The Eureka Stockade Rebellion

I'm falling in love with Wikipedia. From yesterday's front page I ended up on an article about the Eureka Stockade Rebellion in Australia in 1854. It fits in well with the Labour Party victory there. Miners, called 'Diggers' of course, staged a revolt over taxation and for voting rights. Some of the leaders had the experience in Britain of fighting for the Chartist movement. British troops and police under the control of the colonial government of Victoria killed 22 miners in a very one-sided fight.

Of the 120 'diggers' arrested, 13 were brought to trial and then acquitted. What caught my eye were the nationalities and race of these 13. I think Australia can be justly proud when you look at the list below. (I tend to think of early immigration into Australia being convicts but an explosion in population took place when gold was discovered.)

1. Timothy Hayes, Chairman of the Ballarat Reform League,
2. James McFie Campbell a black man from Kingston Jamaica
3. Raffaello Carboni, an Italian and trusted lieutenant who was in charge of the European diggers as he spoke a few European languages. Carboni self published his account of the Eureka Stockade a year after the Stockade, the only comprehensive eyewitness account.
4. Jacob Sorenson, a Jew
5. John Manning, a Ballarat Times journalist, from Ireland
6. John Phelan, a friend and business partner of Peter Lalor, from Ireland
7. Thomas Dignum, born in Sydney
8. John Joseph, a black American from New York
9. James Beattie, from Ireland
10. William Molloy, from Ireland
11. Jan Vennick, from Holland,
12. Michael Tuohy
13. Henry Reid

I'm guessing the last 2 are Irishmen. The Irish were probably over-represented in those arrested as the there were many camped close to the stockade when the British attacked.

Charlton Athletic 0-3 Sheffield United

Of course I shouldn't have posted Saturday's score as the very next match on Tuesday night was a disaster.

Is it too late to get rid of Brown?

If only the Labour Party could hold a leadership election now, I think they might even find the fifty or so MPs needed and brave enough to put up a candidate against Brown. If it were allowed maybe they could find a safe seat for Ken Livingstone so he could contest. Diane Abbott, weren't you going to pack it in this time anyway?

I'm not saying Ken could win but keeping Brown is flirting with a disaster. He looks like a man on the verge of a breakdown. This New Labour experiment has run its course and it's time for a rethink.

What Ken would bring to the game is the ability to delegate to good people which Brown doesn't seem to have.

Does Virgin call Alistair Darling Darling?

Sorry about the Black Adder title. With Darling about to finance a Richard Branson takeover of Northern Rock by allowing a long and not guaranteed payback of the tax money put in, they certainly should. The love affair between new labour and the rich becomes clearer every day.

I heard cabinet member Tony McNulty on Radio 4's Any Questions allowing blame on the missing data CDs to be put on a generic "post". He must know that most people would be blaming the Post Office and not a private courier company like TNT who could well be to blame. On top of that we hear that the reason the data wasn't cleaned of personal details was because the department didn't want to pay Ross Perot's EDS to do it.

How many contracts with private companies are there that should be done by the public sector?

Preston North End 0-2 Charlton Athletic

I haven't been updating the Charlton scores on this blog but yesterday's away win at Preston was nice to wake up this morning and far more important than England getting knocked out of the European Championship. Of course, like any computer nerd, I keep a spreadsheet of the Charlton season and four wins on the trot do look good.

Labour Victory in Australia

The left hasn't had too much to crow about in Europe the last few years so it was good to see that in Southern Hemisphere the Australians have at last thrown John Howard out. I'm hoping to hear soon that he has lost his seat too. I know nothing about Kevin Rudd but he would have to be really bad to be worse than Howard.

Howard's success I guess had been based on the electorate usually voting on their worries for their wallets and purses first. Nice to see that the environment, Iraq and maybe just the need of a change were more powerful this time. When the UK Labour Party spin doctors said there "was something of the night" in the then UK Conservative Party leader, Michael Howard, I think they could equally have used the term about the Australian version.

More on Ken Livingstone

I have in the past admitted to being quite fond of the Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London. If the Labour Party had not been taken over by Thacherites we might have had him as a prime minister. That's if the rest of the UK would put up with a Londoner of course.


The last few days his tour of India has been getting some exposure on the BBC World Service TV news. I take it he was visiting Amritsar at one point as he was wearing a head covering scarf to go into a Sikh temple. Together with the red dot head on his forward and the sly grin of man who will not take the press too seriously, it made me laugh.

Ken has, without Blair style charisma and without party support when he first stood for the job, built a considerable political machine in London. I know most of the London Labour Party and many of the ex-GLC insiders were behind him, but what we have now is probably the closest London has ever been to the old New York Tammany Hall Democrat machine, even more so than Morrison's LCC.

In my mind this isn't a bad thing. His success is based on having enough support from the various minorities to have a majority come election time. Hopefully he will have a large Sikh vote now;-) If he were twenty years younger the party would have had a replacement for Gordon Brown if he loses the next election.