The Traitors, AI & the ‘Secret Traitor’’ A 2026 deskilling exercise
After the ratings success of Celebrity Traitors last autumn, a new series of non-celeb Traitors started on January 1st.
The 22 players seem to include quite a number who wherever they may have originated from are based in London. As a born and bred North Londoner I think that’s a good thing. A note of caution. When the Independent Labour Party first had a go at sorting out a leadership in 1892 it picked people representative of the various areas of the UK with the proviso that they all lived in London. Unsurprisingly this did not go down well with people who did not live in London.
The latest series has a twist explained by The Guardian here
on top of the traitors selected by Winkleman at the first round table, there’s now a “Secret Traitor” who knows their identities, nominates who they may kill and is the only player to have total oversight of the game. Not even those watching at home know who, among the supposed faithfuls, is beneath that scarlet cloak.
The point seems to have been missed, and it is 2026, that the Secret Traitor is not a person but an AI tool, sifting the words and the actions of the contestants to see which deserve to go on the purge list.
The role of the three 2026 Traitors has been deskilled, as arguably has the job of the Faithfuls, since they are also being assessed by the AI tool
Their Christmas Holidays and Ours: Does Christmas still have twelve days?
January 5th is Twelfth Night, in the traditional calendar a festival to rival that of Christmas Day, and January 6th Epiphany. These dates mark the end of the modern Christmas holiday period.
How far people in work in 2025/26 observe a 12-day holiday or take time off depends on occupation, employer practices and individual circumstances. It may be that some official statistics are collected on the matter- although I’m not aware of them.
Whether time off is extended or otherwise over the Twelve Days has been the subject of employer and class led change.
For example Hutton in Stations of the Sun notes that in 1797 the Customs and Excise Office in London closed for six days between December 21st (St Thomas’s Day) and 6th January (Epiphany). By 1838 it opened on every day except 25th December. Hutton notes that between 1790 and 1840 ‘employers, led by the Government, carried out a ruthless pruning of the Christmas holidays..’ The 1833 Factory Act had decreed that, Sundays aside, the only days when a worker should not attend work were Christmas Day and Good Friday. The 1871 Bank Holiday Act added a few Mondays into the equation as well as St Stephens Day (Boxing Day)
However from the early 1840s, led by Charles Dickens, efforts to reclaim and promote Christmas as a popular festival of harmony and social peace, certainly for the middle classes were well underway. Hutton notes that in 1847 the Poor Law Commission allowed a Christmas dinner in all Workhouses. The modern Christmas was under development.
The point being that time taken off work at Christmas (or not) although dictated to an extent by the 12 days of the traditional calendar has also been about the promotion or denial of people to take time off work.
The modern retail Christmas, as shopworkers union USDAW underlines each year, seems to consist of Christmas Day (if you are lucky).
Others may take time from 24th December to 2nd January, 8 or 9 days but not 12.
However long you do or do not take in 2026 things are guaranteed to be better ordered and regulated if you are in a trade union.
Tottenham Fox just off the High Rd N17 22/10/24 (picture Keith Flett)
New Year’s Day saw the screening on BBC1 of a programme presented by David Attenborough in his centennial year. He has lived in London for 75 years and the programme might well have been subtitled Maybe its because I’m a Londoner.
Attenborough looked at a London not of the fevered imaginations of Nigel Farage and Matt Goodwin but the London that is the greenest major city in the world.
He looks at rewilding in West London with the reintroduction of beavers after hundreds of years, of the 30,000 parakeets now in the Capital (noting that they were probably not introduced by Jimi Hendrix) and something very familiar to myself- Tottenham foxes.
Tottenham with its marsh and allotments but also its High Rd has the right mix for foxes. They make their dens in greenery and then head up to the High Rd for a meal of discarded chips, kebabs and burgers.
A world of which Nigel Farage has no conception not least because there is no Tottenham Hunt
Class without class struggle reverses the title of a well known essay by the historian E P Thompson on eighteenth century England but as a description of the Archers at 75 it fits.
Class there is in the Archers. After all the programme is named after the ruling Archers Dynasty whose family members have a hand in most things Ambridge. Perhaps the only thing missing which might be expected is an Archers link to the Borsetshire Constabulary and the Magistrates bench. Surely at least one of the leaders of the exploiting class, Brian Aldridge, Justin Elliott and Brian Aldridge would be JPs.
A recent focus in the Archers, and rightly so, is gender and with Paul sexual identities, but class lurks.
The working class in Ambridge are of course the Grundys and the Horrobins. Eddie is rarely without some doubtful scam while on the Horrobin’s side there is Clive. George Grundy straddles both.
There are environmental politics in the Archers going way back. There was the trashing of GM crops, Brian’s pollution of the Am (he largely got off) and more recently re-wilding.
There have been occasional nods to opposition to the Borsetshire Hunt and Mia’s veganism.
Meanwhile of course Pat has a history of CND activism and got involved with the more recent protests against Borsetshire Water after the sewage leak.
However when it comes to workplaces and trade unions the Archers has remained for the most part silent. There have been calls down the decades from the union that organises agricultural workers- now Unite- for it to be addressed. They have been ignored.
Surely if the chicken factory, the meat packing plant and Grey Gables were not unionised (again by Unite, different sections of) there would be campaigns for it to happen. The Employment Relations Act which became law just before Christmas will make this a bit easier. No mention so far in the Archers
There have however been two union reps in Ambridge over the last 75 years. Neil Carter and Mike Tucker. Given the workplaces under discussion and the profile of modern workforces it must be time for the first female union rep in the area.
In an official statement to mark the start of 2026 the Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has congratulated Zohran Mamdani on being sworn in as the 111th Mayor of New York.
The campaigners say that his victory on a democratic socialist platform underlines that beards can be electorally popular and win election.
It is a lesson that the UK has been slow to learn in recent times. The last Prime Minister with a beard was Lord Salisbury who stepped down in 1902.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, as we know while winning an election is the key first step to change, effecting change can be difficult. Zohran Mamdani will need to mobilise beard power to sweep aside clean shaven reactionary politics.
Its rather appropriate that a letter writer to the Times (31st Dec) calls out Tory Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp for his use of the word ‘scumbag’ to describe Abd el-Fattah.
It may be a term for the pub The Farage & Grift Arms perhaps but use by Philp underlines how far the Tories are lurching to the right
Though I am again in good health, I realise, of course, that 74 isn’t 47 and that I can no longer make so free with food, drink, etc. Nor am I as hardy as in the past. But I am nevertheless still perfectly robust for my age
French politician Eric Ciotti who is a right-wing Republican who favours a rapprochement with the fascist National Rally has called for a national homage to Brigitte Bardot
Bardot was associated with far right politics in the last decades of her life and there is evidence to suggest that she was friendly with the French fascist leader Jean Marie Le Pen in the late 1950s
There is also a claim that after the French events of May 1968 Bardot associated herself with the left politics of the Situationist International, although this is not likely to be the reason why Ciotti favours a memorial
Amol Rajan asked who the joint author (with Terence Ranger) of the book the Invention of Tradition was. He prompted with a further clue that the historian had written a series of books such as the Age of Industry and the Age of Empire.
No one was able to answer Eric Hobsbawm. The best guest was AJP Taylor.
This might perhaps have been excusable in the main University Challenge series where current students compete. However for the Christmas version the teams are Alumni of graduates now long distinguished in their respective fields
Eric Hobsbawm one of the best known post-1945 Marxist historians died in 2012
30th December 1850, Fraternal Democrats end of year festival
The Fraternal Democrats were a left-Chartist group focused on international solidarity with links to Marx and Engels. They were organised by the Chartist leader George Julian Harney.
The text below makes reference to the Austrian leader Haynau who was chased by workers from the Barclays (later Courage) brewery when on a visit to London. The text is from the Northern Star 4th January 1851. It’s available free on-line where more speeches can be found!
The Literary and Scientific Institute was just off Tottenham Ct Rd in central London, a centre for radical activity in the second half of the nineteenth century
FESTIVAL OF THE FRATERNAL DEMOCRATS.
The annual festival was held on Tuesday evening December 30th, at the Literary and Scientific Institution, John-street, Fitzroy-square. About seven o’clock a very respectable party sat down to an excellent tea. After the repast was concluded G. J. Harney was called to the chair, and commenced the proceedings by giving a resume of the business and leading events connected with the Society during the twelve months which had elapsed since their last festival. In European politics they had but little cause, for encouragement—nowhere had the people become possessed of those institutions which could alone ensure them prosperity in return for their toil. In England the chief incidents in connexion with their society were the four days’ debate, in the House of Commons, on Lord Palmerston’s Foreign Policy ; the chastisement of Haynau by Barclay’s draymen, and the liberation of their, lately imprisoned brother, Ernest Jones. In reference to the policy of Lord Palmerston, the speaker showed the fallacy of his boast, that the rights and liberties of Englishmen had been duly protected abroad, and instanced the case of Mr. Baker, who had edited a publication culled the Radical, in Vienna, during the year 1848, and who had been put to death within twenty-four hours after the heroic Blum, and for whose murder Lord Palmerston had never demanded satisfaction of the cowardly, butchering, Austrian government. Not-withstanding his professed liberality, Lord Palmerston was as great an enemy to true democracy as was the Tory Aberdeen. The lynch-law, applied to Haynau by Barclay’s draymen, and the meetings called by their society to defend the conduct of those men, had drawn down upon them the condemnation of a portion of the press ; but it had at-attracted public attention to them, and extended their sphere of operations. A correspondence had lately taken place between the Austrian and English governments relative to the treatment of Haynau, in which the latter denounced the conduct of his castigators; but this would weigh but little compared with the approval stamped upon it by the British public. Mr. Barney then dwelt upon the services of Ernest Jones ; apologised for his absence on the ground of the illness of his wife; and denounced the conduct of those who were endeavouring to injure him in the public estimation. He then reviewed the progress of events in Schleswig Holstein, Hesse Cassel, and the larger Germanic States and denounced, in eloquent terms, the slavish doctrine of non-intervention, which was only adhered to when the people’s liberties were endangered, and ever broken when monarchy was threatened. The policy of the Fraternal Democrats was war to all tyrants. The same feeling which actuated an individual to assist his fellow-man when menaced with destruction, should actuate a nation to support another nation menaced with political death. He then called upon their continental brethren present to unite with each other, if no question of principle hindered, and show one undivided and gallant front to the unholy alliance of their monarchical and aristocratic opponents, until all Europe resounded with the cry of ” the Republic, Democratic and Social (cheers)…
Mr D W Burke gave the toast of “The Ladies,” .and a vote of thanks was given to the Chairman who duly acknowledged the same. Dancing and singing then commenced,, which was kept up to an early hour, and all seemed to enjoy the festive scene. Deputations from the, German, Hungarian, Polish and other Societies were in attendance and the Apollonic Society connected with the Institution sang many spirited choruses between the various sentiments.
