too debasing to the dignity of man." He wrote: 

"The time is not very far distant when England will laugh at itself for sending to Holland, Hanover, Zell, or Brunswick, for men, at the expense of a million a year, who understood neither her laws, her language, nor her interests, and whose capacities would scarcely have fitted them for the office of a parish constable."

Despite Andrew Mountbatten Windsor being an asset to the British Republican movement, as of April 2026, the British Royal Family still remains popular with 57 to 59% of Britons holding a favourable view of the institution, and 64% supporting continuation of the monarchy. 

Thomas Cromwell & Hilary Mantel.

 

Not very long ago, I read Diarmaid MacCulloch's biography on Thomas Cromwell.  

Anne Boleyn's enmity towards Cardinal Wolsey stemmed from his failure to get Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled, but Cromwell never forgave her for bringing Wolsey down. Cromwell told Eustace Chapuys, how he engineered Anne Boleyn's downfall which he choreographed as King Henry's chief fixer. MacCulloch writes: "Cromwell and Anne, had very good reasons for detesting each other dating back to Thomas Wolsey's humiliation.Their mutual hatred came to override their joint enthusiasm for promoting a religious revolution." 

Cromwell was the man that most English people blamed for the dissolution of the monasteries. The nobility in Henry's Tudor court saw both Wolsey and Cromwell, as upstarts and resented their rise in Tudor society. Some also saw Cromwell's ambitions as posing a danger and a threat to them. What brought Cromwell down is Henry's marriage to Anne of Cleves which was a disaster and the enemies that he made, within Henry's court. King Henry also thought that Cromwell had acted beyond his authority and had consistently negotiated beyond his brief and without his master's knowledge. 

One of the last places to close was Thetford Priory where the ancestors of Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard, had been buried for centuries. The Duke of Norfolk saw this as a deliberate insult to Howard honour and blamed Thomas Cromwell. The bodies of his ancestors had to be moved elsewhere and reburied. It was the Duke of Norfolk who ripped the collar of St George from Cromwell's neck at the time of his arrest. 

For the most part Thomas Cromwell has been portrayed throughout English history as a kind of villain and was called a disciple of Machiavelli. He certainly liked all things Italian and had fought in Italy. Cromwell knew that the case that he choreographed against Anne Boleyn was a total fiction but he still contrived it as he had done to bring down Thomas More. Cromwell may well have thought it was better to take Anne's head before she took his head. At Anne's beheading, I believe Cromwell had a front row seat. 

I'm not quite sure why Hilary Mantel set out to make it her mission to portray Cromwell in a better light and to destroy the reputation of the saintly Thomas More, but that is what she did.

Liberty and the defence of free speech.

 

The Islamophobe activist, Tommy Robinson, last spoke at the Oxford Union on 26 November 2014 and Unite Against Fascism (UAF), criticised the Union for allowing him a platform.  

I remember when they tried to no platform an English Roman Catholic mother called Victoria Gillick, who didn't want contraception being issued to people under 16, without parental consent. That must have been around 1985/86, when she addressed the Oxford Union. 

They probably did the same thing with Charlie Kirk and Malcolm X, who did believe in Black nationalism and racial separation. Muhammad Ali also addressed the Oxford Union and he believed in racial segregation and opposed mixed marriages between blacks and whites. Ali is known to have spoken at a KKK rally in the U.S. Both Charlie Kirk and Malcolm X were assassinated not long after they spoke at the Oxford Union because people wanted to silence them. 

Robinson, a convicted fraudster and former member of the far-right English Defence League (EDL) and British National Party (BNP), is scheduled to address the Oxford Union on May 28 on the motion, "This House believes the West is right to be suspicious of Islam." He will be opposed by Jacob Rees-Mogg. 

I have no time for Tommy Robinson or his toxic ideology, but as the English author George Orwell famously said,  "If Liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

Is this the end for Zanu Labour in Tameside?

 

Reform UK Tameside

The Zanu Labour gravy train in the one-party state of Tameside, has come to an abrupt end. Reform UK won 18 of the 19 seats up for grabs in the May 2026 local elections for Tameside Council, in Greater Manchester. The council had been Labour controlled for 47 years. 

Labour still remains the largest party on the council but has lost overall control and will now have to team up with other councillors. Although Reform UK are now the official opposition, it's likely that Labour will seek the support of the independent group of councillors who now effectively hold the balance of power on Tameside Council. These independent councillors are unlikely to want the current Labour leader, councillor Eleanor Wills to remain as leader, because she was never elected as the Labour leader, but appointed by Labour's NEC who have been running the council and selecting the Labour candidates. 

It was expected that Tameside voters would give Labour a bloody nose because of the Starmer effect, but there were also local issues that people were unhappy with. The closure of Ashton swimming baths, pot holes and the state of Ashton market ground, have definitely lost Labour votes. In Stalybridge, the council have closed Armentieres Square for road works and repairs which was used as a central bus location in the town. Bus services have had to re-route and are changing routes all the time which is confusing people who are trying to catch a bus.

Oppose no platforming and defend free speech.

 

The Oxford Union

I remember when they tried to stop the Roman Catholic mother Victoria Gillick, speaking at the Oxford Union, because she opposed contraception being given to under-16s without parental consent. It must have been in 1985/86. I was in the bar the night after, and the manager, Brenda, had a black eye. She told me that a young woman had hit her with a stiletto heel. 

They probably tried to stop Charlie Kirk from speaking at the Oxford Union and now some people are trying to no platform Tommy Robinson. This isn't the first time that Robinson as addressed the Oxford Union but there will be a speaker opposing him. I don't care for Tommy Robinson or his vile politics of hate, but neither do I care for no platforming. 

At one time they tried to stop the suffragettes from speaking and people beat the women up. As George Orwell said, "if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." 

It seems strange that both Charlie Kirk and Malcolm X were assassinated not long after they addressed the Oxford Union. That was done to silence both of them.