Beard Liberation Front sends Follicular Greetings to the 155th TUC
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has sent follicular greetings to the 155th TUC which opened in Liverpool on 10th September.
The campaigners say that a lack of beards on the platform can be concern particularly as the new General Secretary Paul Nowak is follicly challenged. However there is every reason to suppose that he backs a beard friendly TUC where all can appear and dress as appropriate.
This year’s TUC will be key to defend the rights of beard wearers and everyone else in the workplace as another period of attacks by clean shaven Tory suits is underway.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we hope the TUC in Liverpool will stand for Beard Power but most of all for winning respect, dignity and better conditions for all at work
Ever since Nigel Pargetter fell off the roof of Lower Loxley while David Archer looked on it has been known that there is a curse of the Archers. It has struck again this week. Ben refusing a cheque that Sykesy was trying to give him, on appropriate professional grounds, caused him of fall and break his hip. He will not it seems to returning to the Laurels as he needs nursing care. Or to put it another way Jasper Carrot’s short term contract is up.
The Saga of Helen
The Archers long term plan for Helen has been to promote her as a single mother struggling with the exigencies of life. Fair enough although it can seem a bit one-dimensional. At the moment she needs professional help. Here the Archers usually departs from reality. In the real world a long wait would occur as Helen’s situation gets worse. But in Borsetshire there are rarely such delays
Keir meets Roger Scruton
Keir Starmer has been going on about the idyllic countryside in Country Life (the Ambridge Socialist request for an interview has yet to be agreed). In our view he should stop reading Roger Scruton and listen to the Archers
An evening at The Bull
Rooth, Pip and Stella too spent an evening at The Bull on Friday but the fact that Pip and Stella are special friends still seems to elude Roooth. Meanwhile George and Brad were also there. George was up to no good as usual but Brad was rescued by Mia. Perhaps they finally got around to watching Battleship Potemkin which was on their viewing list earlier in the week
A Lark Rise to Candleford, E P Thompson on Rough Music and the Archers
Liz Truss is writing a book about her 49 days as PM due to be published in Spring 2024.
It should either be a pamphlet or if its an attempt by Truss to relaunch here career as a stand up comedian. If so she needs to work on her delivery because it really is the way you tell them.
According to the Heil on Sunday which has a small preview Truss is on about being defeated by left wing economic orthodoxy. A list, not exhaustive, of who this might be is:
President Biden
The Bank of England
The IMF
Tony Blair
Gordon Brown
New Labour generally
Simon Case (Cabinet Secretary with beard)
Greta Thunberg
Just Stop Oil
Truss made an anniversary speech on Monday 18th September and added some more to the list:
The bond markets
The Office for Budget Responsibility
The BBC
Mark Carney
International economic bodies
Institutional bureacracy(civil servants)
The Occupy Movement
Academic Institutions and Think-Tanks
Woke Diversity Policies
The left economist James Meadway is right to argue that a left-wing Government seeking to change the status quo would face some at least of the same obstacles (leaving aside those Truss has just entirely made up). Hopefully it would be understood as a political challenge to be grappled with politically with a mobilisation of unions and campaigns behind it. I’ll post further on this
Boris Johnson has been given an honorary degree in Lviv, probably one of the few places in Europe that he would not also facing booing and potentially arrest.
The degree was labelled Honoris Causa meaning for nothing in particular. However the mere fact that Johnson was honoured suggests that it was for lying or dissembling a subject in which he is a world expert.
Beard Liberation Front to investigate Michael Rosen beard trimming incident
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has announced an investigation into an incident where a previous Beard of the Year, author and Arsenal fan Michael Rosen, posted on X that he had trimmed his beard without BLF permission.
The post provoked calls for Michael Rosen’s eligibility for Beard of the Year 2024 to be reviewed. Guidelines for the Award are clear in that those shortlisted must have worn a beard throughout the calendar year.
It is unclear if the trimming has in this case taken Michael Rosen’s follicles below the Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western stubble test.
However given the hot weather across much of the UK in early September the BLF has issued a general permit for beard trimming provided that the parameters set by Karl Marx in Algiers in 1882 are met.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we take a relaxed view of facial hair but it can be a problem if trimming gets out of hand.
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said Celebrity Masterchef winner Wynne Evans will feature on the Beard of Autumn shortlist when it is announced at the start of October.
The campaigners say that Wynne demonstrated the close link between beard power and excellent cooking.
While his facial hair doesn’t always pass the Clint Eastwood Sphagetti Western stubble test for the seasonal beard awards requirements are more relaxed than they are for Beard of the Year in December
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, Wynne is an excellent champion of beard friendly cooking
The comedian and impressionist Mike Yarwood who has died at 82 was known amongst other things in the 1960s and 1970s for doing impressions of Labour leader and Prime Minister (1964-70; 1974-76). He appeared with Wilson’s trademark pipe (he preferred cigars the pipe was a proletarian prop) and spoke Wilson.
One catchphrase was ‘to be perfectly frank, honest and reasonable’. History has been relatively kind to Wilson but this is not exactly how many who were active socialists at the time might recall him.
Wilson sometimes said that Yarwood did a better impression of him that he did himself but took it in good part enjoying humorous repartee, at least in public.
Perhaps those who don’t remember either Wilson and Yarwood might ponder the subject of Starmer and the comic
The connection between smashing windows & the Stones Hackney Diamonds
The Rolling Stones launched their first record of new songs for many years at the Hackney Empire on Wednesday. The Stones have no obvious connection with Hackney being a West London band with Dartford roots.
Hackney Diamonds is London slang for smashing windows and there is certainly a lot of history to that, a small part of it perhaps Hackney related.
I have researched the history of the modern riot [i.e since 1760] for several years and have published and spoken on some of my findings.
There remains much work to be done, in particular in examining how the riot, mostly held by historians to belong to pre and early industrial times, is still very much with us in 2023. It is a form of protest and social dislocation that does not appear to want to be consigned to the history books.
A sideline of the research led me to look at the issue of glass and windows.
Reading the Chartist paper the Northern Star for the year of revolutions, 1848 it is clear that one key determinant of whether a street protest or demonstration had any of the characteristics of a riot was whether or not any windows happened to be broken during the process.
The same criteria are used to determine the modern riot, although here arson plays a greater role in the assessment of whether a riot has taken place.
It would seem that glass and glaziers have an important if little remarked on role in riots. Indeed there is even a parable about the general question.
The role of glass in the development of capitalism cannot be overestimated.
The change to industrial production techniques and methods allowed for the mass production of glass and meant that things like the many thousands of glass panels that were a feature of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in 1851- in fact sixteen acres worth of glass- were possible.
Yet the production of glass remained a matter ultimately not for machinery but for skilled labour and there was a great shortage of it at the key glass factories of Robert Chance & brother William in Birmingham [Smethwick 1838] and Pilkingtons in the north-west. Indeed Chance recruited skilled workers from the rest of Europe.
In fact glass was possibly the ultimate nineteenth century hand based technology mass production industry and this was boosted very significantly by the removal of Excise Duty in 1845.
The conditions in the new glass factories were symbolic of Victorian capitalism- even if Chance did see himself as an employer in the Owenite mould. So much so in fact that Marx focused on glass production as evidence of the ‘one-sideness’ of labour in capitalist production, alienated from the products of its labour. Elsewhere in Capital Marx refers to a symbolic figure of the ‘glass-capitalist’. Perhaps not surprisingly Raphael Samuel in his survey of Victorian industry, the Workshop of the World notes that the glass industry was heavily unionised
The language of glass breaking is perhaps central to the early Victorian riot but we know rather little about it. We have no means of knowing for example who most of the rioters who smashed glass were, and why exactly they did. Nor do we know, as Isobel Armstrong notes in her book Victorian Glassworlds [2007] whether the worlds of glass breakers and glass makers ever overlapped. However the connection was and remains an intriguing one.
William Chance one of the two brothers who ran the Smethwick glass works referred to above twice helped to precipitate a virtual festival of major glass breaking.
In 1830 when Chance was High Bailiff of Birmingham he instigated a visit to the City of Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel, as Armstrong notes both when then ‘at the height of their unpopularity’. She goes on to report that ‘the pair..were shipped up the canal to view the Chance works at Smethwick to the sounds of a hostile crowd’.
In the evening Chance held a banquet for the men in the centre of Birmingham, excluding those middle class elements in the City who backed reform. An angry crowd formed again, and glass was smashed.
In 1839 Chance by now a Magistrate tried to ban Chartist meeting at the Bull Ring [William Chance was an Anglican not a Quaker like his brother and so able to participate in official political life]on July 4th 1839. Chance turned to 60 Metropolitan police officers specially imported for the occasion from London. The result was two weeks of riots. These culminated on July 15 1839 when Armstrong recounts ‘from Moor Street to about a hundred yards beyond New Street there was scarcely a pane of glass left entire’.
Wellington it seems cared about windows. He had cared enough about the windows of the north front of Apsley House at the bottom of Hyde Park to have had them redesigned by Thomas Liddell in 1829. Yet his windows were broken three times in 1831 on 27 April in early October and again on 12 October.
Isobel Armstrong’s well researched and informative work on Victorian glass is the only modern work on the subject. While it contains a chapter about Chartism and riots it does not pursue the research agendas outlined in my opening lines here.
So, this is work in progress and comments are welcome
Given that most significant ‘moderate’ Tories were purged by Johnson and are no longer in Parliament, the battle is on for the leadership of the Tory right if as is likely the Tories lose the next Election.
Conservative Home has polled Tory members and the results have some interest, allowing for the point that these are some of the people who elected Truss.
Positive ratings
Badenoch 59%
Mordaunt 47.5%
Cleverley 44%
Braverman 21%
Keegan 10%
Negative Ratings
Sunak
Gove
Hunt
Shapps
Bottom of the poll
Jenrik
Press TAB five times to redirect to the Accessibility page.
Beard Campaigners back trimming as hottest day of the year forecast
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has backed beard trimming, as the Met Office forecasts the hottest day of 2023 on Saturday with temperatures in some areas over 30C.
The campaigners say that while facial hair can protect against the sun, a full organic beard is likely to be uncomfortable particularly, as it typically the case in urban areas, high humidity accompanies high air temperatures.
It is possible to cool the beard by using hand held fans, visiting air-conditioned offices and shops and also by briefly immersing it in chilled beer or lager but during a heatwave a prudent trim of the beard may be the best way for the hirsute to cope
There is precedent for beard trimming.
While in Algiers in 1882 ,towards the end of his life, Marx wrote to Engels that he’d had his ‘prophet’s beard’ shaved. A photo of a comparatively clean-shaven Marx however is believed to be a mock-up rather than an actual picture.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, of course we’re not the beard police and some may prefer to keep their beards ‘as is’. However in very hot weather it is certainly permissible to trim the beard a little.
