Historian, record collector, and admirer of old machines. Biographer of Peter Shore & Victor Grayson. Working on JR Clynes.
Shropshire
Joined February 2019
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For anyone interested in Victor Grayson I’ve started to update the old website victorgrayson.com and will be putting some more useful stuff for researchers on there.
Harry Taylor 🇬🇧 retweeted
“Perhaps it is time to reconsider an economic model that precipitated the hollowing out of the country’s industrial heartlands, all in the pursuit of cheaper stuff… economic models are not inevitable, they are not laws of nature. They are ours to change.”
@EdConwaySky in his brilliant @NewStatesman piece ahead of the Budget.
Highly recommend. Link below.
Harry Taylor 🇬🇧 retweeted
X is a bubble. Most people on here underestimate how effective Burnham’s brand of “normie populism” can be. Does Burnham appearing on Gogglebox appeal to me? No. But I can recognise why it’s a clever political move.
Harry Taylor 🇬🇧 retweeted
This sort of policy cuts right through by the way. Anti social behaviour on public transport is one of those symbolic things people associate with decline. Smart, simple politics.
People playing loud music on buses could face £100 fine bbc.in/4yR9HFa
Harry Taylor 🇬🇧 retweeted
You ever been so angry about school conditions that you have to steal a six pack of Leffe?
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Harry Taylor 🇬🇧 retweeted
90 years ago, the Jarrow Crusaders marched nearly 300 miles to London in protest at unemployment and poverty. Thomas Cantrell Dugdale’s 1936 painting captures their arrival from a Piccadilly interior (possibly the Ritz).
Harry Taylor 🇬🇧 retweeted
In recent days, I have heard Labour supporters of PR say that Labour should *NOT* go into coalition with the Greens. I've heard the same in the past said about the nationalist parties. No government with Reform, I assume, is a given with them.
So how exactly is Labour meant to govern under PR? Under the perpetual thumb of the Liberal Democrats -- a party whose current leader was a Cabinet minister in a Conservative-led government??
Since 1945, Labour has won 9 majority governments. Tories have won 10. But let's throw that all away for... governing at the mercy of the whims of the Lib Dems.
Great idea.... 🤨😑😮💨 – at Reading, England
If Labour want proportional representation, who are they planning on entering coalition government with then now the Greens have gone totally nuts? Surely Lab-Lib Dems not enough. xitter.cf/lukeakehurst/status/21…
Harry Taylor 🇬🇧 retweeted
Almost no plot. Almost nothing to it at all. A love scene that never happens. No resolution because there is nothing really to resolve. Memory, loss, healing. Real joy, but fleeting. A painting uncovered as lots of other lovely things fade away. One of best books I’ve read for ages.
Harry Taylor 🇬🇧 retweeted
Zack Polanski. A Profile In Courage.
Harry Taylor 🇬🇧 retweeted
A Bennite, a Cleggite and a Cameroon walk into a bar, the bartender asks:
“What can I get you Mr Polanski?”
Harry Taylor 🇬🇧 retweeted
Labour Party constitution:
2. Its purpose is to organise and maintain in
Parliament and in the country a political
Labour Party
Not Greens or LibDems or any other pseudo-progressives - but Labour.
Interesting recent find! Jack Dash’s autobiography, personally dedicated to Bert Ramelson.
Dash was one of the best-known rank-and-file leaders of the London dockers; Ramelson served as the Communist Party of Great Britain’s industrial organiser from 1965 to 1977. Two important figures in post-war British industrial organising.
Harry Taylor 🇬🇧 retweeted
"If we can magically convince a third of our opponents voters to switch to us in the last week we'll still lose" is quite the spin...
Internal Green data seen by HuffPost UK shows the party believes that if it persuades 30% of 2024 Labour voters to switch to them, Polanski will be just 4 points behind.
"This is on a knife edge"
huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/l…
Harry Taylor 🇬🇧 retweeted
Mungo Murray, 7th Earl of Mansfield, and a Conservative MP for Perth, was a keen advocate of proportional representation.
In a 1933 debate, where he was responding to Clement Attlee's objections to PR, Murray (with the courtesy title Lord Scone) boasted:
'I believe that the letters "P.R." do not spell "proportional representation," but "perpetual repression"—perpetual repression of the Socialist party'.
Murray hoped that introducing PR would mean Britain would never have a Labour-majority government. If he'd had his way, he probably would have been right.
Harry Taylor 🇬🇧 retweeted
I’m increasingly fascinated by Zack Polanski’s political backstory. Tony Benn was apparently one of his heroes — yet within a year of Benn’s death, Polanski had joined the Lib Dems and was standing for them while the Bennites had won the leadership of the Labour Party. Quite the political journey. When exactly did this Bennite phase begin?
I’m beginning to think his political origin story has had a few rewrites.
Harry Taylor 🇬🇧 retweeted
It’s Wilsonmania here at Labour conference with a range of merch commissioned to mark 60 years since his 1966 triumph
Harry Taylor 🇬🇧 retweeted
“Men will learn eventually, and if they insist on rejecting the received wisdom of generations past, they do not thereby succeed at invalidating it; they merely condemn themselves to learning it, time and again, by ever grimmer experience.”
Hilaire Belloc
