The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has praised the 155th TUC held at Liverpool as the most beard friendly of the modern era.
In recent times the BLF has made a Beard of Congress Award. However no Award will be made in 2023 because there are just too many beards to reasonably judge which has made the most positive impact.
The campaigners say that the increase in beards is also reflected in a welcome increase in diversity of delegates ranging from gender and ethnicity to age.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, the TUC in 2023 looked a great deal like the trade union members delegates were representing. Some with beards, some not, but positive in diversity as the modern organised workplace should be
A Culture War has started over Avocado’s supposed to be a popular fruit with millenials often on toast.
The Telegraph published an article on 19th August 2023 which covered reasons why eating avocado with or without toast was not prudent. With growing demand production in the South Americas has been reportedly partly controlled by gangs and areas of land raised for avocado growing. This requires large amounts of water and then of course there are the air miles.
The Telegraph notes ‘we must reluctantly enter the divisive and somewhat baffling world of the culture wars. Millenials are renowned for their political activism, but a rigid devotion to social justice and a fancy for avocado on toast (which can set you back around £14 at some cafes) is not entirely compatible’
There are of course numerous recipes involving avocado on the Telegraph site. Culture Wars apply to other people.
The avocado culture war has now turned into a class war however.
Tim Gurner is an Australian property developer who became well known for attacking millenials eating avocado on toast. He argued that spending money on such an item meant they would not been able to afford a property. He was ridiculed on the basis that money saved by abstaining from avocado eating would do nothing to help anyone afford his very expensive properties.
Gurner is back this time arguing that the pandemic has made workers arrogant and that unemployment needs to rise by 40-50% to address this.
Clearly Culture Wars and Class Wars are related particularly when it comes to avocados
Update
Gurney has apologised for his job cut comments but nothing so far on avocados
Update Two
Apparently unknown to the Telegraph there has been a new development which side steps the Avocado Culture by replacing it with peas. Peas on toast with feta or nudja are where the Wokies are now at.
Campaigners mark 9 years since Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour Leader
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers welcomed the Age of the Beard when Jeremy Corbyn was first elected Labour leader on 12th September 2015
Jeremy Corbyn has won the Parliamentary Beard of the Year Award a record number of times and was the winner of the original award in 2001. While his beard may be a little more restrained these days, it has been a consistent presence on the Parliamentary benches for over 40 years and remains so after the July 4th Election despite the best efforts of clean shaven revisionist Labour to defeat him.
The campaigners say that Corbyn faced many comments about his beard and informal appearance during the Leadership campaign but his victory underlined the growing disenchantment that there was and still is with clean shaven politicians in suits
BLF organiser Keith Flett said, we hoped that Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader would herald a more Beard Friendly Britain where how people dress and appear was less important than what they say and what they do. Nine years on clean shaven reaction is back but our fight to free the follicles goes on.
Despite the best efforts of the GMB union it seems like all Wilko stores will close with the loss of 12,500 jobs.
The impact will be significant. People will lose jobs in a cost of living crisis and communities will lose another well used high street shop.
Labour leader Keir Starmer recognised the point on social media arguing that a Labour Government will give people hope for the future. One may be sceptical given Rachel ‘fiscal’ Reeves statements but there is still a contrast with Rishi Sunak who said precisely nothing. The richest MP in Parliament is no doubt unfamiliar with shops like Wilko.
There is a strong echo of the Tory 1980s when the Thatcher Government saw industries like coal and steel decimated, jobs lost and communities devastated. The price is still being paid- by working people not the Tories mates.
But there is a further angle. One reason why Wilko is closing is that the law prioritises the financial interests of creditors and suppliers over those of workers and communities. New Labour originally planned to level this playing field but didn’t. It still needs levelling.
The Stonegate Pub group is planning to hike beer prices by 20p a pint in some of its pubs at busy times.
While the right-wing media often blames wages for inflation, beer prices are part of the ONS basket which determines the figure so perhaps its no surprise that the figure remains high.
In reality the price hike is another example of greedflation. When a pub is busy more beer, other drinks and food is being sold and more profits are being made. A 20p a pint price hike will mean more profit.
Of course in a cost of living crisis many pubs are struggling but Stonegate is a huge pub group that doesn’t fit that.
Its more than time for the return of the Assize of Ale, where the price and quality of beer was checked by ale tasters. Transgressors were subject to legal sanction in times, the eighteenth century, when beer was more of an essential part of the daily diet than it is now. Even so there is a moral code involved, where prices and profits should be seen to be fair. Stonegate is missing the mark.
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has expressed concerns that Keir Starmer is promoting a return to clean shaven revisionism in the Labour Party.
One of the founding principles of the BLF almost 30 years ago was opposition to Blairite clean shaven revisionism.
Tony Blair never had a beard but he did tolerate leading beard wearers such as David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, Robin Cook and Frank Dobson in his Cabinets
By contrast Starmer’s latest Shadow Cabinet is nearly bereft of follicles.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, the picture of Keir Starmer on the front of the agenda for the 2023 Labour Conference shows him as aggressively clean shaven. It’s not a vote winner, any more than it was for Blair which is why he co-existed with the hirsute.
Engels & the search for Pilsner beer at the seaside
Both Marx and Engels were Pilsener drinkers but Engels in particular sought the beer out wherever he was staying.
In August 1884 he stayed with other members of his extended family at 48 Marine Parade Worthing, having had to switch lodgings because the previous landlady had banned him from smoking (cigars)
He wrote to Laura Lafargue on 6th August 1884 that there was ‘No Lager Beer as yet, but Percy is hunting some up in Brighton’
On 11th August 1884 he wrote to Paul Lafargue ‘our stock of Pilsener is almost exhausted and take two days from Brighton to be replenished. We are really out in the wilds here’.
A year earlier in August 1883 staying in what was his favourite seaside location in later years, Eastbourne, supplies of Pilsener had not proved a problem. He wrote to Laura Lafargue on 19th August 1883 ‘Pilsener beer is flourishing and even better than in London’.
Two years later Engels was in Jersey and wrote to Kautsky on 16th August 1885 that ‘a supply of Pilsener beer has been discovered and rapidly consumed’.
However Engels discovered while in Bridlington in 1881 (July 29th to Marx) that the Bitter Ale in the café on the pier was ‘excellent and has a head on it just like German beer’. The reference is to beer poured with a very large head often half of a glass of beer.
Engels often intimates that in order to do serious work having Pilsener to hand was essential. One wonders if he was familiar with the folk song John Barleycorn
The Tories meet in Manchester over the next few days. Reports suggest few Tory MPs will attend. Most of those present will be media and lobbyists with a smattering of hardcore members
During the summer recess the Tories ran a series of weekly campaigns on issues like asylum seekers and crime. All ended up causing at least as many problems for the Tories as they did for the opposition.
The Tories remain around 20% behind Labour in the polls and are badly split. Nadine Dorries resignation letter to Sunak was partly farcical but partly sharp in pointing to numerous Tory policy failures.
Meanwhile Suella Braverman on the hard right of the Tories has renewed calls for Britain to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. There is an issue with this however. She is the Home Secretary in a Government that does not at the moment support that.
In 2005 Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote a book arguing that the Tory Party had reached the end of its historic existence. As the years since 2010 have unfortunately demonstrated he was wrong. However in a recent Guardian article he has returned to the point, arguably more persuasively.
The Tories as a party representing ruling class interests have been ‘shapeshifters’ pragmatically shifting positions and policies to fit the demands of the moment. So the Tories resisted demands for an extension to the vote with force at Peterloo in 1819 and in Parliament with the 1832 Reform Act. However in 1867 they passed a further Act extending the suffrage.
Likewise they were the party of the landed aristocracy but in 1846/7 repealed the Corn Laws because this was in the interest of the rising industrial manufacturing class. In much more recent times Tory leader Edward Heath took Britain into was is now the EU in the early 1970s. 50 years on the Tories are focused on Brexit and staying out of the EU.
The problem they have is that beyond making money for their mates and sometimes themselves they no longer have a coherent view of what ruling class politics which can also win elections is. There have been five Tory leaders since 2015 each seemingly more incompetent than the last.
Boris Johnson personifies the crisis. He was not a supporter of Brexit and notoriously only became so not out of some great principle or understanding of ruling class interests but because it served his personal ambition to be Prime Minister.
However I don’t agree with Wheatcroft that it is certain that the Tory Party is finished as an absolute certainty.
There are several factors which might see it survive in some form.
The first is Labour. Despite huge majorities in 1997 and 2001 Blair while tinkering with reforms determined that his real focus was illegal wars. Then in the financial crash of 2008 Gordon Brown decided that the key thing was to save the market economy and in doing so ushered in an era of austerity. Unsurprisingly Labour votes declined significantly and the Tories who had looked finished made a return
Starmer of course has his own variant on this. If the Tories are busy making themselves redundant then perhaps the way forward is to move Labour into that space. His own version of the Great Moving Right Show. So hapless are the Tories at the moment that this strategy might work, if only briefly.
The Tories however might shapeshift again and move themselves further to the right still, around the racist politics of Suella Braverman, Lee Anderson and others. Nigel Farage and the Reform Party while a minority have the capacity perhaps to mobilise votes around such a grouping. When one looks at Governments across Europe and beyond there is clearly a trend here too
This post originally appeared in the Morning Star
Update
While the Tories political direction is not yet fully clear the Manchester conference is suggesting some pointers. Sunak stands alone fighting a self declared war on motorists and opening a pot holes hotline. The right is split between the New Conservatives Culture War promoters and Trussites. Its a reflection of the state of the Tory Party that Truss’s fringe speech at the Conference on Monday was packed out. It contained the usual range of ideas not actually rooted in reality but significantly in the front row was to be found perpetual political grifter Nigel Farage. Truss was introduced by an operative from GBNews.
The Guardian says she has support from 60 Tory MPs. She is unlikely to be Tory leader again but the likely contenders such as Braverman and Badenoch are both in favour of Britain withdrawing from the ECHR and attacking refugees.
Somewhere in there is scope for a political recongifuration on the hard right mirroring developments across the rest of Europe. Opposing it rather than joining in the Great Moving Right Show is essential.
There is speculation that after an election defeat Farage could emerge as the leader of a reconstituted hard to far right Tory Party. Perhaps but that would also mean the end of the existing Tory Party with various strands of ruling class strategies within it
Michael Rosen’s Beard Trimming found to have passed Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western Stubble Test
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has completed an investigation into a recent beard trim by author and Arsenal fan Michael Rosen and found that it complied with BLF trimming guidelines.
Michael Rosen will remain a potential candidate for Beard of the Year in December 2023. He is a former winner of the coveted award.
The BLF received complaints after Rosen posted on X that he had trimmed his beard without making it clear whether or not he had followed appropriate guidelines.
An investigation has established that the trimming passed the generally accepted Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western stubble test which draws the line between stubble and proto-beards.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, beard trimming needs to be done prudently but in this case we are pleased to announce that BLF guidelines were met
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that a consultative poll on whether it should run a Beard of the Ruby World Cup vote has concluded with a positive majority albeit on a low turnout.
However without financial support to run a video review team at Stockley Park the BLF has to keep in mind the resources available plus the need to filter out partisanrugby suggestions from supporters of particular sides.
The Rugby World Cup has four groups of five teams meaning a potential of 300 plus players to be potentially reviewed.
However as in past rugby votes the game is a collective one. While there may be moments of individual brilliance it is the team effort, and in the case of the BLF the beard power of the team effort that counts.
Suggestions for the team with the most Beard Power are welcome and an initial view will be taken after all teams have played two games
