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. 

Labouring under fallacies.

 

British people labour under a lot of fallacies and one of the biggest ones, is that Britain has always had a capitalist system. You will hardly ever hear the words capitalist or capitalism ever used in mainstream political discourse in Britain.  

Feudalism and capitalism are not the same thing, take my word for it. They are distinct economic and social systems with fundamental differences in property ownership, labour, and social mobility. England had a feudalistic system for far longer than it has ever been a capitalist system. 

If you understand anything about English history, you would know that religion and traditional virtue condemned both money lending and those that coveted money for its own sake. Shakespeare's father was prosecuted for lending money. Buying cheap to sell dear or artificially trying to raise prices, was totally condemned. To a man like the 17th century' ‘Digger,' Gerrard Winstanley, working for wages was totally demeaning. Before the Normans introduced feudalism to England, the country was an Anglo Saxon "Heptarchy' of shifting kingdoms run by warrior kings who ruled a country of peasant subsistence farmers. 

I recently watched the former stand-up comedian Konstantin Kisin, talking about what he called "productive" and "unproductive" people in society. He might give the appearance of being an intellectual, but I thought he was talking out of his arse. Why does he think that only wealthy people are productive? He does so because he's a proselytizer of a pro-capitalist ideology. What generates wealth is people's productive labour? There would be no Jeff Bezos without Amazon workers and Bezos couldn't have devoted his time to building a company, if we didn't have a social division of labour. 

Instead of listening to a clown like Kissin, people should try reading 'Religion and the Rise of Capitalism' by R.H. Tawney or Chapter 27 of Das Kapital by Karl Marx, which is entitled "The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land".

Marx and Bakunin.

 

The Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin, knew both Marx and Engels. He credited Marx with being a brilliant intellectual but a "privileged authoritarian." He also regarded Marx as an egotistical leader and predicted that Marxist rule would lead to a "red bureaucracy" and a "new privileged class" and that is what certainly happened in Bolshevik Russia. 

Bakunin thought Marx democratically inclined but, in a letter, he described him as a "bourgeois, subversive, exploitative" personality that relied on "political slander, lies and intrigue," and Bakunin was often on the receiving end of it. Both Marx and Engels accused Bakunin of being a Russian agent or Tsarist spy. 

While Marx wrote about "rural idiocy" Bakunin thought that the peasantry in countries like Russia, Italy and Spain, could play a divisive role in the social revolution. 

Other socialist' leaders like Rosa Luxembourg and Alexander Herzen, were sceptical about the Marxist worker's state. Rosa Luxembourg predicted a form of Stalinist rule and Herzen thought communism was just Tsarism turned upside down. 

Antisemitism in the British media.

 

Have you seen the egregiously anti-Semitic cartoons and caricatures of Zack Polanski that have been published in the Daily Mail and The Times newspapers? They’re absolutely disgusting. Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, couldn't have done a better job. But don't expect Kemi Badenoch, Keir Starmer, the Board of Deputies of British Jews or the Campaign Against Antisemitism, to rally to the defence of Zack Polanski, or to criticize these two pro-Tory, pro-capitalist, newspapers. 

Antisemitism has been weaponised for political purposes and what is happening to Polanski, is exactly what happened to Jeremy Corbyn, who threatened the interests of the wealthy and privileged. They also want an excuse to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests against genocide in Gaza. 

On the day of the Golders Green attack, three people were stabbed by Essa Sulieman (a man with a history of mental health problems), but one of the victims, appears to have already been hair brushed out of the story. Sulieman has been charged with allegedly stabbing a Muslim man called Ismail Hussein, in South London. This attack is being presented as an act of antisemitism and terrorism on the Jewish community in London, but obviously, Mr. Hussein, doesn't fit in with narrative.

Did Marxist determinism lead to political quietism in Nazi Germany?

 

There's not much democracy in the British workplace, but it's capitalism that unintentionally, created the modern-day worker, trade unions and socialism. Both trade unionism and socialism were a reaction against the brutal exploitative conditions of British capitalism in the early 19th century. The socialist movement grew up in the slums of Europe. 

If you press people together in factories, they will get their heads together. The workers realised that only by combining could they improve their pay and conditions of employment. We never really had revolutionary trade unionism in Britain and early English trade unionism, owes its origins more to craft sectarianism, than class consciousness. An organised working-class that can act as a social class, as immense economic power which could be used for political ends to overthrow the state and the capitalist system.

Karl Marx appeared to regard the advent of socialism as inevitable, but even if you bring the capitalist system crashing down, it doesn't necessarily follow that it will be a socialist system that replaces it; it could be fascism as we saw in both fascist Italy and Germany. Both the socialists and communist movements in Germany failed to combat the rise of fascism in Germany and seemed to see Hitler and the Nazis as an unwelcome and temporary anomaly, "the death rattle of a capitalist system on the point of extinction."

Stalin denounced the German socialists as "social fascists", and urged German Communists to view them as the main enemy of the working-class. The anarchists in Spain did at least stand up to Franco and the Falangists and tried to build a libertarian communist society in parts of Spain.

Will Angela Rayner make a bid for Starmer's job after May local elections?

 

Angela Rayner

Angela Rayner speaks with a lisp. When she was a young girl, her mother - who couldn't read or write - told her that she needed speech and language therapy. 

A Daily Mail columnist once wrote that she 'winced' when she heard Rayner demanding on the Radio 4 Today Programme, "Was you there or not at the party?" Rayner told a meeting of North West Labour members, "I'm sick of shouting from the sidelines and I bet youse lot are too." 

She's described herself as a "failing pupil" from a "failing school." By all accounts, her spelling and grammar are atrocious. One of the volunteers who worked with Rayner during her Ashton election campaign has said:

"She needed quite a bit of advice... I remember she needed help with writing statements, letters, press releases etc, because writing is definitely not her strong point. She just couldn't do it. She couldn't string two sentences together in writing, but of course she excelled verbally... Her husband really managed her campaign, in so far as anyone can manage Angela. He had the UNISON connections." 

Another former colleague has said that Rayner is good at presenting an image of competence, adding, "Quite a lot of time she was bullshitting like crazy. Someone would say something technical and complicated at a meeting, and a few minutes later, she would regurgitate it as if it were her idea."  

Like the fictional Eliza Doolittle, Rayner worked as a flower seller, cash in hand, selling roses in pubs and clubs. Angela Rayner has described herself as wild child, who from the age of thirteen, was visiting night clubs in order to spend time with older men. Rayner said her father would pick her up outside the Manchester night clubs. She's admitted herself that she likes to drink and party and is known to her children, as the "vaping dragon." But both Winston Churchill and Herbert Asquith, liked the booze. Asquith was nicknamed 'Squiffy' by some parliamentarians and I suspect that he's walked into many doors. 

I think it's preposterous to see Angela Rayner as a UK Labour Prime Minister. How would she deal on the world stage of politics with political figures like Donald Trump, Marco Rubio or the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov? I dread to think what they would make of Angela Rayner and her Star Wars shoes and her flat vowels. It's too laughable for words. Within Labour Party circles Rayner is known as the 'Diva' and there is a joke that the only test that she ever sat, was a pregnancy test.

Nazi war crimes doesn't excuse Israeli war crimes and genocide.

 

The Bombing of Gaza

There were always pogroms against Jews in many European countries and anti-Semitism was common, but it's state power that allowed Hitler and his Nazis regime to murder people on a vast industrial scale. 

The persecution of Jews throughout Europe and the concentration camps, were not a casus belli for why Britain declared war on Germany. People knew that Jewish people were trying to flee Nazi Germany but most weren't aware of the extermination camps, until the end of the war. British intelligence would probably have known about the camps and probably their locations, but I don't think bombing the camps or the rail links leading to the concentration camps, was a priority for the British government. The Nazis also exterminated gypsies and other ethnic groups. 

A lot of people in politics today, have a guilt complex about what happened to the Jewish people during WWII and that's understandable, but that should not excuse what the Israeli's have done in Gaza or the West Bank. Around 70,000 people have been killed in Gaza by carpet bombing and many of the dead, are innocent women and children. 

I remember the Jewish Labour MP, Gerald Kauffman saying "My 80-year-old grandmother didn't die after being shot by a Nazi so an Israeli soldier could shoot an 80-year-old Palestinian woman." Kaufmann is one of many Jewish people who deplored the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza and the West Bank. 

The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC). That was what the Nazis were charged with at Nuremberg.

Sir Olly Robbins

 

Sir Olly Robbins

In what other occupation could you get sacked and then demand £1 million from the employer who sacked you. That's what the civil service mandarin Sir Oliver (Olly) Robbins is doing. He wants to be paid the remainder of his five years contract as the Foreign Office permanent under-secretary, plus the value of missed pension payments. Peter Mandelson who was also sacked as British Ambassador to Washington, demanded that £500,000 compensation be paid to him. 

Sir Olly, insists that he followed Civil Service protocols in not disclosing personal vetting information to government ministers about Mandelson, but the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, says he was "furious" that he was kept in the dark about vetting. Sir Olly sees himself as a scapegoat and he's probably right. If he took legal action against the government for dismissing him, it could be costly for the government and politically embarrassing for Sir Keir Starmer. He'd also probably win his case.

We know that Robbins came under intense pressure to approve Mandelson becoming Britain's ambassador to the U.S. even though Mandelson failed security vetting. Why Starmer wanted a disgraced scum bag like Mandelson in the first place, says a lot about his poor political judgement.

Nazi war crimes doesn't excuse Israeli war crimes and genocide.

 

There were always pogroms against Jews in many European countries and anti-Semitism was common, but it's state power that allowed Hitler and his Nazis regime to murder people on a vast industrial scale. 

The persecution of Jews throughout Europe and the concentration camps, were not a casus belli for why Britain declared war on Germany. People knew that Jewish people were trying to flee Nazi Germany but most weren't aware of the extermination camps, until the end of the war. British intelligence would probably have known about the camps and probably their locations, but I don't think bombing the camps or the rail links leading to the concentration camps, was a priority for the British government. The Nazis also exterminated gypsies and other ethnic groups. 

A lot of people in politics today, have a guilt complex about what happened to the Jewish people during WWII and that's understandable, but that should not excuse what the Israeli's have done in Gaza or the West Bank. Around 70,000 people have been killed in Gaza by carpet bombing and many of the dead are innocent women and children. 

I remember the Jewish Labour MP, Gerald Kauffman saying "My 80-year-old grandmother didn't die after being shot by a Nazi so an Israeli soldier could shoot an 80-year-old Palestinian woman." Kaufmann is one of many Jewish people who condemned the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza and the West Bank. 

The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC). That was what the Nazis were charged with at Nuremberg.

Are the Green Party bowing to pressure from the pro-Israeli lobby by suspending Tony Greenstein?

 

Tony Greenstein

The pro-Israeli lobby smeared Jeremy Corbyn with accusations of antisemitism in order to destroy him and end his leadership of the Labour Party. We were told that a Corbyn Labour government would pose an "existential threat" to Jews living in Britain. 

To a great extent, Jeremy Corbyn bought into these spurious calumnies because he thought he could placate his detractors and win them over. He watched his comrades get thrown under a bus as they were smeared as anti-Semites. 

They're now doing the same thing with Zack Polansky and the Green Party. The Green Party have just suspended the anti-Zionist pro-Palestinian activist Tony Greenstein, from the Green Party after pro-Israeli lobby group complained that he was a "notorious anti-Semite." Tony is Jewish and is the son of a rabbi. 

The Brighton Green Party would have certainly known about Tony's pro-Palestinian activism when he applied and was offered membership of the Green Party, because it's all in the public domain and on social media. You can only conclude that the Green Party have bowed down to pressure exerted on them by the pro-Israeli lobby. 

Are Britain's middle-class becoming part of the 'precariat'?

 

The middle-class in Britain today, are becoming part of the 'precariat' and are rediscovering the condition of asset-less economic insecurity that once afflicted the nineteenth century proletariat. 

I'm constantly reading about the difficulty that highly educated university graduates find in trying to get gainful employment in today's Britain. Getting a University Degree is no longer a guarantee that you will find your place in the Sun.  They often complain about AI screening of job applications and of being rejected because they lack paid work experience. Many university graduates are even being rejected for entry levels jobs in hospitality. 

The job market for academics has become precarious. There are fewer full-time university jobs and many institutions favour flexible, short-term contracts over secure full-time roles. The level of pay is also declining. 

I can see AI displacing many people in journalism, teaching, and possibly medicine. Doctors in general practice, who have become averse to having face-to-face contact with patients since COVID, are being diluted by less qualified people like 'Physician Associates' and 'Anaesthetist Associates' who are paid less money and there's even autonomous AI doctors.

I'm not surprised that Zack Polansky and the Green Party are attracting disenchanted alienated younger voters because the other mainstream parties have done nothing for them.

Reform UK candidate outed for expressing support for Oswald Mosley and the Blackshirts.

 

Nigel Farage & Andrew Mahon

Andrew Mahon, a Reform UK candidate in Blackburn has been outed for expressing support online for Oswald Mosley and his fascist Blackshirts. We shouldn't really be surprised that they've got racist and Nazi and fascist sympathisers in Reform UK. They're the Alf Garnett's of British politics.

Reform UK is an atavistic personality cult centred around their stockbroker leader, Nigel Farage, who is alleged to have expressed Nazi sympathies when he was a pupil at the exclusive Dulwich College. In my view, Farage isn't a Nazi, he's a charlatan. Politically, he's a nationalist Thatcherite Conservative, who likes making easy money.

The English writer George Orwell, thought that Oswald Mosley was as "hollow as a jug" and that his speeches were the "usual claptrap" of blaming everything on Jews. Curiously, Enoch Powell, an academic classicist, compared the Tory elite to the Athenian oligarchs who would always sacrifice culture for class. They nearly sold us out to Hitler and the Nazis because they thought Hitler was on the side of the dividend drawer and was an anti-communist. 

The upper-class English communist, Jessica Mitford, recalled watching Mosley and his Blackshirts, march through the Elephant and Castle in the 1930s giving the Nazi salute and singing the Horst Wessel Lied, the anthem of the German Nazi Party. Can you think of anything more likely to offend English working-class patriotic sensibility, than dressing up and trying to mimic a German Nazi?  

Playing the Blame Game.

 

What is it about the English? As a people they seem to be so divisive. They're always playing one off against the other. Young people against old people; unionised workers against non-unionised workers; the employed against the unemployed; blacks against whites; women against men; Muslims against Christians. This is why they never get anywhere because they're so easily side-tracked and duped. 

As a retired state pensioner, I don't deny that many young people find it hard going today, but that's not the fault of the elderly - it has more to do with successive government policy. Many of us received full education grants when we were younger, but we didn't introduce students' loans, raise tuition fees, or introduce the gig economy and zero-hour contracts. British governments facilitated all that. 

To hear some people talk, you would think that the so-called 'Baby Boomers' have taken it all and left generation Z, without a pot to piss in. The national economy is not a fixed pie or a zero-sum game where some people can only gain at the expense of others. Who gets what, when, and how, is more of a political decision than an economic decision. Britain is not a poor country by any means, but it's a very inegalitarian and unequal society. 

During the Victorian era, when Britain controlled two thirds of the world, and had immense wealth, some people called Britain, paradise for 30,000 and hell for thirty million. Both my parent's new what poverty was and slum housing because they lived through the depression of 1930s.

Do free markets self correct?

 

Eugene Fama

If you believe in what's called the "efficient markets Hypothesis" then the 2007 financial crises shouldn't have occurred because free markets have the ability to self-correct. 

The 2007 financial crises revealed that much of the recent productivity growth in finance was achieved through the debasement of its products - the creation of overly complex, riskier, and even fraudulent products. The complexity of the new financial product, 'Asset Backed Securities' (ABS's); 'Collateral Debt Obligations' (CDO's) and 'Credit Default Swaps' (CDS), is exactly what made them dangerous and what nearly brought the capitalist financial system crashing down. 

Markets may transmit information, but what reason is there to believe that - unlike any other institution - they have a built-in capacity to correct their mistakes? Moods of irrational exuberance and panic can, and often do, swamp the price discovery functions of markets. 

To avoid a worldwide economic slump and depression which occurred after the 1929 'Wall Street Crash', governments adopted Keynesian policies. They bailed out some firms, bought toxic debts, and injected money into the financial system to shore it up. It was a kind of socialism for the rich and the free market for the rest of us. 

The American economist, Eugene Fama, of the Chicago School, took a different view. He argued that financial markets were a casualty of the recession and did not cause it. For Farma, the U.S. government made lending too easy, credit too easy and too easy to obtain. He maintained that banks acted rationally in responding to incentives put in place by an interfering government and that unencumbered markets work efficiently. Fama won the Nobel Prize for economics, but there were many other financial crises before 2007, and they seemed to have been triggered by excessive liberalisation in the financial markets. 

In 1982, Chile got into a major banking crisis following radical financial market liberalization and there were banking crises in Sweden, Finland and Norway, following financial deregulation. There was the 'tequila' crisis in Mexico in 1994-1995, and a crisis in the economies of Asia, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and South Korea, in 1987, which resulted from financial deregulation.  

Some do argue that this theory called the efficient market hypothesis, played a key role in the making of the 2007 financial crisis because it made policy-makers believe that financial markets needed no regulation.

Before you study the history study the historian.

 

I would hardly describe history as neutral. The famous English historian E.H. Carr, did say that before you study the history, you should study the historian.

Every historian carries their own baggage.  Nevertheless, it's rare to find anyone who sees history as simply one shambolic heap of chaos, chance, accident and contingency. We have to give history a coherent shape in order to make sense of it and that's why we divide it into periods of history. 

Scarcely anybody believes that there are no intelligible patterns to history at all. For the most part, the threads that lash it together have been scarcity, hard labour, violence and exploitation. If we were to cut through past history at any point and inspect a cross section of it, we're likely to find the great majority of men and women, living lives of largely fruitless toil for the benefit of a ruling or privileged class. We're likely to see a political state that is prepared to use violence to maintain the status quo and probably some form of resistance to this injustice by people who feel exploited and oppressed. We are also likely to find that quite a lot of myth, culture and thought of the period, lends itself to legitimising the situation. 

The sort of history that we were taught at an English state school in the 1950s and 1960s, was about English Kings and Queens who were mainly of French, Norman, or German in origin. We were told really nothing about the lives of ordinary people. It was neither his-story or her-story, but the story of power and ruling elites. What they call history from below or labour history, came much later, with pioneering works like the 'Making of the English Working Class', by E.P. Thompson.

Warfare not Welfare says Streeting.

 

Labour's health minister, Wes Streeting, wants to cut welfare spending to increase defence spending. You might call it WARFARE NOT WELFARE. 

How did a pox doctors' clerk, like Wes Streeting, get into the Labour Party and rise through the ranks of the Labour Party? This Labour stalwart, entered British Labour politics, by a familiar route. A position within the National Union of Students (NUS), a stint working for a charity like Stonewall, and then as an errand boy for Peter Mandelson. You would hardly call that working at the coal face, would you? Streeting seems to believe that cutting welfare spending is the only way of increasing defence spending and you have to make the poor pay for it.

As most UK social security spending goes on state pensions, welfare cuts are likely to impact on the elderly. You could make the rich pay for it, or the Royal Family, or increase taxation, or crackdown on tax dodgers and tax exiles, but this so-called Labour man, doesn't seem to think that's a good idea. 

I think Streeting as just dashed any hopes that he may have of replacing Sir Keir Starmer-oid as the next Labour leader. 

How English is the Flag of St. George?

 

It probably never occurs to these so-called 'patriots', of Britain First, that the Flag of St George, was originally the ensign of the Republic of Genoa and is associated with Richard the Lionheart’s crusades in the 12th century. 

St George, a Roman soldier and Christian martyr, had a Palestinian mother and was from Cappadocia in what is today, modern-day Turkey. He certainly wasn't English and he became the patron saint of England in the 14th century, replacing St. Edmond, the original patron saint of England. 

During his ten-year reign, King Richard I, spent around six months in England and most of his time was spent in the Holy Land, France, or imprisoned in Austria and Germany, where he was being held for ransom. Although he was born in Oxford, he didn't really speak Old English and he probably didn't understand the language, or would have thought it beneath him to do so. It was the language of the English peasantry and it would be incomprehensible to most of us living today. 

Richard grew up in the Duchy of Aquitaine in France. He's known to have spoken a mix of French and Occitan and he saw England as a source of revenue.  Both his parents were French. His father King Henry II, was born in Le Mans, in France and his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, had been the Queen of France as she was previously married to King Louis VII of France.

Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool.

 

Tolstoy and Countess Tolstoy

I read George Orwell's essay 'Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool' (1947), many years ago. Orwell found it curious that Tolstoy, a Christian anarchist, would pick on King Lear specifically, and concluded that it was because Tolstoy saw something of King Lear in himself. 

Tolstoy tried to renounce much of his wealth and to escape his privileged position and to live the life of a peasant, but it didn't bring him happiness. Tolstoy's wife, Sophia, called her husband's disciples "riffraff" and they weren't keen on her. She said it wasn't easy having a genius for a husband but she also thought that Tolstoy didn't always live up to his own ideals, and wasn't a particularly good husband or father, to his children. The utopian communes that were inspired by the teachings of Tolstoy, weren't always a great success. 

William Shakespeare wasn't always popular in Britain, even though Tolstoy regarded him as having been universally popular. He was certainly popular in Elizabethan England but became less popular in the late 18th century and early 19th century, and then his popularity steadily increased afterwards. 

A good friend of mine used to say to me that the English know as much about Shakespeare as the French know about good French wine. What we know about the life of Shakespeare could be written on the back of a postage stamp, and some believe, that he didn't write all the plays. Yet, there's never been an English writer who has had as much influence on the English language or the English people as William Shakespeare. English people often use expressions and words coined by Shakespeare without even knowing it or realising it. 

Napoleon in Egypt.

 

Jaffa wasn't the only massacre carried out in Napoleon's Egyptian campaign of 1798. The French fleet was sunk by Nelson at Aboukir Bay leaving Napoleon stranded in Egypt. Napoleon had invaded Egypt to disrupt British trading routes in the Mediterranean. The French used beheadings, hostage-taking and village burning to secure its presence in Egypt.

When Cairo rose up against Napoleon, he ordered that all captured rebels should be beheaded and their corpses thrown into the Nile, where they would float past and terrorise the local population. Their heads were put in sacks, loaded on mules and dumped in piles in Ezbekyeh Square in central Cairo. 

Jaffa refused to surrender and the governor replied by displaying the head of Napoleon's messenger on the walls. Napoleon ordered that the walls be breached and thousands of French soldiers slaughtered the inhabitants. Some nine to ten thousand prisoners who were captured at Jaffa, were taken to the beach and massacred in cold blood. The French caught the plague off Jaffa's inhabitants who they raped and pillaged.

Napoleon abandoned his troops in Egypt to return to France. When the French general Jean-Baptiste Kleber discovered that Napoleon had left Egypt he called him "that Corsican runt" and told his staff, "That bugger has deserted us with his breeches full of shit. When we get back to Europe we'll rub his face in it." Kleber was denied the opportunity because he was stabbed to death in June 1800 by a 24-year-old student called Soliman. He was executed by having a pike driven into his rectum up to his breast. 

In the 60 battles that Napoleon fought, captured European soldiers were never treated like the inhabitants of Egypt. Today, Napoleon's Egyptian campaign is best remembered for the way in which archaeologists documented Egyptian artefacts in the twenty-one volumes of the 'Description de L' Egypte' and the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which led to Jean-Francois Champollion, being able to crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822.