Two radical history pamphlets; the former supposes a high level of prior knowledge of its subject, whereas the latter serves as an introduction.

Historical Geography Research Series No. 1, 1979
Andrew Charlesworth – Social Protest in a Rural Society : The Spatial Diffusion of the Captain Swing Disturbances of 1830-1831 (78pp.)
http://www.exeter.ac.uk/cornwall/academic_departments/geography/HGRG/Research%20Series.html

1830 was a year of revolution in France and Belgium. In England it saw the revival of agitation for parliamentary reform, sustained partly by the examples of Paris and Brussels and undoubtedly encouraged by the success in Ireland the previous year of O'Connell's Catholic Association. 1830 was a year of tax potests and of widespread industrial unrest. And in the autumn and early winter of that turbulent year, whilst the first steps towards the making of the First Reform Bill were being taken, there swept across southern and eastern England a massive series of protests by agricultural labourers.

The labourers' protests took many forms. In some areas there were demands for higher wages and for tithe reductions, although the two were not always associated. Other areas saw the overseers of the poor attacked; in a few places workhouses were the target of the crowd. In central-southern England forced levies of money by the protestors were common, but even more widespread were the detruction of threshing machines. And as a background to the collective protests there was the firing of barns and ricks and the receipt of threatening letters, often signed by the mythical 'Captain Swing'. Finally, after earlier concessions, order was brutally restored.

Such, in brief and bare outline, were the Captain Swing protests of 1830. In the most detailed study of the the protests so far, Hobsbawn and Rudé maintain that:

One thing can be said with some confidence: they [the protests] were essentially a rural and local phenomenon. That is to say their diffusion had nothing to do with national lines of communication and very little to do even with the local towns. Over most of Sussex, Hampshire and Wiltshire, for instance, the movement spread across such main roads as there were from London to the coast of from one town to another … The path of the rising … followed not the main arteries of national or even county circulation, but the complex system of smaller veins and capilliaries which linked each parish to its neighbours and to its local centres.
[E.J. Hobsbawm and G. Rudé, Captain Swing (London 1969; rev. ed. 1973) 159]

It is contended that these conclusions are at variance with the evidence. In fact, the diffusion of the protests had a great deal to do with national lines of communication. Moreover, it is argued that this altered perception of the spread of the revolt opens up new questions and possibly affords new insights into the world of the agricultural labourer. The new findings challenge not only Hobsbawn and Rudé's views on the spatial patterning of the protests but also their conclusions on the unpolitical motivations of the labourers' actions.

Thus the first part of the monograph sets out to identify the channels along which the disturbances spread. In so doing, although we can identify pathways of the rising different to those indicated by Hobsbawn and Rudé, simple contagion models of diffusion are still inadequate to explain why the major routeways of southern and eastern England guided the spread of the revolt. In the second part of the monograph, therefore, the diffusion of the protests is explained in the light of the work of such historians as Charles Tilly and E.P. Thompson. Their perspective on social protest places more emphasis on the 'political' and organisational aspects of collective action, rather than on economic motivation and on the spontaneity of the outbreak of disturbances. It seeks to place collective protest within its historical context, the spread of crowd turbulence reflecting the political crisis of the day rather than the ever present hardships of the common people.

Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #11, 2009
Steve Mills – A Barbarous and Ungovernable People! A Short History of the Miners of Kingswood Forest (20pp.)
http://brh.org.uk/publications.html

"A barbarous and ungovernable people" is a bit of a strong condemnation of a community. Especially considering that at the time the community in question was situated on the outskirts of a vibrant city in Britain. The people of Kingswood Forest supplied the south west of England and the industries of Bristol with coal, and it is fair to say that without the Kingswood Forest coal Bristol would not be the city it is today. However, the relationship between the two communities was strained to say the least.

By the time of the English Civil War 1642-1649 squatting on the common land of Kingswood Forest had become more widespread and many people exercised their age-old right of eking out a living from the raw materials that their environment provided them with. Following the Restoration of 1660, the Crown sought to reassert its authority in the old Royal Forests, Kingswood Forest included. The residents were not prepared to give up their rights easily and over several generations they resisted through petitions, physical force, tearing down of tollgates, smashing of looms, roadblocks, rioting and other means.

This pamphlet tells the story of the misunderstanding and mistrust which, from time to time, blew up into full scale conflagration.

Last weekend I went along to the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival. (For those who have never heard of the Tolpuddle Martyrs: "On February 24th, 1834, six farm labourers from Tolpuddle [Dorset, UK] were arrested on a charge of taking part in an ‘illegal oath’ ceremony. The real offence was that they had dared to form a trade union to defend their livelihood. For this they were sentenced to seven years’ transportation to the penal colonies of Australia. The sentences provoked an immense outcry, leading to the first great mass trade union protest. The campaign won free pardons and the Martyrs’ return to England. It was an historic episode in the struggle for trade unionists’ rights in Great Britain.")

Of particular interest to me were a couple talks delivered by the Bristol Radical History Group, which were perhaps the most controversial thing there. These were about the large scale Captain Swing riots "that swept across the south of England 3 years before the events in Tolpuddle." These were controversial in the sense that they were carried out by the so-called ignorant rural peasants. As the speaker pointed out, whereas The Tolpuddle Martyrs were innocent, the Swing Rioters were guilty and they were defiant in their guilt. They recognised their rights as people, despite what the law and the law-makers would have to say on the matter. It is the innocent/guilty polarity, (amongst other reasons), according to the speaker, which means that today many have heard of the Tolpuddle Martyrs but few have heard of Captain Swing, despite the Captain Swing riots being a much larger movement involving a far greater number of people, and being a far bigger problem for the authorities. I agree. The talk was titled 'The Flea and the Elephant', the flea being Tolpuddle, the elephant Captain Swing.

The Bristol Radical History Group have put on many events, check their website for details of upcoming events. They also publish a series of pamphlets, three of which I picked up whilst I was at the festival:

We Come For Our Own And We Shall Have It, Smuggling In Poole And Dorset
Kevin Davies
Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #2
A look at the history of smuggling in Dorset and the government responses to it. This pamphlet examines whether smugglers should be considered folk heroes and to what extent smuggling was a community enterprise.

Yesterday's To-morrow, Bristol's Garden Suburbs
Stephen E. Hunt
Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #8
In 1909, the Bristol Garden Suburb Limited was set up to implement the ideas Ebenezer Howard popularised in To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, first published in 1898. Garden-City principles inspired promising developments at Shirehampton, Sea Mills and Keynsham chocolate factory, but were diluted in the construction of Bristol's interwar housing estates at Knowle West and Bedminster, Hillfields, Southmead, Horfield, Speedwell and St Annes. Today it's timely to revisit Howard's ideas in the light of several topics of green chatter — transition towns, peak oil and Gordon Brown's intention to promote the construction of eco-towns.

Nicotiana Brittanica, The Cotswolds' Illicit Tobacco Cultivation In The 17th Century
Will Simpson & Jim McNeill
Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #9
Four centuries ago a group of farmers from the West Of England decided to see if they could make a living for themselves by growing tobacco. This put them at odds with the English state and its imperial ambition to build a mercantile economy driven by indentured and slave labour. This is their story of resistance.

To date, the Bristol Radical History Group have published 10 pamphlets, see their website for further information.

It is said that public confidence in politicians is at a very low ebb following the Telegraph's leaking (and subsequent reporting by most newspapers) of the majority of politicians' questionable expenses claims. Claiming for second homes, piano tuning, clearing of a moat (£2,115), an ornamental duck house (£1,645), swimming pool maintenance (several claims), mortgages that don't exist (£15,000+), double-claims for council tax, a trouser press (more than one claim), home cinema system, removal of wisteria, trimming hedge around "helipad" (£609), leather rocking chair (£1,200), food, toilet seat, eye liner, biscuits, and so on, and so on, ad nauseum.

Politicians from all the main three parties have been exposed. Most give the appearance of being humbled in the media now that they have been found out, however, some, (the Tory gentry, as you may imagine), have appeared indignant that they should have to answer to the lower classes. An example of this is Anthony Steen, MP for Totnes in Devon, who claims that we are all just jealous of his million pound home: "I've done nothing criminal, that's the most awful thing, and do you know what it's about? Jealousy. I've got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral. It's a merchant's house of the 19th century. It's not particularly attractive, it just does me nicely."

What is surprising, or perhaps unfortunate, is that it takes something like this exposé in the media to lower the public's confidence in MPs when just a quick browse through history will show that they have been stealing from us for years. Most people would face fines or imprisonment for theft, but these MPs just give an apology, pay a little back and feel exonerated.

There have been heated, angry public debates where politicians are confronted by their constituents, resulting in some MPs being in denial about the feelings of the people whom they are supposed to represent. One wonders if this could be the spark to ignite the summer of discontent of which there have been murmurings of in the press. There is a long history of social protest in the UK, as you can imagine (if you don't already know). Let us take the act of incendiarism as an example and quote from John E. Archer's 'By A Flash and A Scare', where he asks Why Incendiarism?:

—
Links
MPs' expenses in detail (The Telegraph)
MPs' expenses on Google Earth (The Telegraph)

A new version of the unofficial Claws Mail ClamAV™ Plugin has been released. Version 3.5 supports Clam AntiVirus™ version 0.95, libclamav 6:2:0 — that is, at least it does once you apply the Personal Build patch.

Further details and downloads can be found on the Unofficial Claws Mail ClamAV™ Plugin page.

If only it were true.

Since google launched gmail IMAP the Claws Mail development team (and several Claws Mail users) seem to have devoted a proportionately high amount of time to answering questions and working around problems that arise through gmail's IMAP implementation. The same must surely be true of other open source teams. How many wasted man-hours must that add up to through all the different development teams and how many more useful things could have been achieved in that time? How far will they set things back?

Don't believe the hype!

Following on from the previous post, it is worth noting a recent news item which has revealed that, on average, in England and Wales a parent is sent to jail every two weeks for their child's truancy. There were 10,000 prosecutions in England alone in 2007.

This is all part of New Labour's target, launched in 1998, to cut truancy, which includes pouring millions of pounds, (over £800m), into the initiative, giving the police new powers to drag kids back to school, hefty fines and imprisonment for parents, paging and text messaging of parents, electronic tagging of parents, withdrawal of child benefit for truants' parents, spiked security fences tipped with paint which marks pupils' uniforms if they try to climb in or out, swipecards for pupils, fingertip scanning of pupils, informing travel agents to warn parents of the dangers of term-time holidays, and so on.

Does it work?

In 2008 truancy rates in England reached their highest level since 1997.

If school days are the best days of your life, go and see a psychiatrist!

Who Cares about the White Working Class? is "a new study on the white working class and ethnic diversity in Britain"¹ published by The Runnymede Trust, an "independent policy research organisation focusing on equality and justice through the promotion of a successful multi-ethnic society."²

"The essays in this volume all point to the paradoxical and hypocritical ways in which the ruling classes speak for the white working class on the one hand, and how they speak about them on the other. Whereas middle class commentators are happy to defend the white working class interests against the onslaught of politically correct multiculturalism, they will simultaneously deride and riducule the feckless and underserving poor, who have squandered the opportunities gracefully given to them by the state, and therefore righfully be left to wallow in their own poverty."³

The study has been prompted by "a recent emphasis in the media and by other commentators on the segragation of, and competition between, ethnic groups [which] has suggested that white working class communities may be losing out in the conflict over the allocation of scarce resources. … [It] shows that … the most disadvantaged working-class people of whatever ethnic background, roughly the poorest fifth of the population, are increasingly separated from the more prosperous majority by inequalities of income, housing and education. By emphasizing the virtues of individual self-determination and the exercising of 'choice', recent governments have in fact entrenched the ability of the middle and upper classes to avoid downward social mobility and preserve the best of life's goods for their own children. Moreover, the rhetoric of politicians and commentators has tended to abandon the description 'working-class', preferring instead to use terms such as 'hard working families' in order to contrast the the virtuous many with an underclass perceived as feckless and undeserving. … life chances for today's children are overwhelmingly linked to parental income, occupations and educational qualifications — in other words, class. The poor white working class share many more problems with the poor from minority ethnic groups than some of them recognise."⁴

The media's skewed portrayal of the white working class, e.g. the BBC's White Season and Channel 4's Immigration: — The Inconvenient Truth, is exposed as fallacy, "the white working class are habitually pitched against those of minority ethnic groups and immigrants, while larger social and economic structures are left out of the debate altogether. … The media's efforts to acknowledge and discuss white working class grievances has excluded issues such as the legacy of Thatcherism and deindustrialisation, or the rise of the super-rich under Labour. Instead, there is a fairly consistent message that the white working class are the losers … while minority ethnic groups are the winners – at the direct expense of the white working class."⁵

"The white working classes are discriminated against on a range of different fronts, including their accent, their style, the food they eat, the clothes they wear, the social spaces they frequent, the postcode of their homes, possibly even their names. But they are not discriminated against because they are white."³

"When commentators argue over the neglected interests of the 'white working class', the comparison to other groups is always in terms of their ethnicity, with Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets, or Pakistanis in Oldham. The distinctive social position of these groups is presented in terms of their ethnic identity, as cultural or religious difference, rather than by the very marked class inequalities that they also experience. This exaggerates the differences between ethnic groups, and masks what they hold in common. By stressing the whiteness of the white working class, the class inequality of other ethnic groups also slips from view. This sidesteps the real issue of class inequality."⁶ Of course, this is how the game works for the ruling classes: divide and rule. It always has. For example, see the employment and vagrancy laws, first in the UK, then later in the colonies, bending workers as far as they will go before they break.^*

"The rising significance of education in British society has not undermined the role of class; instead it has opened up new avenues for class competition and disadvantage. … despite the meritocratic values⁷ of British society, high social position still helps to 'insure' against weaker educational performance, and numerous studies show that if we compare lower achievers, those from more privileged backgrounds have much better careers than their less advantaged peers. … the fact remains that it is often harder for privileged children to fail than it is for disadvantaged children to succeed."⁶

England is the "most explicit example of the use of schooling by the upper classes to dominate the lower classes. … Adam Smith epitomised the English bourgeois viewpoint regarding working class education in The Wealth of Nations:

For Smith, as well as for the vast majority of the political, and intellectual élite at the time, the schooling of the working classes was always to be subordinate and inferior to that of the middle classes, designed to contain and pacify rather than to educate and liberate.⁸ When the English state schooling system was set up in the late 19th century the intention of the dominant classes was still to police and control the working classes rather than to educate them."⁹

All well and good, and to paraphrase a line from the introduction, this may all appear as truisms to you or I, even verging on the banal, but it is good that an organisation such as the Runnymede Trust has finally lifted the corner of the carpet and reported on what they've seen brushed under there. I welcome this publication, even if it does put itself well within the bracket of the middle class once again speaking about and for the working class — then again, the main body of readership will be the middle class, that is, I guess, its target audience. Mostly the essays are highly readable but, for me, it fell down in two places. One of these essays in particular made for nauseating reading indeed: the 8th and final essay. It starts with, "The remit for this chapter was to produce a contribution which translates academic thinking to non-academic audiences"¹⁰. An incredibly condescending read! Who did the author think he was writing for, the odd working class person who happened to come across the publication? If the difference between academic writing and non-acedemic writing is the dumbing-down for its apparently dumbed-down audience, then he did a great job. But, seriously, the main difference between an academic person and a non-academic person is the academic's ability to produce prose, but not his thought processes and his ability to understand and reason. This last essay was unnecessary.

Having said that, the report is, however, a stimulating read on the whole. If it works towards creating more solidarity and self-awareness within the working class, then it's a good thing.

Who Cares about the White Working Class? is available as a free PDF from the Runnymede Trust, here.

——
1. http://www.runnymedetrust.org/
2. Who Cares about the White Working Class?, inside cover.
3. Kjartan Páll Sveinsson, Introduction: The White Working Class and Multiculturalism: Is There Space for a Progressive Agenda?, What Does this mean for Race Equality? — The Aims of this Volume, pp. 5-6
4. Dr Kate Gavron, Foreword, pp. 2
5. Kjartan Páll Sveinsson, Introduction: The White Working Class and Multiculturalism: Is There Space for a Progressive Agenda?, Class Re-emerges in Political Discourse, pp. 5
6. Wendy Bottero, Class in the 21st Century, pp. 7, 10
7. …or, rather, because of them?
8. So little has changed.
9. Diane Reay, Making Sense of White Working Class Educational Underachievement, A Brief History of the Working Class Underachievement, pp. 23
10. Danny Dorling, From Housing to Health — To Whom are the White Working Class Losing Out? Frequently Asked Questions, pp. 59-65