Kmflett's Blog

Lords cricket ground, one of the world’s most iconic, hosts a Test between England and India in July 2025. A few weeks later however it will be exclusively the home of the Hundred team currently called London Spirit.

Lords is owned by the MCC a private members club (there is a waiting list). As part of its plans to monetise English and Welsh cricket the ruling body the ECB have gifted the grounds that host Hundred teams 51% of their equity. The ECB plan to sell the remaining 49% to a suitable and most likely the highest bidder.

The list of bidders has now been whittled down and those interested in Lords (the highest valued ground) are:

Avram Glazer (Man U Co-Chair)

Cain International (Chelsea director Jonathan Goldstein & joint owner Todd Boehly)

Ambani Family (owner of Mumbai Indians)

Sanjiv Goenka (owner of Lucknow Super Giants)

Liberty Media (owns F1 & MotoGP)

Owners of Chennai Super Kings

Given the scale of investment the ECB are after its unlikely that any of the above will be content with a 49% stake. In the case of Lords the MCC can sell some or all of their stake to give a successful bidder the controlling interest.

They no doubt will want to re-brand the ground so perhaps next season at least for part of the summer it’ll be the Mumbai Indian Lords or the Manchester Lords

The source of this story is Elizabeth Ammon (The Times) always a well informed & readable cricket writer

This is the last Chartist petition presented to Parliament. A new Chartist determination, led by Feargus O’Connor, collected over 5 million signatures on behalf of the Chartist movement. The Chartists and the petition represented a desire to see that all adult men, regardless of social position be given the right to vote. It also campaigned for annual elections to Parliament, equal numbers of voters in each constituency, pay for MPs, and vote by Secret Ballot. Unfortunately, Parliament would later vote against the petition by 222 votes to 17. While the Chartists were not successful at the time, by 1918 all but one of their original demands had been pass by Parliament

The UK population at the time was just over 15 million to give a sense of the reach the petition achieved. Of course in a Parliament elected with a very partial suffrage MPs rejected it, but as the Parliamentary note above records there was no doubt which way the wind was blowing.

Let me give the Prime Minister another example of a real business. Following his Budget, the head of McVitie’s said that it was “harder to understand” what the case for investment in the UK was. While the Prime Minister has been “hobnobbing” in Brazil, businesses have been struggling to “digest” his Budget. Is it not the case that the Employment Rights Bill shows that it is not only the “ginger nut” that is causing him problems?

Hansard 27th Novemver 2024

In fact what Salman Amin head of Pladis the firm that owns McVities (and Jacobs & Carrs biscuits) actually said reflects a concern with the previous Tory Government’s economic policies, support for Labour’s headline policy but again a concern about how this will work for his business.

As a socialist I might have another view on all that but the point is that Badenoch either has not understood what he said or is deliberately twisting it. Perhaps needless to say Starmer, no great Commons performer himself (just compared to Badenoch) missed the chance to correct the Tory leader. Perhaps he just doesnt like McVitie’s biscuits

I think we can all sign up to the Government’s mission to grow the UK economy, renew the country’s competitiveness and unlock investment. After all, what business leader wouldn’t? The big question is how – and this is where I have a concern Going forward, it’s becoming harder to understand what the case for investment is Small amounts one can understand, but the quantums that I think we need to make a difference in the growth rate of the economy are in the order of tens of millions every year.

“In the last couple of years, it’s just become a lot harder to really see how does that play out.”

h/t to the Guardian’s sketch writer John Crace who reported Badenoch’s biscuit preferences (the text above comes from Hansard) although he also missed LOTO’s errors

Lord Salisbury was the last Prime Minister with a beard (1902)

Beard Liberation Front

27^th November

Contact BLF Organiser Keith Flett @keithbeard.bsky.social

Parliamentary Beard of the Year list is clean shave after huge intake of MPs at Election

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that it faced 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.

While the existing Parliamentary Beard of the Year holder Alex Cunningham has stepped down as an MP the campaigners say they have now reviewed nominations for the 2024 shortlist.

Politics is a disputatious activity and the shortlist invariably draws comment from partisans.

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 this year with so many new MPs but after reviewing nominations we have drawn up a list comprised of some veteran Parliamentary beard wearers together with some fresh faces as it were

Parliamentary Beard of the Year 2024 shortlist

An on-line poll will run in early December 2024

Jon Trickett (Labour)

Jeremy Corbyn (Independent)

Colum Eastwood (SDLP)

Andy McDonald (Labour)

Nick Timothy (Tory)

Shockat Adam (Independent)

Robin Swann (UUP)

Terry Jermy (Labour)

Ilyich studied living London. He liked taking long rides through the town on top of the bus. He liked the busy traffic of that vast commercial city, the quiet squares with their elegant houses wreathed in greenery, where only smart broughams drew up. There were other places too – mean little streets tenanted by London’s work people, with clothes lines stretched across the road and anaemic children playing on the doorsteps. To these places we used to go on foot. Observing these startling contrasts between wealth and poverty, Ilyich would mutter in English through clenched teeth: “Two nations!”

From Krupskaya, Lenin in London

Johnson has claimed that when he was young, it was “very rare for there to be a fatso in the class. Now they’re all fatsos and I’d be shot for saying they’re fatsos, but it’s the truth.”

He said in the past, people “ate Spangles and Curly Wurlies and dog shit… but they expended far more energy and nowadays kids are sitting on screens and being told that it’s all too dangerous to go outside because there are paedophiles everywhere”.

Apparently the Church of England are to blame because their focus on reparations for slavery means they are not providing the spiritual well being that means people dont eat too much

Johnson was interviewed by the food writer Henry Dimbleby and public health expert Dolly van Tulleken. He is a a Catholic btw so perhaps his best line of argument would be to argue for the Disestablishment of the Church of England

The 15th series of Great British Bake Off concluded on 26th November.

It started on the BBC in 2010 and moved to Channel 4 in 2017. Of the original cast only Paul Hollywood star of the Meerkat soggy bottom advert remains.

Bake Off is part of recent social history not least because its one where a diverse range of amateur bakers, aim to win. A sort of community feel good thing. Or to put it another way its not the kind of programme that Nigel Farage or Liz Truss are likely to be found bigging up. It may end up as a footnote in a social history of Britain in the 2010s and 2020s when its written in 50 years time.

It can of course be argued that its all rather middle class, Waitrose (who are the sponsors) TV.

Anyway I didnt become a regular watcher until 2020 and the pandemic period when sitting in front of the TV was one of the more interesting things to do. I watched occasionally before then but until the advent of the IPlayer and C4’s rather less user friendly equivalent you had to be watching at the time. Now you dont.

Herein lies perhaps the most interesting thing about GBBO- cakes aside- the stats. The last final to be shown on the BBC attracted 14.9m viewers. The 2023 final on C4 got 4.38m and the 2024 semi-final got 3.9m.

Is the series tired? Perhaps, but as likely it reflects changes in viewing habits. People can watch clips on social media, or watch the programme any time on catch up. That in itself reflects the fracturing of a national viewing experience, but its where we are. Down the pub I might not discuss the 2024 winner yet because my drinking companions might not have watched it yet…

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

The contract of Marstons (now Carlsberg) to sell beer at Lords cricket ground ended in the summer and it has now been announced that Brewdog will provide beverages at St Johns Wood for four years from 2025.

‘Matchdays at Lords at set to become an even more dynamic experience with the involvement of Brewdog’, says the Lords press release.

Brewdog will take over the upper tier of the food village and will also provide match day ‘activations’ at its Paddington and Waterloo Bars.

It will mean of course that cask beer will disappear from Lords (Marston’s Pedigree was sold on handpump- though a bright version)as Brewdog don’t do cask. I suspect cask will carry on in the members only Pavilion which used to sell Fullers London Pride when the old Tavern Bar sold the plebs Watneys. Thanks to Will Hawkes who skeeted that the Pavilion cask will be Brewdog Shore Leave. I can’t see that going down well with the members who at least when it comes to food and drink are a discerning lot.

In my view Brewdog beers which 15 years ago were excellent are now mostly mediocre but that’s not the reason I havent had one of them for some years. Rather the Brewdog has a poor employee relations reputation and a very mixed public image due to some ill thought out publicity stunts.

Brewdog beers are expensive but then so is everything else at Lords. I do have tickets for the England v India Test in July 2025 at the ground but, even though Lords is the only cricket stadium in the world where you can bring a small amount of your own beer in (it carries its own insurance) I no longer drink at cricket matches. Given the cost of tickets I prefer to watch sober.

Finally Lords may have missed that James Watt the figure most associated with Brewdog, who recently stepped down as CEO, has welcomed on his LinkedIn the appointment of Elon Musk to Trump’s Dept of Government Efficiencies.

Let the innovations and efficiencies at Lords begin…

In 1902-03 Lenin paid the first of several visits to London on this occasion with his wife Krupskaya. He lodged just off Kings Cross Rd in Islington and spent much time consulting books in the old Round Reading Room of the British Museum. His studies led to the book Materialism and Empiro Criticism.

However Lenin also liked to get out and about- he stayed in London for a year- and as Krupskaya revealed in a later memoir enjoyed trips to Primrose Hill in North London on the bus. They normally rode on the top deck observing London life and people something you can still do today if your knees are up to getting up the stairs (mine are-just)

We were in the habit of going for rambles in the suburbs too. More often than not we went to Primrose Hill. It was the cheapest trip – the fare only costing sixpence. The hill commanded a view of almost the whole of London – a vast smoke-wreathed wilderness of houses. From here we took long walks into the parks and country lanes. Another reason we liked going to Primrose Hill was because it was near the cemetery where Karl Marx was buried. We used to go there.

London 1902-1903 Krupskaya

For more detail on Lenin in London see Bob Henderson’s recent London Socialist Historians Seminar:

The Campaign for Real Ale has discovered a further consequence of the decision of global brewer Carlsberg’s decision to close Banks’s brewery in Wolverhampton next year.

A number of cask beers will simply be ditched. They include beers from Ringwood and Bedford that were originally produced by independent breweries that Carlsberg bought and closed.

As CAMRA notes its the logic of the accountant and the financial bottom line rather than any engagement with Britain’s brewing heritage and customer choice.

Its a reminder too that global big beer remains the most serious threat to beer drinkers not what the Government has or has not done in the Budget

CAMRA statement

https://camra.org.uk/media-centre/press-releases/carlsberg-marstons-brewing-company-plans-to-decimate-consumer-choice-93715

Beers to be ditched

• Banks’s Mild
• Banks’s Sunbeam
• Bombardier (keg)
• Eagle IPA
• Jennings Cumberland Ale
• Mansfield Dark Smooth (keg)
• Mansfield Original Bitter (keg)
• Marston’s Old Empire
• Marston’s 61 Deep
• Ringwood Boondoggle
• Ringwood Old Thumper