The above figures are very unlikely to be entirely accurate. After all they have been compiled by the Met Police who aren’t very good at reliable evidence. Even so they give an interesting counterweight to the often repeated view that people get more reactionary as they get older. Clearly not universally so…
The above is the first Editorial in The Times (11th August 2025).
I thought the Guardian might Editorialise against a ban on Palestine Action even though it has its sympathies with Tel Aviv. However the Times, which is not just sympathetic to the Tel Aviv Government but a wholehearted supporter of it has got there first.
The key points in the Editorial that a ban is disproportionate and counter-productive are entirely reasonable. Of course the Times dwells on more robust PA activity (many are peaceful protests and blockades). Some of these break the law, although a justification of stopping death in Gaza is sometimes put forward, but again as the Editorial points out there are existing laws aplenty to deal with it.
There are two wider points. Firstly the protests described are very similar in nature to those carried out by one section of the Suffragettes in the period immediately before World War One. Secondly the Government is in a hole here and its still digging. Times Editorials opposing crack downs on protest rights are as rare as rocking horse sh*t
A Government so out of tune with public sentiment may not notice (or care) but when Times letter writers start appearing to your left on the subject of national security the reality gap is really starting to yawn.
Meanwhile Junior Justice Minister Alex Davies-Jones was despatched to the Monday morning media round. Pontypridd has been badly served by a series of right-wing Labour MPs in recent decades and clearly Ms Davies-Jones has no intention of breaking the mould.
Is it the case that the police arresting protesters the majority of whom were over 60 were in any way ‘brave’? It seems very unlikely. Was it the case that the protest was entirely peaceful? It seems so and on the basis of Ms Davies-Jones words they should not have been arrested at all. Meanwhile as there were reportedly 40-50 police officers from south and west Wales involved in the arrests perhaps Ms Davies-Jones needs to reassure her constituents that there was of course no actual criminal activity in the area that required investigation on Saturday..
I want to thank the police for their bravery and their courage in carrying out their diligent duties in the line of public protection, and I want to state that the right to peacefully protest in this country is a cornerstone of our democracy, and of course, we respect that. (Guardian 11th August)
11th August 2025
Contact Keith Flett @keithbeard.bsky.social
National Sideburns Day. Noddy Holder voted Best Modern Sideburns 2025
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that with National Sideburns Day on August 11th it has run a snap on-line poll to judge the best modern sideburns.
Noddy Holder won 56.1% of the 1200 votes cast with Chris Packham, presenter of Spring Watch, getting 31.7%.
National Sideburns Day takes place every 11th August, and reflects the growing popularity of a range of facial hair styles.
National Sideburns Day was originally held to mark Bradley Wiggins Olympic victory in 2012
The campaigners say that sideburns, sometimes known as mutton chops, and named after US Civil War General Ambrose Burnside were often worn by Victorian politicians
Bradley Wiggins reinvented the post-1945 tradition of sideburns from Elvis Presley to Noddy Holder and the late Lemmy and Alvin Stardust, turned them into something no self-respecting hipster would be without
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, this year National Sideburns Day underlines the resilience of the style over centuries of changing facial hair fashions with a particular focus on contemporary sideburns. We congratulate Noddy Holder whose iconic sideburns are surely a National Treasurer
Shortlist
Richard Osman
Chris Packham
Noddy Holder
Jacob Elordi
Ambridge Socialist
10th August
The first attempt at a leadership for the Independent Labour Party (1893). ‘cockneys unbend & come to Bradford’
The ILP was formed in Bradford in January 1893 and many of the debates about the name of the party (should ‘socialist’ be included) and its organisation (a federal structure or not) are familiar in 2025. Another issue was the construction of a representative leadership.
The principle was that there must be leaders representing different areas of the country.
Cunningham Graham, Scottish Labour Party
HH Champion, Scottish United Trades Council
Tom Mann, London ILP
H Quelch London SDF
Ben Tillett, Yorkshire ILP
Stephen Fay, Manchester & Salford ILP
‘In addition the Midlands and the North of England could nominate some Midlander or Northerner provided they lived in London’. Indeed all of the leadership lived in London. When a provisional leadership did appear after the 1893 conference it met in Manchester
W H Drew President of the Bradford Labour Union noted of the London plan ‘what you should set your face to is a conference of provincial men and Londoners, and you cockneys ought to unbend and come say to Bradford. The idea that a representative leadership should all live in London didn’t work. As E P Thompson noted in Homage to Tom Maguire the new leadership of labour emerged not from ‘London Head Offices’ but from ‘those shadowy parts known as the Provinces’
The Ambridge Socialist
10th August
The Fete: a tug of class war
The Ambridge Fete is one of the highlights of the village. Usually there is a celeb visitor but this year the highlight seems to be a tug of class war at Grey Gables between some of the warring factions of the Ambridge ruling class.
Getting the wheat in
Brian has cleared off for a holiday. In the meantime Pip and Stella and others are harvesting the wheat. Message: food is important, Brian and Justin are not. Brian does not believe it. There was a whole TV comedy series based on this. Meanwhile it sounds like Stella plans to claim constructive dismissal (she immediately walked off the job & quit after Brian threatened her on his return)
Will JD Vance be stopping by The Bull?
JD Vance and his partner have arrived in England for a summer a break. They are staying in the Cotswolds but the Ambridge Socialist understands that a visit to a traditional English pub may be in prospect and The Bull is not that far away. Eddie Grundy, Hillbilly?
In Other News
Susan has found Oliver’s magazine which is in fact the hard right Spectator though the BBC has stopped reporting that.
Amber is still going on about her wedding to George. No more news about his poem however.
Lilly is leaving for the coast (Coronation St probably)
Arrests of people protesting about genocide won’t stop the protests, any more than State action to stop freedom of the press in the 1820s did
On Saturday 9th August the Met Police say that they arrested 474 people (or it might be 532- look do you expect the Met to know what its doing?) for protesting largely under a Defend Our Juries basis for mentioning words about Palestine that Yvette Cooper the Home Secretary thinks should not be mentioned. Keeping in mind that the Met are incompetent, can’t add up and tend to, er, lose evidence, that is still a significant number out of the 800+ who attended that particular protest. In one of the biggest exercises of wasting police time and resources in recent years (The Met are specialists) police from a wide area including Wales appear to have been despatched to central London. Good news for those committing actual crimes elsewhere on the day.
It’s clear except clearly to Cooper who was not paying attention in history lessons that more protesters will step forward. There is a well-known precedent in British history.
Around the period of Peterloo in 1819 the (Tory) Government was determined to crack down on radical opinion and calls for democratic rights. Prosecutions for seditious libel were common and the taxes on knowledge(levied on newspapers) saw the rise of an unstamped, illegal press. Many who published it went to jail, but that didn’t stop publication.
One of the best known was the freethinker Richard Carlile. In the early 1820s he ran a radical bookshop in Fleet Street known as the Temple of Reason. Carlile was frequently jailed but he had an important principle: THE SHOP IN FLEET STREET WILL NOT BE CLOSED AS A MATTER OF COURSE’
It wasn’t. Before the Government gave in 150 volunteers, shopmen, printers, newsvendors, had been jailed and served over 200 years of imprisonment between them.
Whose were these people? E P Thompson noted in the Making of the English Working Class:
The men and women who came forward were, in nearly every case, entirely unknown to Carlile. They simply came out of London; or arrived on the coach from Lincolnshire, Dorset, Liverpool and Leeds. They came out of a culture.
Interestingly though Thompson was also clear that while those who broke the law and fought for press freedom were part of the rise of a radical working class movement, they themselves were not usually workers, with the power to organise and challenge capital at the point of production, but artisans.
However the reading culture they promoted and developed fed into the rising working class movement and was one of the motors for Chartism from the later 1830s.
Perhaps the protests on mentioning words that must not be mentioned won’t change the world but they might help create a movement that does
10th August 2025
Contact Keith Flett @keithbeard.bsky.social
National Sideburns Day. Vote open for best Modern Sideburns
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that with National Sideburns Day on Sunday August 11th it is running a snap poll to judge the best modern sideburns.
National Sideburns Day takes place every 11th August, and reflects the growing popularity of a range of facial hair styles.
National Sideburns Day was originally held to mark Bradley Wiggins Olympic victory in 2012
The campaigners say that sideburns, sometimes known as mutton chops, and named after US Civil War General Ambrose Burnside were often worn by Victorian politicians
Bradley Wiggins reinvented the post-1945 tradition of sideburns from Elvis Presley to Noddy Holder and the late Lemmy and Alvin Stardust, turned them into something no self-respecting hipster would be without
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, this year National Sideburns Day will underline the resilience of the style over centuries of changing facial hair fashions with a particular focus on contemporary sideburns
Richard Osman
Chris Packham
Noddy Holder
Jacob Elordi
Picture posted on Farage’s Twitter account 8th August 2025
Financial Times 9th August 2025
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