Kmflett's Blog

The England and Wales Cricket Board have revealed viewing figures for the Womens and Mens Hundred competition 2024 as part of details a further cricket broadcasting deal.

The headline good news is that Test Match Special retains UK rights for all England Womens and Mens international games (all formats) until 2028.

The BBC has not met the ECB’s asking price to show a handful of Womens and Mens T20 live and Channel 4 and ITV are not interested either. That means all live cricket will revert to Sky in the UK. Given the viewing figures for the Hundred (below) Comcast who own Sky are no doubt overjoyed.

Their subscription audience for cricket is likely mostly grumpy old men (hello there..) who like Tests and like less short form matches and in particular the shortest form of them- The Hundred.

Unfortunately the BBC has retained rights to show 15 live Hundred games split between the Womens and Mens game

Of course this is all rather one-dimensional. On many days (at one hour or another) the cricket fan can check TNT or other channels for international matches (all formats) being played around the globe as well as at least some of the twenty T20 and T10 franchises operating

viewing figures for the Hundred dropped by more than a quarter this summer, although they held up ­better on the BBC than on Sky Sports despite ­clashing with the Paris ­Olympics, which convinced executives in ­Salford to stick with the ­competition. ­Audiences for the ­women’s ­Hundred fell by 41% on Sky compared with 2023, with a 28% decline for the men’s ­competition, while on the BBC the men were down 25%, with the women’s figures ­dropping by just 2%.

Guardian 29th October 2024

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/oct/29/cricket-england-ecb-fails-to-agree-free-tv-deal

100 years of Labour Budgets. Will Rachel Reeves revive the ‘Free Breakfast Table’ of 1924

The first Labour Government which took office on 22^nd January 1924 was not in Government long enough to achieve much of significance, even if it had intended to, which is not evident from the historical record.

One achievement however was the promotion of the Free Breakfast Table. This didn’t mean free breakfasts but rather the reduction of taxes on items that were thought to be essential parts of it and in particular the working class breakfast.

In his Budget in late April 1924 Labour Chancellor Philip Snowden cut taxes.

Sugar duty was cut, taxes on tea were halved and there were also cuts in the cost of coffee, chicory, cocoa and dried fruits (mainly prunes).

The demand for a free breakfast table had originated with the Liberals in the 1860s and became an important part of their programme. Snowden was a member of the Independent Labour Party but had been bought up with Liberal politics in Halifax and, like Rachel Reeves, was an orthodox Treasury Chancellor.

The Free Breakfast Table was a nod to what Snowden termed the Housewives Budget. He was clearly rather better at comms than the present Government as published a pamphlet to underline the focus of his Budget (which otherwise did very little)

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

With Erik ten Hag despatched as Manchester United manager the BBC published an interesting stat on how much each manager spent on players over the last 10 years or so.

It might be thought that Moyes was relatively frugal but his tenure was also relatively short.

Otherwise its a tale of ever bigger money but not particularly ever better results.

Its nothing new but it underlines how football at this level is arguably more business than sport

Hard to far right Tory leadership contender Robert Jenrick has written in the Mail (where else, particularly on the 100th anniversary of the Zinoviev Letter) about reparations. He of course is against them and sees British colonialism as a good thing because it brought Christian values to what became the British Empire. The fact that many of the inhabitants that Britain ruled followed other religions or none at all, seems to have passed Jenrick by. Perhaps he is too ignorant to know.

He does admit that there were ‘crimes’ associated with colonialism but is too busy celebrating it to say what they might have been.

Finally he looks at where the demand for reparations is coming from. It seems they

seeped into our national debate through universities overrun by leftists peddling pseudo-Marxist gibberish to impressionable undergraduates”.

Is Jenrick the new Liz Truss?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/oct/29/former-british-colonies-owe-debt-of-gratitude-robert-jenrick-reparations

Times 28th October 2024

failure is no success at all (Dylan). However down with imperial preference. Pakistan were by far the better side in two out of three Tests. That is a significant positive for global cricket

The 1924 General Election took place 100 years ago this week.

Labour led by Ramsay MacDonald had formed a minority administration in January 1924 but the Liberals called a vote of no confidence in early October 1924 which Labour lost. A General Election took place on 29th October. The Tories won easily, taking seats primarily from the Liberals who ended up with 40 seats. They did not recover a significant Parliamentary presence until recent decades.

Labour also lost seats but still held 151.

A feature of the campaign was the Zinoviev letter, allegedly written by the Chair of the Third International outlining Communist plans for Britain and Labour. The letter was a forgery probably constructed by Russian anti-Bolsheviks. They were likely concerned that Labour was prepared to do business with the Bolshevik Government which the Tories were not. Labour of course was not pro-Bolshevik simply pragmatic.

The forgery was promoted by the Tories and the Daily Mail and possibly facilitated by the security services. A political conspiracy- all concerned were anti-Bolshevik and well disposed to anything that could promote that.

The actual impact of the letter was probably not as great as sometimes thought, Labour’s fairly modest losses being due to other issues.

On 27th October Ramsay MacDonald who sat for Aberavon spoke on Cardiff about the ZInoviev letter. One hundred years on Labour leaders still struggle with a hostile media it seems and still struggle with the reality that standing on the grounds of a right-wing political agenda makes it more difficult to deal with media scare tactics.

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

28th October

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that while the sacking of Erik ten Hag as manager of Manchester United is to be regretted it is also understandable.

ten Hag was unusual in bringing his hirsute Managerial skills to Manchester United who had not had a hirsute manager going as far back as David Moyes, although Jose Mourinho sometimes had stubble when he forgot to shave.

The campaigners say that for this reason Manchester United did not fully appreciate what ten Hag’s beard brought to football management. There was a mismatch

At the same time ten Hag himself often appeared to fail to fully grasp the dialectic of hirsute football management. His beard did not appear to motivate players in a way that Gareth Southgate’s beard was able to do on occasion.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, its a matter of regret that one of the most distinctive beards in British football management is departing. We hope some lessons on Beard Power in the technical area will be learnt

Critical Beer Writing

I don’t write about beer as such. I leave that to those (few) who try to make some sort of living out of it. I remain gainfully employed elsewhere.

I do however write about beer history and politics for Culture Matters, which is not quite the same genre.

Matthew Curtis has written a useful piece querying why there is no real independent writing about beer, in the way there is about wine or restaurants. You can, for example, read Jay Rayner’s restaurant reviews with the knowledge that while of course he has personal preferences, he will praise the good and call out the not so good.

Of course beer writing does call out the not so good  but this is almost always at the level of breweries. Global Big Beer and its products comes in, rightly, for a lot of criticism, as do some just about independents such as Brewdog.

Matthew’s point though is more about individual beers from generally respected breweries.

As he notes often given the times they can be in difficult circumstances and criticism may not help.

As a parallel I used to review (mainly socialist history) books for left-wing publications. I do that less now because I can just post something on my blog which may well get more readers.

However when I was reviewing the general policy was clear. Space was limited and if a book wasn’t up to much it was best ignored. Far better to review and draw to the attention of readers good books that they might enjoy reading.

Again as Matthew notes in beer there is space for that. Adrian Tierney Jones beer of the week in the Daily Star flags up new beers that readers may be unaware of and might well enjoy. Given the space available it would hardly make sense to review a beer and conclude by saying it should be avoided.

That said Matthew has a point that developing a tradition of independent and critical beer writing would be a useful development. I’d venture that this would need a sponsoring publication- 50 years ago the Guardian published Boston on Beer weekly- or someone who either earned the living elsewhere or had independent means.

Let’s hope something does happen..

On Criticism in Beer Writing — TOTAL ALES

Boak and Bailey have also commented. I agree with most of the points but the idea (for example) of a new Richard Boston (a concerning idea perhaps!) is that a regular column about beer written critically in i.e. the Guardian (or at least on their website) would reach people who think good beer is Brewdog or Beavertown.

Pete Brown’s blog that word of mouth works well is a very good point btw

Dorothy Thompson [socialist historian and campaigner, author of The Dignity of Chartism among other works, and Edward’s wife] I also knew quite well. Dorothy and I had a very interesting relationship; we used to go to a secondary school in Marleybone, Quintin Kynaston School, which had an annual “balloon debate” where you had to go into “the balloon” playing a particular character, and then would vote on who would be “thrown out” and who would “survive” to the end.

I was there being Karl Marx, and Dorothy was there playing Queen Victoria. She was absolutely brilliant at being Queen Victoria and managed to create a sort of almost feminist narrative around Queen Victoria’s life. At one point we got into a sort of repartee, and she was saying: “Mr Marx, you don’t even want my head to be on my shoulders,” and I was just saying: “Your Majesty — no, I’m not calling you ‘Your Majesty,’ you’re just a person; you’re Mrs Saxe-Coburg-Gotha!” It became a big joke, the whole thing, and we got on really well. She was actually brilliant at bringing out Queen Victoria in the role of the monarch during all the social movements of the nineteenth century; she would say things like: “I suppose, Mr Marx, you support the Chartists?!”

Jacobin interview with Jeremy Corbyn 2nd February 2024

https://jacobin.com/2024/02/historian-e-p-thompson-palestine-cnd#:~:text=This%20week%20marked%20the%20100th%20birthday%20of%20E.%20P.%20Thompson,