The name's Hunt. Total Hunt.

People have got many LOLs from Jeremy Hunt's name, particularly when it was (accidentally) transformed on live radio into an insulting and crude term for the female genitalia. It's not a term I use, and anyway, being likened to Jeremy is the most wounding weapon in my arsenal.

But what is it about politicians called Hunt? Jeremy is the Minister for Health who a) wants to sell the whole thing off to his friends in business and b) things homeopathy is a thing. The other prominent Hunt is Tristram, MP for part of Stoke-on-Trent thanks to being Peter Mandelson's friend back in the days when that wasn't code for 'corrupt Machievellian war-monger': parachuted in against the wishes of the constituency members. Tristram is of course the very exemplar of meritocracy: anyone who claims his political rise is in any way connected to the fact that his father is a Labour member of the House of Lords is just a cynical purveyor of the politics of envy. Tristram. No, like all Labour's leaders, Tristram spent a formative period underground as a miner, before embarking on the long hard slog through community activism before the acclaim of his fellow proletarians led him to set out on the long march to London to change the world.

Only joking. Tristram went to the very expensive and elitist University College School, then Cambridge. After a brief period as an academic and TV historian (very much not the same thing as being a non-TV historian), he went – surprise surprise – to a New Labour think tank and then into Parliament.

Unsurprisingly then, our Tristram is indistinguishable from the Old Right. Despite being an academic expert on Marx, Tristram shares Michael Gove's passion for private-school stylings and neo-Victorianist attitudes. He has never said anything that could remotely be described as socialist or left-wing, and is seemingly entirely uninterested in anything other than pragmatic triangulation. This of course is a shame as Michael Gove and David Willetts have turned school and higher education into a quagmire of privatisation, free-market principle, corruption, bullying and prejudice. You'd have thought that anyone with more brain cells than a nematode could manage to carve out a political space allowing him to critique this neoliberal project, but apparently not.

Tristram Hunt's descent into shame was complete today. As I and thousands of other academics and support staff picketed in response to our fifth consecutive real-terms pay cut, Tristram crossed a picket line to deliver a class on – of all things – Marxism. Which at least indicates a vicious sense of humour.

That's right. A Labour Minister for Education ignored his former colleagues and his party's history to become a scab.

Update: thinking about it like a politician, I realised I initially missed the point. Tristram is a former academic and a Shadow Minister for Education. There is no way that he did not know that a) his former colleagues were taking industrial action and that b) there would be a picket line. Knowing that, he then chose to cross that line. He could have stayed at home or done one of the many things he has to do (perhaps take a trip to Stoke-on-Trent, which he supposedly represents). He could even have arrived early and sneaked into the building before the pickets started, like some of my scab colleagues. He didn't do any of these things: he deliberately crossed a picket line to make some kind of point, presumably to curry favour with the Daily Mail. And for that reason, I'm going to write to him and Ed Miliband.

I'm a Labour Party member. That means that I've endured the endless erosion of principle and passion in the party for as long as I've been alive. I've watched my party leadership running scared from the Daily Mail in every industrial dispute going. I've seen them hand over essential public services to their scaly new friends in the City. I've seen them torture and bomb and kidnap, bug and burgle and hack and I've stayed in, hoping that one day a shred of principle might re-emerge in the only non-Tory party that has a chance at government.

My reward? To watch Tristram Hunt stab us in the back without a twinge of guilt. We're so far beneath his concerns that he won't bother explaining himself and the Party will support him. What is the point of him? What is the point of voting Labour if it's led by people entirely bereft of principle? What will Tristram Hunt do that Michael Gove won't? From here, it's pretty hard to tell.

Gibbering with expectation.

Amongst the facts you may have gleaned about me are my love for science fiction and Marxism. So imagine my delight at the arrival in the post of Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould and China Miéville.

SF has many political variants, though my personal sense is that the rightwing version is fading away with the end of communism as a bogeyman. In the Cold War period, conservative SF projected Aliens as threatening Communists, and the application of massive military superiority was the solution to all situations. Early Star Trek tilted this way (Klingons were particularly Asiatic, for instance), though Vietnam brought about a decisive change of view. Robert Heinlein was a particularly unpleasant neofascist: the film version of Starship Troopers gleefully satirises his approach. Blasting everything out of the sky if it contradicted the small-town values of an imaginary America was rather commonplace: I'd even suggest that Back To The Future's construction of an idyllic 50s and the utopian and dystopian presents and futures betray a politicial consciousness which is at least liberal.

But there were plenty of lefty and hippy SF writers of the time: Spinrad extended the counterculture across the galaxy, for example. Ursula K LeGuin took the toys out of the boys' hands in her feminist fantasy and SF. Sheri S. Tepper produced serious and rather wonderful eco-feminist SF, while I think that Gwyneth Jones is one of the best writers in any genre, and she primarily writes liberal-left feminist novels about the near future of the UK. It goes back further of course: H. G. Wells was a radical and prominent Fabian socialist, and even Lionel Britton, the working-class modernist, wrote science fiction plays. Adam Roberts's novels tackle technology and society in a quietly leftish fashion, while Ken MacLeod's novels have covered everything from future economies to the War On Terror from an anarcho-Trotskyist Scottish perspective.

I haven't had a chance to peruse Red Planets yet, but I'm looking forward to it. Marxist and neomarxist theory should have a lot to say about the economic and social formations predicted by technological and political change. Class formations and permutations, the extension of hegemony online (despite the carnivalesque resistance offered by groups like LulzSec) and the economic injustices perpetuated by discredited but not defenestrated capitalist élites will all become more, not less, relevant as we move into an era of triumphant, guiltless and naked class warfare. If you don't think that moving jobs, pollution, (reduced) wages and environmental destruction to the browner continents is an act of class warfare in which you and I are on the wrong side, then you're a moron.

Tony Pulis, Class Traitor?

I return from my union meeting with another job - co-signatory on the funds. Not, unfortunately, a great opportunity for embezzlement: last year we bought a kettle.

I've had sport on my mind today. Last night I went to the university's fencing club, desperate to hit someone, only to find that it's been abolished by the students' union without regard for the democratic niceties: the union's disgraceful financial incompetence and slavish devotion to the university's management trump such details. It's a real shame: before I resigned as coach over a year ago, I acquired £5000 of new kit for them… sigh.

Later in the evening, I declined the opportunity to manage the England junior team for the School Games - I'm already the Games' Welfare Officer for my sport. Maybe next year.

Then, Ewar sends me a link to a very amusing and ideologically correct blog entry on my beloved Stoke City. You can tell it's clever and true because Ewar, blinded by his hatred for anything leftwing, describes it as 'bollocks'. In this piece, the author explains why the manager's defence of Ryan Shawcross's devastating tackle is 'pernicious' because it seks to explain the actions of the worker on an individualistic level (intention to hurt, in this case) rather than in structural terms (i.e. the system requires potentially dangerous behaviour because the alternative is to lose): it's classic Marxism. Stumbling and Bumbling earns a place on my blogroll for mixing football and Marxist politics.

Beer My Dear

I've just been to see Mark Steel, the comedian. I didn't just pop round to his house, of course. He was doing a gig in the back bar of the Civic Hall (which didn't impress him much, nor me, in the harsh light of sobriety). He was, though, very funny, once he'd got past the opening 'is Walsall the local rivals?' spiel. I did learn from him, after nearly ten years, the difference between Brummie and Black Country accents, and he explained Marx's theory of alienation by using the phrase 'here come the little fuckers' about apple pies. I will be incorporating this into my lectures at every opportunity.

It cost £12 to see Mark Steel make me laugh and think for two solid hours. In the bar, I bought 3 bottles of Corona, each one containing exactly half a pint. This cost me £10.20. So according to the Civic Hall, about one hour and forty minutes of well-known, witty and talented Mark Steel is worth one and three quarters of a pint of average lager. It is certainly the most expensive beer I have ever drunk. I've signed petitions about all sorts of terrible events and worthy causes, but I'm furious about this one - it's just so eye-gougingly expensive. To the barricades!

(Sorry about the Marvin Gaye reference in the post's title. He won't mind. Because his dad shot him dead).