SPGB Snippets: Ann Widdecombe (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

July 15, 2026

Red faces in the Socialist Workers Party after their tweet on X in response to the death of Widdecombe was ‘Hooray, she’s dead’, followed by immediate deletion as furore swept the media. Some even confused the SWP with us.

So we should point out that, while we oppose capitalism and all its works, and urge the world’s people to establish a post-capitalist society of democratic common ownership, we have no truck with the SWP’s infantile reaction to the death (probably murder) of a pro-capitalist politician, however detestable that person’s opinions.

Capitalism is a worldwide system of private property and market trading, which can only be replaced at a worldwide scale by a conscious and informed majority, not by targeting individuals.

Let’s abolish food banks (2023)

From the August 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are various providers of free or very cheap meals all across the country. They may rely on donations from individuals or companies or they may ‘recycle’ food which would otherwise go to waste. Foodcycle’s answer to the question, what is surplus food is that ‘Surplus food is designated for people to eat but which has ‘no commercial value for the retailer.’ ‘In the UK, an estimated 12 million tonnes of food is wasted each year at all levels from plough to plate whilst 4 million people are affected by food poverty. At least 400,000 tonnes of this food is thrown away at retail level’ (foodcycle.org.uk/who-we-are).

This provider says it wants to ‘make food poverty, loneliness and food waste a thing of the past for every community’. Admirable. Who doesn’t support that? Other similar providers have similar ideals. The Trussell Trust says ‘…the stark reality is that too many people are unable to stay warm, fed, and dry right now’. Too true unfortunately. No argument there. ‘It doesn’t have to be this way’, Trussell says. Spot on. Ticking all the right boxes definitely.

They all put forward their solutions for minimising the impact of the underlying conditions that lie at the root of food poverty. The underlying cause is capitalism. Do they realise that?

All these various providers, whether large or small, still have to function within the straitjacket of capitalism. They have paid full-time staff, have to pay for their premises, have to pay their utility bills. Those employed by the charities and those who volunteer also have to live according to the norms of a capitalist society. They need money in order to live too. Check any website in the Third Sector. Capitalism means it will always be channelling Bob Geldof at Band Aid. Give us your money! But generally much more politely than Sir Bob.

The issue is, how is poverty in its many forms to be eradicated?

A solution that appeals to many is, vote for a more society-friendly (sic) party. Kick this heartless government out of office, then things will change for the better! It’s not difficult to find examples of the stony attitudes within one of the political parties which is regularly put into the position of running capitalism on behalf of the UK asset-owning class.

The Marie Antoinette of the Tories, ex-Conservative-MP Ann Widdecombe, said a little while ago, ‘Britons don’t have an automatic right to low food prices’, adding that people should simply go without certain items if they are struggling financially. Widdecombe also advised people who cannot afford to pay for some food items, like cheese, to simply stop buying them:

‘Well then you don’t do the cheese sandwich. None of it’s new. We’ve been through this before’, she said. ‘The problem is we’ve been decades now without inflation, we’ve come to regard it as some kind of given right’ (Guardian, 17 May).

Discussing the UK’s cost-of-living crisis on the BBC’s Politics Live show, the former Tory and Brexit Party MEP suggested that anyone claiming unemployment benefits should be made to fill labour shortages by picking fruit.

Under-fire Andrew Bailey told workers to stop asking bosses for unsustainable pay rises – shortly after piling interest rate misery on households. The Bank of England governor battling to bring inflation under control, said the country ‘can’t continue to have the current level of wage increases’ (tinyurl.com/5a78w28s).

In Peter Tinniswood’s stories about Yorkshire family the Brandons, Carter Brandon’s fiancé Pat opens conversations with, ‘Isn’t the price of sprouts outrageous’? Yes, and so’s the price of nearly everything in the supermarket nowadays. The cost of living has surely superseded the favourite topic of the British, the weather.

The Trussell Trust recently issued a 100-page report called Hunger in the UK. It makes sobering reading. One in seven people in the UK faced hunger in 2022 due to a lack of money, they say. The survey equated this to an estimated 11.3 million people.

Why were people being forced to use food banks? Money. Or rather the lack of it due to living in a capitalist society where the price of nearly everything keeps getting higher and higher.

The United Kingdom has the second largest economy in Europe and the sixth largest economy in the world.

Hunger in the UK: 

‘… insufficient income is the fundamental driver for almost all peo-ple forced to use a food bank. The vast majority (86%) of people referred to food banks in the Trussell Trust network in mid-2022 have an income so low that they were experiencing destitution when they were supported by the food bank. (They) are further destabilised by a lack of savings and having to cope with arrears and debt’.

The report lists those who are most like to feel the pinch. This includes a high proportion of people renting, ethnic minorities, the disabled, unpaid carers, those living alone, those with dependent children, and single parents.

In the report’s introduction the Chief Executive of the Trust says:

‘That means we know what needs to change if we’re going to build a more just society where everyone has enough money for the essentials. It is clear that we need a social security system which provides protection and dignity for people to cover the costs of their own essentials, such as food and bills’. 

‘Because in coming together, and working together, we will build a future where none of us need a food bank, because none of us will allow it’ (tinyurl.com/nhhr7evt). 

We certainly know what needs to change but we need more than to tinker with a knackered engine. We need to replace it. Whilst a capitalist society continues to receive support from very many, including those globally who suffer badly under that system, sticking plaster solutions are not the answer.

Working together for socialism, we can build a future where none of us will need a food bank ever again. Our solution is one that eradicates the problem once and for all.

Dave Coggan

Greasy Pole: Blair’s a Catholic – it’s official. But who cares? (2008)

The Greasy Pole Column from the April 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

If Blair had read Labour Party history, would he have been put off a political career for life?

Soon after Tony Blair’s costive farewell to Number Ten, anyone who fretted about the chances of him joining the ranks of the impoverished – which his government promised to abolish – would have been reassured by the carefully crafted plans of this reluctantly-disciplined ex-public schoolboy who grew up into the ambitiously manipulative barrister on the look-out for an easy way into Parliament. All will be well for the Blair family budget. There will be the “lecture” tours during which each speech will attract fees running into tens of thousands of pounds. A lavish advance of payment will lubricate the writing of his memoirs (we all wait with tightly bated breath to find out how much he reveals and how much hides, of what went on). With staggering, if predictable, audacity he accepted the job of a Middle East Peace Envoy charged with repairing some of the damage wreaked on that unhappy place by military decisions in which his government was heavily implicated. Any spare time will be absorbed by the “consultancy” jobs which, for a few hours a month, promise to richly reward the advice he will give to commercial and banking interests about how to inflate their profits through prudent contracts. But apart from all that – after all, a poor boy from a multi-million pound home in Connaught Square has to scrape a living somehow – there are the spiritual riches Blair expects to spume out of his formally declared conversion to the Catholic Church.

Rebuke

The announcement of Blair’s change to the Roman Catholic church was “formal” in the sense of his long-standing contact with that church while he was a practising Anglo Catholic. His biographer, Anthony Selsdon, described him as “a profoundly religious figure” and says that it was religion and not “…reading Labour Party history” which brought him into politics in the first place. (It will be a matter for Blair to discuss in the confessional whether, if he had read Labour Party history, he would have been put off a political career for life). But for some time there has been little doubt about where, in terms of his allegiance to a church, he would end up. Although an Anglo-Catholic he took communion at Westminster Cathedral which, as it is not permitted for non-Roman Catholics, brought down a stern rebuke from the late Archbishop Basil Hume. For Blair, it must have all been reminiscent of time up before the head of Fettes. That his present situation continues to be confused was quickly pointed out by Ann Widdecombe (herself a convert): “he’s gone against Church teaching on more than one occasion”. On the Michael Parkinson chat show in 2006 Blair offered a rather different version, saying that he had prayed while deciding whether to order British troops into Iraq “I think if you have faith about these things, you realise the judgement is made by other people … and if you believe in god, it’s made by god as well”. Which conveniently passed off the blame for the slaughter onto someone who, as they don’t exist, could not have a say in the matter.

Sedgefield

But Tony Blair cannot argue that his conversion was an attempt to understand, and unravel, a history of confusion about his political aims. Any reading of his rise through the Labour Party must bring a chilling sense of his single-minded ambition. His first attempt to get into Parliament was in May 1982, in Beaconsfield. A less likely opportunity for an aspiring Labour candidate would be hard to imagine, for Beaconsfield is one of the most arborescent and moneyed towns in the Chiltern Hills. Blair agreed to stand there on the advice of a more seasoned party member, on the grounds that making his mark there would help him in applying for other seats. Perhaps that, as well as the rock-solid Tory vote, gave him some scope in how he presented himself politically; he had no qualms about describing himself as “a socialist” (either without defining the word or offering a definition which was a nonsense) and to admitting to support for CND. Of course he lost his deposit, reducing the Labour vote by 10 percent in the process. But he did indeed make his mark and, buoyed up with approval from local Labour stalwarts, he moved thankfully in search of a more possible seat.

This came in 1983, in Sedgefield, where the local man Les Huckfield was expected to win the Labour nomination. Conscious that the people had their differences from the bankers and chief executives of Beaconsfield, Blair was careful that his address for the adoption meeting did not mention that he had been to public school nor that as a barrister he had represented big corporations in court. He presented a letter of support from the then Labour leader, ex-left-wing-firebrand Michael Foot and it was arranged to unsettle Huckfield by hostile questions fed to Blair’s supporters in the audience. It was all tightly organised and very effective, giving Blair the nomination in a safe Labour seat. It was also – although none of the party members there probably realised it – a foretaste of how he would behave when he got into Parliament and later into Number Ten.

Iraq

We may ask, for example, how those Sedgefield members would have voted had they heard him say, as he subsequently did: “I believe Margaret Thatcher’s emphasis on enterprise was right” or that “Britain needs more successful people who can become rich by success through the money they earn”. Would those members have sat on their hands knowing that Blair was to justify the invasion of Iraq, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, by lies about weapons of mass destruction the existence of which, he said, was “beyond doubt” and the defiant declaration “I am absolutely convinced and confident about the case on weapons of mass destruction-critics will be eating some of their words”? And would they have approved him sucking up to the rich and powerful while 13 million – that’s one in five – of the population of the country he was supposed to be leading to the promised land of plenty and safety are officially classed as suffering poverty?

If Blair is to be a proper Catholic he will have to attend confession – get down on his knees behind the curtain in one of those small boxes in a church while some robed hypocrite who rivals him in disseminating falsehood sits on the other side of the grille trying not to yawn while listening to him unburdening his mind before telling him how he can make himself feel a bit less guilty, perhaps by reciting some meaningless incantation or other. The question is, can Blair be trusted to come clean about his sins? After all what he has to confess will be the most serious for a catholic – the mortal sins which have speckled his time in politics. This may take him some time while others – politicians, media people, bankers and the like – wait their turn. It is all a part of the great deception which keeps this unbearable society in being.

Ivan

An Apology

There was a mistake In last month’s Greasy Pole (Flint’s Hard Line). The TV programme in which Flint stood her ground against Andrew Neil was not The Politics Show (which does not exist) but The Daily Politics. For this confusion we apologise to everyone. Even, in case he reads the Socialist Standard, Neil himself.

Greasy Pole: Re-Inventing the Losers (2011)

That Celine Dion song . . .  that one.

The Greasy Pole column from the May 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

One year after That Election, the wretched group who are no longer entitled to be known as Honourable Members Of The Most Exclusive Club In The Land have had time to adjust to their new, cruel reality. Time to accept that they are no longer waved through a doorway by a smiling policeman. To bravely suffer an unaccustomed lack of interest in them by the media. To contemplate a life made unbearable without the weekly session of verbal hooliganism called Prime Minister’s Questions. To manage their homes, gardens and the like without support from a self-designed, self-regulated expenses system. To re-invent themselves in a new, bitterly unforeseen image reminding them of those other, unexciting people who voted for them to manipulate their lives in the name of democracy, justice, equity…

Widdecombe
Some of these victims of the voters’ verdict will have clearly had difficulty in rebuilding their self-esteem but this has not been so for Ann Widdecombe, because she slipped away from Westminster without waiting for an election. Which is not to say that her re-invention has been any less grotesque. Widdecombe sat for Maidstone, later Maidstone and The Weald; before that she had tried for the candidature in Burnley and Plymouth Devenport. During the Thatcher governments she was, famously, Minister of State for Prisons under Home Secretary Michael Howard. She quickly assured herself of a welcome from the more apoplectic of the Tory rank and file by calling for zero tolerance for cannabis users, opposition to equal rights for gays and defending the policy of shackling pregnant women prisoners when they were in hospital. More controversially, in the Tory leadership election of 1997 she denounced Michael Howard as having “something of the night” about him. Her meaning was not entirely clear but she provided a lot of material for cartoonists eager to depict Howard as a sort of vampire – which may have helped towards him coming last in the contest.

Leadership 
In fact Widdecombe herself had something of a bumpy relationship with the post of Party Leader; having failed in 2001 to raise enough support among MPs for her own bid she switched her support to a succession of other failures – Michael Ancram (Michael Who?), Ken Clarke, Liam Fox, David Davis. When David Cameron, as the new Leader, was keen to prove his credentials as a new broom or breath of fresh air or whatever, announced a more equal “A List” of parliamentary candidates she opposed this as “an insult to women”. Having at first declared, in October 2007, that she would leave the Commons at the next election she soon experienced so dramatic a change of mind that she allowed herself to stand for Speaker of the House in the vote to replace the serially unpopular and questionable Michael Martin. Eventually, to widespread relief, she did retire at the 2010 election, selling her homes in London and Kent and moving to a house on Dartmoor.

Media
So – after all the strident hard-lines, diversions, backtracking…there was clearly some need for Widdecombe to demonstrate that there was another person, a reinvention of the MP, within her. Much of that person has, disconcertingly for those who admired her for being above earning any money in such a way, sprouted in the media – where they obviously can recognise a good profitable thing when they see it. She has been an agony aunt in the Guardian (which must have caused some hiccups at many a suburban breakfast table) and for both BBC television (Ann Widdecombe to the Rescue) and ITV. She took part in Celebrity Fit Club as both a competitor and a judge and she is a columnist in the Daily Express. But the height – or should it be the depth – of all this, in terms of her exposure and the public response, was on the hugely popular Strictly Come Dancing. The news that she was to be a contestant in this programme provoked much ribaldry in many a saloon bar, on the theme of speculating about which male partner would be patient and strong enough to twirl someone of her build around the dance floor. To prolong the amusement there were enough viewers, perhaps of the same cussedness as Widdecombe herself had relied on to get her through her career, to repeatedly vote against the judges to keep her dancing. Until December that is, when matters got rather serious and, shrinking from the prospect of voting her into the final, they ended it all.

Agency
But it does not follow that her re-invention is at an end; that she will sink quietly from sight. She can be engaged for some kind of public appearance through the Gordon Poole Agency and Talent Bureau – who will gladly let you know how available she is for whatever exposure you have in mind and what it will cost you. For the right sort of money she may even tell you what she thinks of it all now, of her devoted preparations for a political career, her change from being an agnostic to a Roman catholic, her hopes of becoming leader of her party and then of the House of Commons itself. It does not make a pretty story.

But the capitalist system with its contradictions its anarchy its impoverishment and diseases is not pretty. The spectacle of cynical politicians presenting themselves in what they hope will be the most effectively deceptive way is stunningly ugly. And if Widdecombe ever gets to reflect on her political career, driven as it was by her abrasive eccentricity and dogged ambition, she might devote a word or two on how it all says as depressingly much about those who were captivated by her as about herself.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: The truth can keep you in shackles (1996)

The Greasy Pole column from the April 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Now that we have got the Arms to Iraq business out of the way, Sir Richard Scott can get down to what may turn out to be his real life’s work. This will be a new dictionary of English usage in which words can change their meaning by the addition of a nervous qualifying phrase or can have their meaning obscured by burying them beneath layers of double—perhaps treble or even quadruple—negatives.

For example, if someone thinks an Attorney General is personally at fault in dealing with evidence which might help to acquit people who are in danger of going to prison they don’t have to say so directly; the proper way is to say “I do not accept that he was not personally at fault.” For example, if a minister is caught out in a piece of double-dealing he or she can be described as making a claim of a “duplicitous nature", which softens the criticism quite a bit, and then can be got off the hook almost entirely by saying that of course they had "no duplicitous intention". For example, if a government has avoided what it claims to be its clear obligation always to conform to the constitutional principle of ministers’ accountability, there is no need to denounce this in clear terms; any criticism you make can be qualified with the words "in my opinion". And as by this time more people will be completely fed-up with such wimpish evasions it is a fair bet that your opinion will not be given much more than a contemptuous laugh.

Anyway, if Sir Richard Scott will send The Greasy Pole a free, autographed copy of his dictionary when it is complete we will respond by sending him a copy of the dictionary occasionally referred to by this column—a dictionary which defines duplicity as "deceit, double-dealing", and which he can use the next time he is called on to tackle the question of whether politicians ever mislead the rest of us and if they do whether this is deliberate or by accident. Whether, in words which may well make Sir Richard shudder, they ever tell lies.

The relevance of this issue is rooted in the fact that politicians base their appeal for votes on a clear, copper-bottomed guarantee that they are people of honour, people who hold to principles, which they will never betray. On the basis of those principles they make promises to us about how they will re-arrange society in any number of superficial ways so that many of its problems won’t worry us any more. Vote for them. You know you can trust them. Don’t you?

And so it has come about that among its many quaint, tourist-attracting rituals like Black Rod knocking three times on the door, like MPs addressing each other as honourable and gallant and learned or whatever and never saying anything controversial in their maiden speech, there is also the tradition that they never lie in the House of Commons. This causes certain difficulties because not a few MPs and ministers have been caught out making statements in the House which were not true. Indeed over the past few years there has been a succession of cases in which Members have at first defended themselves against allegations but have then had more-or-less to own up and resign

Shackled women
But whatever happens none has ever admitted to telling a lie and, perhaps more to the point, no other MP has ever accused them of doing so. Because that is another of those quaint customs. What it gets down to is this: it is permissible to tell a lie but if you are caught out you must not call it a lie; it is permissible to say that a Member is lying but you must not actually use the word. Other words must be used. Like mislead.

Because that was the word used by Ann Widdecombe, the Home Secretary’s deputy who is in charge of prisons, in the infamous case of the Shackled Women. Under the rule of Howard and Widdecombe, the prisons of Britain have had to develop internal regimes which have left the more anxious reformers wondering how long it will be before the crank and the treadmill will return. The duo in charge at the Home Office have notoriously thick skins, but even they were rattled when it was revealed that women prisoners who were about to give birth were being transferred to the nearby Whittington Hospital in chains which were not removed until the final stage of the confinement.

In the subsequent uproar Widdecombe—who was left by Howard to take the criticism—defended the policy with her customary obduracy and seemed to think she had clinched the argument by saying that the medical staff at the Whittington had not complained about the barbaric practice. But for Widdecombe this was a claim too far because the hospital had complained—indeed it would have been astounding if any doctor or nurse would happily treat patients in shackles— and had done so some time before. And of course the hospital were not slow to put the record straight, to expose Widdecombe in giving false information to parliament.

Telling the truth
Now this could have been a serious matter. Had Widdecombe told a lie about so sensitive an issue? Well we have already mentioned how durable are her dermal defences. So when she explained the matter to the House, when she apologised, it was not for lying, but for “misleading" them. So that’s alright then. Except, perhaps, for the women in Holloway and their children.

Except, perhaps, for the millions of people who live in the wider confinement of working-class life, who are so impressed with the promises and the declarations of honour that they elect politicians to sit in places where they make laws and mislead each other but never, never tell lies. Of course there is a desperate need in all this ritual of deception. What would happen, if politicians suddenly began to tell the truth? If they suddenly exposed their own impotence to make a world free of war. poverty, famine, fear. . . ? If they suddenly admitted that all those promises were really bribes to persuade us to vote for them? If the politicians’ sophistry fell into disuse and words always meant—well, what we know they mean?

Ivan