Kmflett's Blog

Beard Liberation Front  8^th March

contact Keith Flett      07803 167266

Snow & Ice Guidelines for beard wearers. Act to prevent frozen follicles

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has issued updated guidelines to beard wearers after many areas of the UK have snowy and icy conditions for the next few days.

The BLF says that while beards have been protecting against cold weather since 1854 it is also important to protect the beard itself against snow and ice penetration.

One way to do this may simply be to remain indoors and away from all possible contact with snow and ice.

However this is not possible for all including many workers and those who venture out for essential reasons.

When venturing out in the ice and snow, the following guidelines for beard wearers are advised-

Snow and Ice Guidelines for Beard Wearers

1] Protect the entire beard with a scarf or roll neck jumper. If snow is heavy a snood is advised.

2] Sweep any drifting snow from the beard on a regular basis. Do not allow snow to accumulate in the beard under any circumstances.

3] Comb the beard through regularly to remove any residual snow

4] If the beard becomes chilled or frozen due to snowy or icy weather it is essential to thaw it out slowly.

5] When temperatures drop below zero freezing follicles can be a significant issue

6] If follicles do freeze or develop icicles these should be thawed slowly as quickly as possible

5] Brief immersion in a glass of imperial stout may help the thawing process but this is optional

6] Dry the beard slowly in a warm room and check for any damaged hairs and follicles

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said snow or ice in the beard can cause serious damage to hairs and follicles and the hirsute are urged to make sure they are protected before venturing out in snowy weather. If snow does accumulate in the beard or follicles become frozen it is essential to follow the BLF guidelines to prevent serious damage. In particular if the beard suffers from icing, gradual thawing following the guidelines is equally important to avoid damage.

Beard Liberation Front

8^th March

Gary Lineker on Beard of Spring shortlist as refugee comments give positive image of the hirsute

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that BBC sports commentator Gary Lineker will be on the Beard of Spring shortlist when its announced on 25^th March.

Beard of Spring is the second of four seasonal awards that go towards the Beard of the Year vote in December. Each list contains eight names who have presented a positive public image of the hirsute during the season.

The BLF says that Gary Lineker’s condemnation of Suella Braverman’s  Refugee Bill on 7^th March show exactly the tolerance and humanity that is the best of beard wearers.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said. Gary Lineker has a modest but distinguished beard and his refugee comments underline the gravitas that facial hair can bring to important words

Not cancelling history but remembering it: International Women’s Day, still getting Hidden from History

International Women’s Day 2026 comes not so long before the 60th anniversary of the first women’s liberation conference held at Ruskin College, Oxford.

A key impetus for the conference came from a women’s history strand organised in History Workshop events in the late 1960s. A key figure in that was Sheila Rowbotham who has written a number of important books about women’s history including Hidden From History

If historical memory is not refreshed what is known by activists in one generation can disappear in the next. How many will recall that one of the key figures behind IWD was the German Communist Clara Zetkin. A link below provides a brief summary of a London Socialist Historians Seminar on her writings from 2016

Likewise how well remembered currently is someone like Alexandra Kollontai a pioneering socialist feminist who served in the Bolshevik Government in Russia after 1917.

Much historical work as ever to be done.

The Chartists are coming & so is snow in London

Hurrah for old England and liberty sweet,

The land that we live in and plenty to eat;

We shall ever remember this wonderful day,

The Chartists are coming, get out of the way.

The Chartists are Coming, Ballad, 1848

According to the weather forecast there may be a  chance of snow in London over the next couple of days. The forecasts are made by professional weather forecasters, often trade union members of the professional’s union Prospect, they both deserve to be taken seriously and are highly likely to be accurate.

That said you don’t need a weatherman to tell you that in recent times it has snowed infrequently in the Capital. A northern colleague said to me recently that despite it being the middle of winter if it does actually snow in London it will be headline news.

The inability of perhaps particularly London to cope with even modest amounts of snow is legendary.

The expectation of snow in London is one of the great things of London life nevertheless. People peer anxiously out of windows for signs of snow and search for reports of approaching snow (these days much easier to find with social media). In the mid-nineteenth century London, 170 years ago, when it snowed a lot more than now, it was the Chartists who got people looking out of windows, checking for any sign of impending trouble.

Suffice to say that in the revolutionary year of 1848 the Chartists did indeed come, on April 10th 1848, but actually they were rumoured to be coming far more often than they actually arrived.

Snow and the Chartists two of the great imponderables of London life. Actually quite a lot of Londoners liked and like both of them.

Hard to far right MP Lee Anderson who is currently Deputy Chair of the Tory Party is to host a show on the hard right social media site GB News. He joins Rees Mogg, Philip Davies and Esther McVey as sitting MPs who rather than representing their constituents, for which they are paid £84K a year, prefer to spout their views in the media.

Anderson’s bigoted views often feature on news reports makes an interesting addition to GB News. Earlier this year it stated that all its presenters would undergo OfCom training to make sure they stick to the required framework of balanced commentary and reporting.

This is something GBNews has struggled with and this week OfCom found against former presenter the far right Mark Steyn who had publicised anti-COVID vaccine views that were not only false but not balanced by the point that other views were available.

The meeting of GBNews, Anderson and OfCom will be, er, interesting. Certainly one of the Culture Wars of 2023

After Suella Braverman, Britain, Europe & a history of solidarity with refugees

After Suella Braverman’s latest hard right rant on refugees and her likely unlawful plans to further demonise them I was looking through E P Thompson’s Peculiarities of the English for quite other reasons and came across the passage below which has interest in the context of 2023.

It’s an argument about why Britain is not an exception to the rest of Europe (a debate he was having with Perry Anderson and the late Tom Nairn) and why links existed both in the realm of ideas and in practical solidarities of fighting fascism and welcoming refugees.

Certainly a message for our times from European history and yet more British history the Tories would prefer to avoid thinking about.

Here is this island, and there, across a few wet miles, are Other Countries. Those waters have, on occasion, been crossed. That city, London, is not in the Antarctic but has been, alongside Paris, Vienna and Prague, a great European capital. In its East End there have been deposit after deposit of refugee and immigrant workers. In the universities there have been deposit after deposit of émigré intellectuals. Across that water there came, in the 1930s, wave after wave of refugees from Fascism; across that water there went, in the early 1940s, wave after wave of troops to assist in the liberation of Southern and Western Europe; and across that water there came, in the later 1940s and 1950s, a further wave of refugees from Eastern Europe.

Peculiarities of the English, 1965

Beard Liberation Front

PRESS RELEASE 7th March Keith Flett 07803 167266

BRITISH PIE WEEK POLL FOR THE CLASSIC BEARD FRIENDLY PIE OF 2023

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that with British Pie Week running from 6-12th March its annual poll on the most Beard Friendly Pie is open.

The hirsute campaign group say that as with many prepared foods the requirements of people with beards are often overlooked when it comes to pies. The outcome of the annual poll often reflects that, with traditional pies designed for eating ‘on the go’ easily beating leading pie brands.

The BLF says that common issues with pies for those with beards are:

Excessive gravy

Puff or flaky pastry which ends up in the beard not the mouth

‘Deep filling’ making it difficult to avoid contact of the pie with the beard

The campaigners cite some types of the traditional steak and kidney pie as an example of pies which are made without thought for the requirements of the hirsute pie consumer. Such pies often have excessive gravy- and comparatively little steak and kidney- which ends up in the beard.

Unfortunately the same issues tend to apply to many vegetarian and vegan pies too

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, once again this year we’ve decided to have a narrower focus on the absolute classic beard friendly pie

Steak/Seitan & Ale

Fish

Butter/Cheese & Onion

Pork

Recording of Merilyn Moos Socialist History Seminar, Living With Shadows, Memoir of daughter of German Anti-Nazi activists

Merilyn Moos spoke to the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research on March 6^th   (organised by the London Socialist Historians Group) about her recent memoir Living With Shadows

Merilyn is the daughter of German Anti-Nazi activists. Her father Siegfried fled Germany on the night of the Reichstag fire and James Maxton the Labour MP secured him entry to Britain. He was a leading Berlin Communist who went on to lecture in economics and in the 1960s was a special advisor to Harold Wilson.

Her mother Lotte fled to Russia where she met an Irish Communist who was later imprisoned in and died in the Gulag as a supposed Trotskyist.

Merilyn recounted how her parents rarely talked of their past, or of their relatives murdered by the Nazis and warned her off political activity.

Notwithstanding this Merilyn went on to become a leading rank and file activist in the lecturers union (now the UCU) and a lifelong revolutionary socialist.

A powerful history of the present

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/SHm_GvZNBIzNLs4ZkI4jchdSMndIHd1zftdfVVnginOLKRVObdV9czARfd2W0dg.iYQ3H0KfbWDhq7_M

Cats, socialism & Collective Organisation

Michael Rosen (10th April 2022) had a lovely piece in the Sunday Times magazine about his lifelong relationship with cats. I have rarely in my 66 years been without a feline companion myself. Rosen swerves the issue of the politics of cats, though most of those I’ve known have been Anarcho-Syndicalists.

However cats can sometimes be socialists in the sense that they often plan to share a catch- mice or a bird-with their people. At other times they can be iconoclastic. Even so there have been strong links between the left and cats.

The IWW had a wild cat* as their symbol and the Post Office HQ at St Martin’s Le Grand in central London employed cats to catch mice with a carefully negotiated feeding to mice caught agreement.

Engels claimed his cat Tidlums was the terror of Regents Park Rd

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn caused a mild media ripple when he revealed to the Independent that his black and white cat does not have a name but is addressed simply as El Gato. More recently further ripples were caused when the Daily Mail reported that he named a cat he had in the 1970s Harold Wilson

There is a picture of the late British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm with his cat. Perhaps there is something about Marxist historians and cats as E P Thompson also had one:

Such pictures appear to suggest a missing link between cats and socialism

If you were looking for a conspiracy, while Lenin was a cat lover there is no record that it had a name either (no, it was not Joe). However that is most probably due to a failure in cat history rather than anything else.

Not all politicians have been cat lovers. There is no record, for example, of a cat in Tony Benn’s Diaries except an entry where he notes he was given a ‘black woolly’ cat to hold for a photo shot.

Harold Wilson by contrast brought his own cat into Downing St when he became Prime Minister, while Churchill patriotically named his Nelson.

The New Labour period, perhaps inevitably, was beset by cat controversy. It was thought Cherie Blair didn’t like cats much and in November 1997 Alistair Campbell announced that the veteran Downing St cat Humphrey had gone to a quiet suburban location. Journalists inquired whether this was code for ‘cemetery’ and photos had to be produced of Humphrey happily in retirement..

We should however be cautious about assuming an automatic link between cats and any particular trend on the left, Rosa Luxemburg described what happened when her cat Mimi met Lenin:

“She also flirted with him, rolled on her back and behaved enticingly toward him,” Luxemburg writes. “But when he tried to approach her she whacked him with a paw and snarled like a tiger.”

Some names of Politician’s cats

Engels- Tidlums

Lenin- cat no known name

Churchill- Nelson

Wilson- nemo (Siamese)

Corbyn Harold Wilson; El Gato

Blair- Humphrey (until Nov 25 1997)

Thatcher Marvin (2007)

Rosa Luxemburg, Mimi

• Thanks to Steve Cushion for the reference