Kmflett's Blog

Lord Salisbury, the last British Prime Minister to wear a beard

Beard Liberation Front

23rd November

contact BLF Organiser Keith Flett: @keithbeard.bsky.social

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that it is facing an unprecedented challenge in drawing up its annual shortlist for the Parliamentary Beard of the Year.

The General Election on July 4^th 2024 saw the departure of a large number of existing MPs- mostly clean shaven Tories- and the arrival of an equally large number of Labour and LibDem MPs.

The existing Parliamentary Beard of the Year holder Robin Swann remains a contender but the campaigners say they are open to nominations for the 2025 shortlist.

Politics is a disputatious activity and the shortlist invariably draws comment from partisans. However a nomination should provide a brief reason why the MP nominated should appear on the shortlist

The shortlist is NOT about the politics of the MPs on the list. It’s about whether their activities during the year have provided a positive image of the hirsute during the year. Obviously this can be disputed- how positive or otherwise- so the shortlist will go to a vote with the winner announced in mid-December.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, there is no question that the Parliamentary Beard of the Year shortlist is a challenge with so many new MPs albeit now eighteen months in. We will review nominations and aim to publish a finalised list in the near future.

This was posted by Andrew Lester on FB on 15th November 2025

I’m posting it as an addendum to Pete Brown’s recent Sunday Times article noting that cask beer under a fiver is available in London.

Indeed this is Central London albeit Sarf of the Thames (just). The Waterloo Tap is an independent bar. It can be found by descending the main steps from the main entrance to Waterloo station and crossing the road (at the lights of course). Its then immediately on your right.

It also sells a good range of independent keykeg and keg beer although most cost a bit more.

The Times 19th November

An update on the Ashes Stats War.

A lot of it is hype and bluster and sometimes interesting but not hugely relevant history. The Root stats are however relevant. A corrective to England triumphalism (where it exists) but also the context that Root continues to improve as a batter (if not as *the* spinner)

Nigel Farage, racism & the City of London in the 1980s & 1990s

The Guardian is continuing its coverage of Nigel Farage’s school days at Dulwich College. Its alleged he was well known for making racist and anti-Semitic comments, which he denies.

I went to a North London Comprehensive School not a South London public school so I can’t make a useful comment on the specific Guardian reports. However I’ve always thought that Farage was and is a racist but someone, mostly, politically skilled enough to avoid crossing a line into overt racist politics.

Farage left school in 1982 and worked as a broker in the City of London until 2003. Here I can make a more useful comment. For much of that time I was also working in the City of London, initially as a junior manager in one of the UK’s largest companies (post 1984).

I was located in various offices over the 1980s and 1990s but none more than 10 minutes’ walk from the trading areas Farage was employed. The workplace culture was much the same across the City I think. It was mostly male, and mostly a drinking culture, in particular after lunch. In the days before mobiles and e-mail the long lunch was common in one of the many City hostelries.

Most but not quite all of my colleagues were considerably older and mostly (but again not all) they were on the right politically. There was consternation when the Guardian named me on its front page as the Editor of Living Marxism. This of course was one of the paper’s famous errors.

Were my colleagues racist? Mostly not overtly although most were sexist.

In summary it was a very male, nearly all (but not quite all) white, drinking culture. Its very much the context of Farage with a very important difference. All of my colleagues were trade union members and understood very well why it was important to be part of a collective organisation. That’s why despite the fact they had  little time for my left-wing politics they reliably elected me as their union rep.

A world of which Farage, working just minutes away, had and has no conception.

Immigration policies & votes. Danish Social Democrats lose Copenhagen Mayoralty for first time since 1903

On Monday Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced in the Commons that Labour planned to adopt a policy on asylum seekers that is being promoted by the Danish social-democrats. They are a centre-left party broadly in the same area as Starmer Labour.

On Tuesday there were elections in Copenhagen. The Red-Green Alliance and the Green Left got 40% of the vote up from 35.6% while the Social Democrats got 12.7% down from 17.2%. One result is that the Social Democrats lost the Mayoralty of Copenhagen something they held since 1903.

In elections elsewhere in Denmark the vote for the far right increased but only slightly.

The decline in the Social Democrat vote as it pursued a great moving right show underscores similar crisis for other social-democratic parties across Europe. So far Labour has escaped….

Guardian report

Among the reasons cited by analysts for the Social Democrats’ decline in Copenhagen were voter fatigue over the prime minister’s hardline policies on issues such as integration and immigration, which have partly inspired a newly unveiled asylum and migration policy in Britain.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/19/denmark-social-democrats-suffer-election-losses-mette-frederiksen?CMP=share_btn_url

‘[t]he crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’

Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

Picture: The Guardian

Nigel Farage smoking a cigar no doubt sees himself as Churchillian. However the right does not have a monopoly on cigar smoking. Engels was also an enthusiast

A footnote relating to Engels life as a bon viveur, as Tristram Hunt would have it.

This though is a piece of trivia that Hunt missed in his biography of Engels.

The great beard wearer was (of course) fond of Cuban cigars but developed an aversion to some of the best quality produced.

In a letter from London written on 21^st May 1887 to Laura Lafargue in Paris, Engels explained why:

My eye is considerably better since I have taken to smoke different cigars. There was the determining cause of the whole affair. You may laugh but I shall as soon as I have time to explain to Paul (Lafargue) medicinally that the thing was entirely caused by applying too much guano to the tobacco fields of the Vuelta Abajo.

Vuelta Abajo is a tobacco growing area of Cuba. Guano is no longer used

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuelta_Abajo

Guano was big business in Victorian times and there was a guano war between Spain, Peru and Chile in 1864

Lord Glasman of Blue Labour: getting rid of lanyards is the key success of Brexit

Until recently when I mentioned the words Lord (Maurice) Glasman to Labour Party members, let alone wider audiences, the invariable reaction was ‘who?’ Perhaps that is changing. I’ll be carrying some ephological polls.

Glasman, the co-founder of Blue Labour- has a higher opinion of himself than others it would seem.

Glasman who was critical of New Labour twenty years ago (far too liberal) is now busy urging Starmer to move right. It’s likely he has some influence on Morgan McSweeney.

In August 2025 Glasman could be found writing in the Sunday Times (24^th August). A lot of his column was about getting rid of the ECHR, lawyers generally etc. You would be hard pressed to put one of Farage’s fag papers between Glasman’s views and those of the owner of Reform UK.

However at one point Glasman diverts to one of his favourite subjects, lanyards

I attended a MAGA rally during President  Trump’s second inauguration and I witnessed people throwing their lanyards in the bin and declaiming, ‘Free, Free at last, thank God Almighty I’m free at last’ to great applause from those around them. What began with Brexit was finalised with Trump’s 2024 Election’

While reality is but a distant vista for Lord Glasman it still exists. Brexit was a failure and lanyards are still with us. Whether Shabana Mahmood’s next move is to ban lanyards at the Home Office I rather doubt but we shall see.

Beard Liberation Front

The Ashes starts on Friday and the Beard Liberation Front has received news that the Ashes Travel Collection is now available. We don’t go in for branded or designer goods- wear what you want and what is comfortable.

However we note that according to the publicity wearing a beard is essential

According to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood the aim of her proposed asylum policy is to head off the possibility of Farage at some point doing something even worse.

The Guardian’s regular 7am news e-mail on 18th November carried an interview with the paper’s Nordic correspondent Miranda Bryant. Some key points are below.

Firstly the policy hasn’t really succeeded in getting migrants to leave Denmark due to legal challenges. No doubt some will complain about activist lawyers but even Trump, so far, has to contend with the US legal system.

Secondly the policy far from capping off support for the Danish far right, because it hasnt really worked, has simply driven Danish politics further to the right.

There are elections in the social-democratic stronghold of Copenhagen on Tuesday. Hopefully a report on the outcome will appear somewhere…

Guardian 18th November

“The rhetoric in Denmark has had a big impact,” Miranda Bryant told me. “Even when policies can’t be fully implemented, they create huge uncertainty and vulnerability for people seeking asylum. And that can deter people from entering Denmark, regardless of what is legally possible for the state to do in response.”

Denmark is also an ECHR signatory, and I asked Miranda if there had been legal obstacles to enacting the asylum seeker policy there. She told me: “A lot of the hardline rhetoric hasn’t translated into action.”

Denmark’s own legal system has blocked some of the most controversial measures. Miranda said that hundreds of Syrian refugees had their residence permits revoked and were told they had to return to Syria as it was now deemed safe by the Danish state – but the country’s appeals court prevented anyone actually being forced back.

“So while the rhetoric seems to have helped bring down the number of asylum seekers choosing to attempt to settle in Denmark, much of the policy hasn’t been enforceable.”

In 2019, the Social Democrat leader Mette Frederiksen campaigned to be prime minister on a platform explicitly tough on immigration, going as far as to say she wanted zero asylum seekers arriving.

“The Social Democrats retained progressive positions on many issues, but became right-wing on immigration. That helped them take votes from the far right, and support for the Danish People’s Party fell away sharply,” Miranda said.

“But now the far right is climbing in popularity again, making even more extreme demands, including so-called ‘remigration’ – the mass deportation of people with immigrant backgrounds living in Denmark. Given that, it doesn’t look as if the Social Democrats’ shift to the right has ‘solved’ immigration as a political issue for them. If anything, there are concerns that the party will move further right again.”