Which political parties do right 

 

wingers support in the UK?

The straight forward and obvious answer is Conservatives and Reform but the real answer is so much more complicated.

The Labour Party has always had a strong right wing sect which is there due to the party being created for the whole working class. A class based party will always have a wide range of political opinions within it and it’s only in recent times that many of Labour’s right wingers have decamped to Reform.

I recall that in my early days in politics as a Liberal my expectation was that Labour supporters, activists, councillors and their MP’s would be centre-left through to full-blown socialists of one sect or another. OK, I was a bit green as I kept running into all kinds of Labour people who were clearly to my political right. It wasn’t until I had an illuminating conversation in the mid-1980’s with a fellow trade unionist, who was a Labour Party member, that the penny dropped for me as he explained why so many Labour supporters were both right-wing and indeed racists. He told me that racism was a far bigger issue in the Labour Party than in the Conservatives. A real eye opener was that conversation.

Of course, even my own party has right wing people within it and I refer here to Libertarians who see Liberalism as being the vehicle for their views when in reality Liberalism has always been radical and left of centre. To clarify, Libertarians take the view that we should be able to do pretty much whatever we want to do no matter what the effects on others, the environment etc. may be. In other words the very opposite of what being a Liberal actually means as we passionately believe that whilst we should be free to do what we want that can’t be at the expense of others the planet etc.

The tensions between the Liberals and SDP during the Alliance period were often based on the authoritarianism that some former Labour members of the SDP brought with them and the fact that elements of the SDP were clearly right of centre in outlook. Leftie Liberals did not (and still don’t) care for authoritarianism and right wing politics. I must add that I hardly ever encountered such issues with the SDP members I worked with back in the day although I did see Dr David Owen in such a light.

One of the political right issues which has long amused me is that Labour supporting, working class, right wingers won’t vote Conservative even in the days when there were some Conservatives less right wing than them! The opposite applied too, in that Conservative leaning voters would not vote Labour despite it having a significant right wing. In both cases it was really the politics of class creating the divide and party political no go areas.

Oddly, now however, we have a new significant party of the far right i.e. Reform where the leaders are pretty much all former Conservatives and the foot soldiers are often former Labour supporters/members! So voting Conservative was and in many cases still is a step too far for the working class right wing, but voting for an even more right wing party run by former Conservatives is very much OK. Untangle that one!

I once had a conversation with a UKIP party activist back in the day; UKIP being being one of the former guises of Reform, of course. In that discussion the UKIP’er told me they were an Arthur Scargill-type supporter, yet they were campaigning for UKIP! Another one you to try to get your head around.

It’s also interesting how the UK right wing media swung behind far right Reform, but they’re now swinging back, at least in part, to backing the Tories again following them being forced to track further right. The former centre right One Nation Tories are pretty much gone or have been invited to leave the Conservatives. This means that we now have further and far right party political options in the UK whilst the centre right is effectively no longer obviously represented.

As I’ve mentioned in previous blog postings my old dad was a Tory and at times a party member. My guess is he’d be politically homeless if he was alive today as what he saw as the Conservative Party has long gone. He died in 2009 and spent his last 10 years muttering about how he felt uncomfortable with his party as it became more populist and less Conservative. He had similar views about his once beloved Daily Telegraph newspaper too. He could not be doing with anyone who evaded the truth or made things up, so he’d be no Reformer!

The muddle on the political right in the UK shows no signs of settling down and it seems that those with right of centre through to far right political views will continue to populate most of our political parties.

 

The soon to be former State Pensions Triple Lock

The architect of the Triple Lock was Coalition Pensions Minister Steve Webb, a Liberal Democrat, in that generally otherwise appalling government which condemned the Lib Dems to many years of political oblivion.

It was a surprisingly progressive policy, oddly at times credited to George Osborne! It’s aim was to try to redress the fact that the UK state pension was far too low and many pensioners were living in poverty, unless they had additional sources of income. It was Liberalism in action, although it was clouded in Nick Clegg’s stupid about turn on Tuition Fees – don’t get me started on that debacle!!!

I guess the Tories only supported it reluctantly, as it was in no way a Conservative approach to poverty. That would be to ignore it!

Burnham seems to have turned it into a Double Lock with a vague promise to assess whether it keeps pace with wages every now and again. It’s probably what a Tory government would do, or have actually done, if they weren’t so concerned about the age profile of their own voters being 65+.

The comfortably off have pretty much always opposed the Triple Lock on the basis they don’t need the extra state pension and I include here some people who consider themselves progressive too. Keep repeating that the Triple Lock is unaffordable and eventually you’ll get many people repeating it, although not the less well off, of course.

Yes, I get the affordability issue but then again things that benefit the poor/less well off have never been affordable and they never will be. I also take the view that comfortably well off people seeking to reduce things that the poorest benefit from will usually be code for we want our taxes cutting.

Now to give Burnham some credit he says he wants to use what’s hypothetically saved from the Triple Lock to tackle our care crisis. I hope he means it too.

The Tories made us the most taxed we’ve been for generations, yet our public services are on their knees due to the 2007 financial crash, Brexit and Covid with austerity still very much alive and kicking us daily. Will Burnham’s move to a Double Lock on state pensions work? Will it create trouble for him with the ever growing ranks of pensioners? Will our state pensions slide back again over the years? Remember even after quite a few years of the Triple Lock our state pensions are still much lower than in many developed counties.

So let’s celebrate the work of Steve Webb, who saw poverty, far too much of it, within pensioners and did something positive about it. That he’s no longer in the House of Commons is a detriment to progressive politics. But at least the comfortably off now have something to celebrate, you might say…………...

 

Family Sayings

When in 1969 I went to Ormonde Drive Secondary Modern School (now Maghull High School) on Merseyside I became friendly with Tad (Antony-Tony) Jarrett* and subsequently got to know him and his Mum (Joyce) and Dad (Ken) very well indeed. Sadly, all 3 have now passed on.

 

Tad Jarrett (left) with another Ormonde Drive SMS chum Andrew Beattie

They hailed from the Peterborough area and, like myself**, they’d ended up in Maghull due to Ken’s job; he was an engineer. They lived in Manor House Close, a distinctive group of houses built, I understand, for the employees of GEC. Joyce was a secretary*** to Maghull Town Council and she was often seen cycling around Maghull – late 1960’s through to the 1990’s.

My reason for talking about all this is because of the sayings that family had for many a situation or item. I’ve probably forgotten many of their sayings but every now and again a situation will pop up and I’ll remember one. Here’s a few:-

Jippo – That’s what they called gravy – It seemingly has maritime connections as a slang word

Eating Irons – for cutlery

Left footer/Right footer – reference to being Catholic or Protestant – Interestingly, the family weren’t religious at all as far as I know.

The family were, it seems, quite opposed to swearing so instead of saying ‘sh1t’ when something went wrong they’d sing a little ditty ‘Shine your buttons with Brasso it’s only three ha’pence a tin, you can buy it knock from Woolies but I doubt if they’ve got any in’

Likewise, instead of saying ‘Feck’ they’d say ‘Four cakes and a bun’

Maybe because we both hailed from differing parts of England the Jarrett family sayings both fascinated and, at the time, confused me. Funny how they pop back into my mind randomly after all these years because something has happened to trigger one. Even odder that I can be found using them myself.

* Tragically, Tad died @1990 in his early 30’s

** My Dad worked for Thomas Cook the now defunct travel agency. We hailed from the Notts coalfield and came to Maghull when I was 10 via a stay of 4 years in Rochdale.

*** It was indeed odd when I was elected to Maghull Town Council in 1985 for one of the staff, who were there to assist me, being a best friend’s mother.

 

Good things can come from social media & some 

fascinating (to me) Notts mining history

Social media has many faults and many bad actors using it for negative/appalling purposes but my experience of it has been quite positive, indeed, it has connected me with new Kirkby-In-Ashfield friends and helped me better understand my family’s coal mining history.

Back around 5 or so years ago I placed an old family photo on the Kirkby Living Memory FB page and the consequences were very positive as people chipped in with their knowledge of my Dad’s side of the family; the Robertson’s of Hampden Street. One response turned into a friendship and that, in turn, created another friendship with former Kirkby residents Geoff Chapman and David Amos. Like me, they left Kirkby some years ago but unlike me they are both still Nottinghamshire residents. They are now firm friends and without FB I would never have got to know them.

David Amos is a history and heritage expert particularly with regard to coal mining in the East Midlands and he has helped me research the industry which up until the previous generation of my family, before mine, was a way of life that no longer exists at all.

Geoff Chapman has a direct connection with my Dad’s family as his family knew my grandma’s sister’s family Kath & Len Harrison and their 3 sons (Rex, David & Melvyn), once of Victoria Road, Kirkby. Geoff and I also share a love of cricket.

I had a grandad at Kirkby (Summit) Colliery (Walter Calladine), an Uncle at Bentinck Colliery (Henry Wright) and another Uncle at Sherwood Colliery (Doug Depledge), plus I had an uncle who was a driver at Kirkby Loco Shed (Ken Calladine).

I now travel back to Kirkby at least once a year, usually when Notts County Cricket Club has a home fixture, as cricket has always been been a big thing amongst the men in my family too. My Dad, George, knew Joe Hardstaff Jr and my Mum, Sheila, went to school in Kirkby with one of Harold Larwood’s daughters.

With David Amos advice I have now read quite a number of books about coal mining in Notts and the wider East Midlands not least the ones David has written himself (Coal Mining in the East Midlands – David Amos & Natalie Braber & Coal in the Blood – Natalie Braber & David Amos). Most recently I’ve read this book -

 

It’s a fascinating read about miner’s housing in various communities within Notts. it was funded by the National Lottery and is at part of the Minor2Major project’s website - https://miner2major.nottinghamshire.gov.uk/ & FB page https://www.facebook.com/miner2majorproject

Even though my family left our Kirkby home (14 Orchard Road) withme aged 6 in 1964 I find that the town and it’s heritage a continuing source of interest. That Kirkby has it’s own Heritage Centre, which I’ve visited a number of times, is brilliant. I guess I’m a Kirkby lad and always will be.

 

Is the Co-Op in trouble?

 The headline above is from ‘The Grocer’ website and is dated 03 07 2026

I ask this wide ranging question due to a minor matter which the Co-Op has failed to resolve over more than 3 months now. This, together with the lack of any meaningful communication (other than apologies), has made me wonder.

On 7^th May this year I reported a small problem to the Co-Op, with regard to their Town Green/Aughton shop, and as I type the problem is still unaddressed despite my continuing to raise it with them on 4 or 5 occasions. The problem? A bollard, which protects the cycle rack outside their shop from vehicles that can and do block it from being used by cyclists.

It’s happened before but repairs have previously been reasonably swift. In reality it’s not vehicles knocking the bollard over but teenagers rocking it until it eventually became detached from the ground. A more substantial bollard is required so it’s no surprise that having re-fixed the old one a while back in exactly the same way that it’s happened again.

If this was just an ordinary for profit shop who’d had to install a cycle rack as say part of a planning permission then I’d get it. They probably wouldn’t care less, but this is supposed to be an ethical business mutually owned by its members, like me. The Co-Op should be promoting environmentally ways to access their shops not effectively doing pretty much the opposite by ignoring requests to fix a small matter like this.

Yes, I’m disappointed that this matter has seemingly been ignored and that nobody has given me an explanation as to why it hasn’t been addressed, but at the same time I continue to pick up vibes that suggest the Co-Op is really struggling to address local shop-based issues. Could the issues raised by ‘The Grocer’ be at the heart of the issue?

I have no issues with the staff in the shop I use most frequently, indeed they’re always helpful and polite, even when I have a grumble about this matter. No, the problems seem to be further up the management chain, a chain that is supposedly accountable to the members of the Co-Op!

Is this mutual business in danger of arriving at a similar position to Lancashire County Cricket Club where their members are in dispute with their own committee?

What’s going on at the Co-Op?

 

The sport I love is actually in crisis

Being born up in Nottinghamshire, it’ll be no surprise to anyone who knows anything about cricket that I love the game. Larwood, Voce, Rice, Sobers, Hadlee, Randall are my cricketing heroes and trips down to Trent Bridge to watch County Championship matches are my highlight of each year.

Looking over Trent Bridge from the Derek Randall suite - June 26

 

 As a Notts supporter I obviously want my team to do well and in 2025 we won the County Championship under the excellent leadership of Haseeb Hameed and I was over the moon with delight. But below the surface all is far from being well with the way cricket is structured in England.

Lancashire’s members are effectively involved in a civil war with their own leadership/committee, Yorkshire are trying to demutualise creating all kinds of trouble within that club’s membership. Quite a number of the smaller counties are going bust. The Hundred has taken the best weeks of the cricketing year out of the calendar for all other formats. Those peak summer days should be there for the County Championship which is now shunted to the beginning and end of each season as an after-thought.

Like all major sports these days it’s all about money and the selling of souls, for it is what happens. With regard to Lancashire their committee have successfully redeveloped Old Trafford; indeed you could say they’ve done remarkably well. However, on the pitch Lancashire cricket has been pretty dire for quite some years and that’s why the Lancashire members are in open rebellion. Having a brilliant ground but a crap cricket team is not a good mix for a club that exists to be a great cricket team that just wants to be better than their bitter rivals across the Pennines.

Yorkshire, we’re told, needs money and a lot of it in the form of private investment to redevelop its Headingley ground and the powers that be think this can’t be achieved without demutualising their structure so that it becomes a private company. As a Liberal mutuals mean everything to me and in my humble opinion we’ve spent far too many years taking mutuals, such as building societies, and turning them into banks. Yes, I can hear all you Conservatives out there shouting only private investment is any good whilst you decry and plan to try to take more mutuals into private hands. I get it, you don’t like common ownership and neither, sadly, does much of our political establishment with even my own party of choice being well meaning but actually doing little to promote mutuals.

And what about cricket on TV? Cricket sold its soul to Sky many years ago meaning live free to view cricket is rare indeed these days. I’m sure money was the rather obvious reason to move to pay per view TV but the unintended consequence has been to make the game one that few people take an interest in as it’s hardly ever seen these days. And no the partly free to view Hundred is not cricket; it’s probably nearer to baseball than the English summer game.

For me the sweet spot for short format cricket was the much missed 40 over Sunday League. I struggle to look upon the Twenty/20 (T20) as cricket at all.

The beleaguered county teams have reacted to them being sidelined by using You Tube to show their games and a great innovation it has been, although some counties coverage is sadly dire and not up to the high standard of say Nottinghamshire’s You Tube feed, which brilliant and I watch regularly.

So how can cricket be saved in England both from outside factors and indeed from itself? A few ideas of mine…….

* The ridiculous Hundred needs to be changed to the more normal, if too short, T20 format.

* England contracted players need to allowed/encouraged to play for their counties too when at all possible.

* The high summer weeks need County Championship games to be played.

* There may well be a need to be a reduce the number of fully professional county teams – presently 18 - say down to 12.

* Three Divisions of 6 teams, each playing 12 County Championship games per season, with the 3^rd division being semi-pro.

* The County 50 over cup needs to be taken seriously. Presently it’s not and unsurprisingly it’s the format that the England team often struggles most with in recent years.

But will I defend mutual run clubs to the bitter (probably very bitter if Yorkshire is anything to go by) end? Yes I will, unless an alternative structure can can be found where county club members can have a very significant say in the running of their clubs. And I don’t mean here some kind of consultative forum where tea and sympathy is handed out by the powers that be only for everything the members have said to be totally ignored. I accept that we live in a very commercial world and no matter how much I find it distasteful sport will continue to be about money first and last and always. I just hope cricket will not become as discredited as football has in the process.

Lancashire CCC has ended up in civil war probably because, it inadvertently or otherwise, pushed its members, who actually own the club, into the long grass. Doing so whilst not having a competitive cricket team, which is the be all and end all for the members, has been a recipe for how not to do things. For all the financial progress and much improved stadium, what’s the point if there’s only a second rate team to go and watch in the cricket season?

Am I optimistic? Well I try to be, as cricket is very important to me. It’s my go to thing for relaxation in my retirement either at Trent Bridge or via You Tube. I do like international cricket but county cricket is more important to me. It’s great that women’s cricket is coming on so well even if the best international team is still the Aussies. Another piece of good news this summer has been the England men’s team wicket keeping coach being Sarah Taylor, who is the best keeper I’ve ever seen male or female. So yes, I’m still just about optimistic that cricket will get itself off the self-made sticky wicket it finds itself batting on but, being realistic, it’s going to need a lot of heavy rolling.

PS. I drafted this piece on the very day that Garfield Sobers passed away but not knowing that sad fact. RIP Garfield the greatest cricketer of them all.

After thought - In an odd twist the CEO of Notts, who'd only been at the club for just less than a year, has jumped ship to be CEO of Lancs!

 

Planning (as in land use) and why it’s an utter mess

 

The huge Maghull East Urban Extension before building commenced

 

Unless you’ve been on a local authority planning committee you’ll only really have come across it if you’ve applied for permission to build say an extension on your house or have participated in a campaign to try to stop an unwelcome planning application. Even then you’ll not really know all the ins and outs, but then who does?

I’ve been prompted to write this posting following two recent conversations

The trouble is Planning law and regulations change often, so what you thought was the case just a couple of years back may no longer be so today. You see governments of all colours love to tinker with Planning, like they do with the running of the NHS.

When was the last time you didn’t hear a government saying that more houses need to be built? I bet it was many years ago. Of course, governments set targets for house building (which are rarely, if ever, met), they tell local authorities to ensure more houses get built and they get them to adopt plans that’ll supposedly make sure they’re built, or maybe not. They slacken Green Belt restrictions or tell local authorities to do so to allow more house building. Then, when all else fails and the houses aren’t built to the required numbers, they blame the Planning system for being too slow, too bureaucratic or local authorities for hindering house building. This routine flows through pretty much all governments and has done for as long as I can recall being involved in politics (1980) and it’s probably been the case well before that arbitrary date of mine.

Developers only do what’s in their best interests

Land developers/building companies don’t just build when they have purchased the land and have Planning Permission no matter how loud governments shout at them. They’ll only build when is suits them, in other words when they can sell quickly and at a high price. If the housing market is in the doldrums they’ll sit on the land until it and the economy pick up. Following that aside let’s get back to the Planning system.

There must be literally reams and reams of Planning documents, regulations, advice and guidance produced over the years by both governments and local authorities and frankly only local authority senior planning officers, Planning Inspectors and specialists in the field of Planning will have any detailed knowledge of them. It’s a world all of its own, full of acronyms and in-language probably meant to keep ordinary folk at arms length; a bit like the management of education, pretty much beyond all but those deeply involved.

Why do we need more houses?

Well, a big reason is because we tend to live in smaller family units. I can recall the days when 3 generations of families lived in one house but that’s unusual these days. But it’s not just the number of houses, it’s the type of housing units that’s the big issue.

For example, we have too few social housing properties (council houses/housing association houses), far too few, and that dates back to ‘Right to Buy’, yet we build hardly any new ones. This, in turn, pushes those who have no choice but to rent into private sector renting and again, in turn, government needs to subsidise the rent payable as it’s well beyond the means of many poorer renters. So governments have effectively decided to subsidise private renting rather than build sufficient new social housing. There are other things missing from our housing stock as well, such as too few smaller units (1 and 2 bed), too few adapted houses/bungalows for people with disabilities/the elderly. Building 3, 4 and 5 bed houses is what makes the most money for developers/builders so that’s what we mostly get, like it or not.

Planning Committees

I only spent a couple of years on a Planning Committee of my local council and it was the last two years of my time as a borough councillor. Being knee deep in planning regulations and effectively being told by professional planning officers how I had to treat each application didn’t endear me to Planning. It was being told to act in a quasi-judicial way rather than looking at the balance of issues based on my own judgement that so ill-suited me. As a free thinking Liberal, doing as I was effectively told to do went against the grain so to speak.

Don’t get me wrong the planning officers were invariably nice and well informed people just doing their jobs based on the regulations (seemingly ever changing regulations) sent down to them by whichever government was in power at the time. It was definitely me not fitting into what felt like a straight-jacket which was forever being tightened (as regulations were relaxed) restricting my ability to have any meaningful say in outcomes. Suffice to say I did not enjoy it or frankly see much purpose to it. Getting blamed for approving applications I actually thought were as inappropriate as those who were opposing them was a frustrating process. Ordinary folk hope that planning committees will hear all the evidence presented to them and make the right decision. In reality, many things that are put forward as ‘objections’ are not allowed to be considered, no wonder people who have engaged in the Planning process leave feeling that the system is stacked against them; it is!

Get building on high grade agricultural land

But I suppose what really put me off Planning was the decision to build the massive urban extension to the east of Maghull; building that is ongoing now. Back in the late 1990’s I led what turned out to be a successful campaign to stop building on the very same piece of land. My motivation was very much that the fields in question were pretty much made up of the highest grades of agricultural land that has long grown the food that we eat. It made no sense to me at all to even consider such land for building purposes. Sadly, some 10 years later the very same land was put forward for house building again (some 1600 and counting houses) and absolutely no allowance for the high grade agricultural land was given at all!

The UK is hardly food self-sufficient, in fact it’s very far from it, yet we build on high grade agricultural land without a care in the world. What kind of planning, with a small p, is that? Depriving ourselves and future generations of excellent food producing land is complete and utter madness! So my involvement with Planning has left me feeling the system is stacked against our better interests because, to me, it obviously is.

Planning should never should be considered in isolation because it not only affects house building but also, industrial uses, our environment, health facilities (they rarely, if ever, expand to meet new housing developments) education (as in school places) and transportation (because we keep building car-dependent developments). And for the sake of clarity I’m not one to decry all house building, indeed I’ve long tried to champion the building of social housing because, in my view, the lack of it is at the very heart of our present housing crisis.

A political punishment?

And to close this little rant what I think is an amusing aside. I could never quite get my head around why a small but significant group of councillors, across all political groups, actually wanted to be on a Planning Committee. Let’s say it was 20% of councillors, whilst the other 80% would not go anyway near it (with or without a barge pole) and considered it a political punishment if they were placed on it!

The Maghull East Urban Extension as building work commenced