The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist.

 

It was an engineer who was a member of the CPGB, who advised me to read the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist by Robert Tressell, many years ago. Over the years, I have the read the book several times.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist was a book that was read by many British soldiers in the trenches in WWI. It probably as the same standing as Tom Paine's 'Rights of Man' or Robert Blatchford's book 'Merrie England', which have all been influential. The book is set in the fictional town of Mugsborough (Hastings), and is centred around a group of men, who work for a firm called Rushton & Co. The discussions that those Edwardian working men have amongst one another, are still being played out today in pubs and clubs across the country, and it is said that you can identify some of the characters in the book, with people that you know. Those working men also blame foreigners for most of their misfortunes in life, rather than the political system, but they vent their spleen on French onion sellers.

There's no doubt that the books ideological hero, the socialist Frank Owen, is Robert Tressell. It's also clear that Owen is largely contemptuous about many of his work mates and this is reflected in the title of the book and the name of the town. He basically thinks they're mugs and he's right.

A cloth cap Tory like Lee Anderson, of Reform UK, could have fallen straight out of the pages of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and so could many of the constituents of Clacton-on-Sea - one of the most socially deprived parts of England - who voted for the grifter Nigel Farage and Reform UK, who want to slash state benefits that many of his constituents rely on.

People often say that the book should be compulsory reading in British schools, but it's unlikely that the book will ever be put on the school curriculum because of its socialist content. I think two other books that should be on the curriculum for British schools is "News from Nowhere' by William Morris and 'Candide' by Voltaire. 

Reynolds refuses to rule out UK state pensioners paying income tax in October budget.

 

Jonathan Reynolds

The Labour MP, Jonathan Reynolds, voted to remove the winter fuel allowance for 14,270 local pensioners in his constituency of Stalybridge & Hyde. A staunch ally of the disgraced former Labour minister, Peter Mandelson, Reynolds defended Labour MPs taking 'freebies' from wealthy individuals like Lord Waheed Alli, arguing that freebies weren't a perk of the job but were an essential part of the job of being an MP in Parliament.

It was reported in the press that Lord Waheed Alli had been buying clothing for the Prime Ministers' wife, Lady Victoria Sponger. It was also reported that Angela Rayner and her 'soul mate' and lover, Sam Tarry, had stayed buckshee in a Manhattan penthouse owned by Lord Alli. Rayner also voted to means-test the winter fuel allowance. Rayner said that Lord Alli asked for nothing in return and got nothing in return. Reynolds served as a business minister in the government of Sir Keir Starmeroid, who when in opposition, had pledged to clean up British politics.

The former Chancellor, Rachel freeze Reeves, who took the winter fuel allowance off 10 million UK pensioners to save £5bn, did say publicly that people who had only the UK state pension, would not be expected to pay income tax even if their state pension exceeded the lower income tax threshold.

British pensioners do turn out and vote, but they don't generally vote for political parties that stuff them. Labour had to do a partial U-turn on the winter fuel allowance and reinstated it, after Labour lost councils and council seats to Reform UK. From the moment that Labour removed the winter fuel allowance, it was all downhill for Sir Keir Starmeroid. He never really recovered from this serious blunder. 

Is Lucy Letby a victim of a miscarriage of justice?

 

Most of us weren't at the trial of Lucy Letby so we haven't heard all the evidence that was presented at the trial. The trial lasted 10 months and she had legal representation. At the end of the trial the jury found her guilty of killing babies. If she did kill the babies, I don't think any motive has been established for why she did so.

I spent a number of years in an hospital action group and I learned a great deal about how hospital management connives, manipulate, intimidate, to cover things up to protect the hospital and their own jobs.

The Kennedy Breast Care Review that was carried out by Professor Sir Ian Kennedy, was set up to investigate the breast and vascular surgeon Ian Paterson, who worked at Solihull Hospital. Paterson was given a 20-year jail sentence in 2017, after being convicted of 17 counts of wounding with intent and 3 counts of unlawful wounding. In his report, Professor Kennedy wrote:

 "In reading this Review, you will see and recognise themes which have figured in a number of reports on the NHS over the years. Indeed, it has been said more than once, that, as regards reviews of the NHS, the place may be different, the date may be different, the details may be different, but the underlying issues are all too familiar. They include challenges in managing difficult and powerful staff, difficulties in raising concerns, inter-professional animosities, dysfunctional organisation, failures of communication, lack of openness, a particular style of leadership, lack of engagement by the Board in the quality and safety of care."

What Professor Kennedy found was that medical staff at Solihull Hospital were very wary of raising concerns about other medical colleagues which one described as "raising his head above the parapet." The Hospital Trust was trying to become a Foundation Trust and they didn't want any concerns about Ian Paterson to negatively impact. The Review found that senior managers at Solihull were in thrall to confidentiality and found refuge in it as a way of managing an increasingly difficult problem, keeping control of it and containing it. Professor Kennedy wrote that one of the major indictments of management in the NHS, was that it is inward looking, over defensive, and prone to destroy by a variety of means, those who suggest that the emperor has no clothes. "This is not unique to this Review. It is a blight on the NHS and one of the principal areas where lessons must be learned."

There are similarities with the way in which the Lucy Letby case was handled by the Countess of Chester Hospital and the deaths of babies at Bristol Royal Infirmary, who died after botched open heart surgery by incompetent surgeons. There's a pattern of trying to cover hospital failings up, intimidating whistle-blowers, and kicking things into the long grass. It's possible that there may have been other reasons why these babies in the Lucy Letby case died, and I understand that her defence team are trying to establish that and prove that Letby is a victim of a miscarriage of justice. 

Marshal Ney.

 

It was said of Napoleon's Grande Armee, that every soldier carried a Field Marshals baton in is knapsack.

Marshal Michel Ney was the son of a cooper from the Saar, who had married one of Marie Antoinette's chambermaids. Many of Napoleon's marshals were of working-class origin and had risen through the ranks. Ney was to gain a reputation for being insanely brave. Napoleon said of Ney that he "was good for a command of ten thousand men, but beyond that he was out of his depth."

Napoleon felt that Ney had betrayed him at Fontainebleau in April 1814. He told Gourgaud that "Ney got no more than he deserved. I regret him because he was inestimable on a field of battle, but was too hot-headed and too stupid to succeed in anything but a fight."

The Prussians and Bourbons wanted to execute Napoleon but he always seems to have been treated leniently, having been exiled first to Elba and then to St. Helena by the British and the Duke of Wellington. The Duke seems to have regarded Napoleon as a military genius but also thought him a Corsican upstart. Napoleon called Wellington a Sepoy General because he'd served in India. In his will, Napoleon left a bequest of 100,000 francs to Cantillon, Wellington's would-be assassin, who he said, "had as much right to kill that oligarch as the latter had to send me to die on the rock of St. Helena."

John Wroe's virgins.

 

I have walked through the Moravian Settlement in Droylsden many a time. The Moravians also had a community in Dukinfield.

Religious dissenters came to this area of East Manchester, because it was known for religious toleration. Another dissenting faction, were the Christian Israelites or 'Joanna's' who were led by Joanna Southcott, a prophetess from Devon and locally, by the charlatan, John Wroe, from Bradford, who travelled about on the back of a donkey. Wroe, a hunchback, is said to have circumcised himself in public and had retained a menagerie of young virgins. He publicly claimed that he was commanded by heaven to take seven young virgins to "comfort and cherish" him. He faced trials, beatings, and rejection in various towns due to a public backlash against his behaviour.

Wroe's leadership was marked by severe financial and sexual scandals. He died in Australia in 1863.

UK state benefits are too high says former newspaper editor.

 

Kelvin MacKenzie

The tabloid newspaper hack, Kelvin Mackenzie, talks a lot of horseshit when it comes to Britain's benefit system. He's another one of those social pundits, who thinks that people are living a cushy life in Britain on state benefits and that they need to be cut. He says that in the U. S., nobody talks about state benefits because they're that low, so people are incentivized to work. 

If you're receiving Universal Credit (UC), and are over 25, you will currently receive about £98 a week. Try living on £98 a week in Britain today. Nearly 40%, of people who claim UC, are in work. They claim UC because their wages are so low that they need to be topped by UC payments. Others who claim UC may have caring responsibilities. If you claim UC because your unemployed, you have to be available for work and demonstrate that you are actively seeking work. If you fail to do so, you will be sanctioned, and your benefits can be suspended. 

The point about the unemployment benefit system in Britain, was always about insuring you against loss of employment, through no fault of your own. It wasn't designed for people to live a life of dignified otiosity at the public's expense. That only applies to the British Royal Family. If you gave up your job without just cause or lost it through gross misconduct, you didn't get unemployment benefit. There is also a benefit cap. 

America is one of the most inegalitarian countries in the world. In a speech that he made to a liberal funding event, Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island, yelled: "I don't need Bush's tax cut! I have never worked a fucking day in my life." The average income for a black American is 61% less per year than the average white income. That is the same percentage difference as it was in 1880. Black women are four times more likely than white women to die while giving birth. Black levels of unemployment have been roughly twice those of whites since 1954. African Americans have been on the lowest rung of the economic ladder since the day they were beaten and dragged to the country in chains. 

In his book 'Capital in the 21st Century', the economist Thomas Picketty, says the average income of the parents of Harvard students is $450,000 dollars which corresponds to the average income of the top 2% of the U.S. income hierarchy. He adds, "Such findings do not seem compatible with the idea of selection by merit." In the U.S. parents in the top 1% income level are overrepresented in elite colleges.

Ideology and Nazism.

 

Hitler and the Nazis may well have appropriated both the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and the Bible to justify their horrors, but I don't think that you can blame either Nietzsche or Christianity for what Hitler did. 

Many German Jehovah's Witnesses were executed for refusing to serve in the German army or finished up in concentration camps, and they were Christians. Not all Roman Catholics colluded with the Nazis. 

Nietzsche was well aware of the connection between demagoguery and stupidity. He viewed political parties with deep skepticism, arguing that they rely on manipulation, destroy independent thinking, and reduce complex ideas into simplistic dogma. To appeal to the crowd, he said that political parties are forced to "transform their principles into great frescoes of stupidity." No ideology is wholly absorbed by its adherents. It breaks down in practice in a thousand different ways under the criticism of impulse and of experience. 

The Russia writer Fyodor Dostoevsky seems to have believed that any plan that was aimed at changing or perfecting human nature, was likely to end in failure because man's main defect was his chronic perversity. He thought that man's desires were not reasonable and that he often acted contrary to his own interest and common sense, but that is what made him human.

Britain's gun laws.

 

How do gun deaths in Britain compare with deaths arising from industrial accidents or deaths on the road or knife crime, or street violence? They pale into insignificance, even though there are many people who own legal firearms in Britain.

You have more chance of being killed crossing the road in Britain than you have being shot by a gun. So why are the police being so alarmist? Basically, because the police and the government don't like the hoi polloi having access to firearms. The constant tightening up of gun laws in Britain has more to do with social class than it has to do with preventing gun deaths or any war against people living in the countryside.

There's a presumption in Britain that hunting and shooting should be the preserve of aristocrats, wealthy landowners and the green welly brigade. Britain already has the strictest and most complicated gun laws in the world. It's not easy to own a legal firearm in Britain and it shouldn't be easy.

Unless you are a member of a gun club, you will have no chance of getting a Section 1 Firearms Certificate. You have to show good reason for wanting a gun and all gun clubs run section 21 police checks if you apply to be a member. If you have served a 3 year or more term of imprisonment, you are prohibited from owning or possessing a firearm for life. This also applies to suspended sentences. If you have served less than 3 years in prison, you are prohibited from owning or possessing a gun for five years after leaving prison. If you lie when 

Blue Labour - left wing economics missing in action?

 

Blue Labour – left wing economics missing in action?

(Andrew Wallace, 30/08/2026)

In so far as the Blair and Brown governments (1997-2010) attempted to define their political ideas, they attempted a syncretic embrace of market liberal economics and social progressivism. This rightist turn on economics would arguably be compensated in the non-economic realm of cultural liberalism and the meritocratic elevation of equality of opportunity and the proscription of discriminations in regard to race, sex, gender, sexuality and disability. Anthony Giddens (Blair’s in-house sociologist) heralded the new syncretic era in his books Beyond Left and Right (1994) and The Third Way (1998). Arguably it was Blair’s ‘modernising’ rightism that provided the accelerant for the ‘new left’ recourse to identity politics, if only as a sop to placate left wing critics and maintain the performative vacuity of faux progressive radicalism. Thatcherism with enhanced LGTB rights and diversity quotas would inevitably irritate an older cadre of paleo-leftists who preferred the material certitudes of class politics over the distractions of intersectionality.

Blue Labour

The Blue Labour campaign group emerged during the fag end of Brown’s government as a riposte to Giddens’s twin social and economic liberalisms. Founded by academic Maurice Glasman, Blue Labour attempted to promote what it took as the hitherto unrealised sweet spot of British politics, with a settlement that was both economically left wing and aligned to cultural conservatism. As critics of globalisation and market fundamentalism Blue Labour came with intimations of protectionism and sympathy for Brexit. This played out in public as a conspicuous rupture with New Labour (Wintour, 2011). Yet for all disavowals between the respective camps, Glasman aligned with the right-wing factionalists of Labour Together under the direction of Mandelson protégé Morgan McSweeney and future Chief of Staff to Starmer.

Glasman presents a thin-gruelled communitarian critique of the post-war Keynesian welfare state. The top-down statism of old is castigated for its bureaucratic inefficiencies and remoteness from the communities it was ostensibly designed to serve. Whilst there is undoubtedly more than a kernel of truth here there is also a danger such views can also be easily co-opted into a Hayekian narrative of old-fashioned resilience and personal responsibilities (Cooke, 2025). Glasman compounds his belligerence with a generous helping of invective (‘bed wetters’ and ‘lanyard classes’) directed at those Labour rebel MPs with the temerity to contest controversial welfare cuts targeted at disabled claimants (Newman, 2025, Channel 4 news).

Matt Goodwin, the former academic and analysist of national populism also provided an ongoing commentary in the last decade which provided ballast to the Blue Labour narrative. As a persistent critic of Thatcherism he championed the realisation of “what he has long prophesised as the “great realignment” — the potent combination of social conservatism with economic interventionism.” (Rubenstein, 2026). Goodwin repeatedly stressed his anti-Thatcherite worldview:

“He also once described his party’s (Reform) economic plans as an “utterly toxic combination”, explaining that he “cannot stress enough how UNPOPULAR slashing taxes and cutting spending on public services is” in a post on LinkedIn three years ago.” (Devlin, 2026)

Now that Goodwin has formally boarded the Reform UK flotilla his previous support for economic intervention has been replaced by free market boilerplate axioms of low taxation and deregulation and a corresponding populist anti-welfarism (Goodwin, 2025). This is in keeping with the idea that much of the supposed post-Brexit postliberal realignment is fictitious. It is merely the latest re-iteration of neoliberal normalcy with a pivot into cultural protectionism and amelioration of concerns with the sustainability of mass migration.

Cooke, R (2025) ‘Maurice Glasman: Labour’s trump card’

Available at: https://observer.co.uk/news/politics/article/labours-trump-card

(Accessed 31 August 2026)

Devlin, K (2026) ‘Reform by-election candidate said it was ‘insane’ to jail man who said ‘burn asylum hotels’ ’

Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/reform-matt-goodwin-nigel-farage-election-b2920781.html

(Accessed 31 August 2026)

Giddens, A (1994) Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Cambridge. Polity Press

Giddens, A (1998) The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. Polity

Goodwin, M (2025) ‘The hard working majority are seen by Labour as second class citizens’

Available at: https://www.gbnews.com/opinion/matthew-goodwin-hard-working-labour-second-class-citizens

(Accessed 31 August 2026)

Newman, C (2025) ‘ “Bed wetting MPs” protecting benefits for “lanyard class” ’

Available at: https://www.facebook.com/share/r/19SoeTLm7F/

(Accessed 31 August 2026)

Rubenstein, S (2026) ‘Matt Goodwin’s road to Reform Politics is just as sordid as academia’

Available at: https://unherd.com/2026/02/matt-goodwins-road-to-reform/

(Accessed 31 August 2026)

Wikipedia (2026) Blue Labour

Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Labour

(Accessed 31 August 2026)

Wintour, P (2011) ‘Peter Mandelson lambasts 'anti–immigrant, Europhobic' Blue Labour’

Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/jul/26/lord-mandelson-blue-labour-edl

(Accessed 31 August 2026)