I’m not a conspiracy theorist and in fact there is no conspiracy here but rather a lack of really useful knowledge in the public domain about organisations that are based in or meet at 55 Tufton St in central London. The four storey building is reasonably close both to Parliament and to the political operations of the news media.
Wikipedia has a decent summary and during the year the New Statesman published a map
That said people from the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and others continue to appear in the media to give their ‘expert’ views. Who funds them and how they can be held to account is generally obscure.
The fact that they are all on the hard right of politics espousing free market libertarian ideas often doesn’t get a mention but has become rather harder to hide after two leaders of the Bosses Revolutionary Party Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng seized power in Downing St for 44 days in the autumn and all but wrecked the British economy and many people’s lives with it.
No doubt the end of year round ups in the media will look at all this in some detail
Their Christmas Holidays and Ours: Does Christmas still have twelve days?
January 5th is Twelfth Night, in the traditional calendar a festival to rival that of Christmas Day, and January 6th Epiphany. These dates mark the end of the Christmas holiday period.
How far people in work in 2023/24 observe a 12-day holiday or take time off depends on occupation, employer practices and individual circumstances. It may be that some official statistics are collected on the matter- although I’m not aware of them.
Whether time off is extended or otherwise over the Twelve Days has been the subject of employer and class led change.
For example Hutton in Stations of the Sun notes that in 1797 the Customs and Excise Office in London closed for six days between December 21st (St Thomas’s Day) and 6th January (Epiphany). By 1838 it opened on every day except 25th December. Hutton notes that between 1790 and 1840 ‘employers, led by the Government, carried out a ruthless pruning of the Christmas holidays..’ The 1833 Factory Act had decreed that, Sundays aside, the only days when a worker should not attend work were Christmas Day and Good Friday. The 1871 Bank Holiday Act added a few Mondays into the equation as well as St Stephens Day (Boxing Day)
However from the early 1840s, led by Charles Dickens, efforts to reclaim and promote Christmas as a popular festival of harmony and social peace, certainly for the middle classes were well underway. Hutton notes that in 1847 the Poor Law Commission allowed a Christmas dinner in all Workhouses. The modern Christmas was under development.
The point being that time taken off work at Christmas (or not) although dictated to an extent by the 12 days of the traditional calendar has also been about the promotion or denial of people to take time off work.
The modern retail Christmas, as shopworkers union USDAW underlines each year, seems to consist of Christmas Day (if you are lucky).
Others may take time from 24th December to 2nd January, 8 or 9 days but not 12.
However long you do or do not take in 2024 things are guaranteed to be better ordered and regulated if you are in a trade union.
The Tories in 2022: A Band of Warring Brothers & Sisters
The term is from Karl Marx although he didn’t add sisters.
Conservative Home has surveyed 3000 Tory members on their favourite Tory Minister of 2022. When one considers that the total Tory membership is not above 180,000 that is a decent sample.
Top of the poll is Defence Secretary Ben Wallace who Conservative Home says is admired because of his efforts in the Ukrainian War. Wallace, who has managed to serve under three Tory PMs this year without apparently noticing the change, has a key job to act as a messenger boy for the Pentagon. Whether he is able to grasp that is less clear. My sources tell me that within the armed forces he is regarded as a ‘blowhard’
Elsewhere hard to far right Ministers Braverman and Badenoch do well, better than Johnson or Sunak but given that 44 Day Truss got 31 votes one may conclude that the Tory membership is either divorced from the realities of modern Britain or in fact is not really Conservative at all in the sense that the term- Church and King essentially- has had meaning since at least Peterloo in 1819.
In another vote far right dimwit Lee Anderson was voted Tory backbencher of the year with runners up including Rees Mogg and Johnson.
As a socialist I’m no enthusiast for Starmer but the above is a reminder that there are much worse things than an administration run by him.
Christmas Lords of Misrule: How rebellious were they?
Lords of Misrule appear at various times in the traditional calendar but certainly in the twelve days of Christmas after 25th December.
Daisy Dunn has written in The Spectator about them. Her take is that were very largely a bit of ruling class fun and not at all subversive, although she does allow this might have been a possibility
An interesting discussion in correspondence between the US historian Natalie Zemon Davis and the late EP Thompson in 1971/2 can be found in Past and Present May 2017 which threw some further light on the historical origins and purposes of the Lords of Misrule
The piece refers back to an article Davis wrote in Past and Present 50 (1971) the Reasons for Misrule.
Here she argued that the Lords of Misrule elected on 26th December were categorised by age and gender, that is they were young men.
She wrote in a footnote about English examples:
The Lords of Misrule seem to be an example of youth officers..not the Lords of Misrule elected at the Christmas revels at Gray’s Inn or at Court but the ‘wildheads of the parish’ (described in 1585 by Philipp Stubbs in his Anatomie of Abuses) who elect a captain of mischief called ‘my Lord of Misrule’ and who go about with hobby horses and pipers and drummers..’
Was this subversive of the existing order, a real rebellion or a licensed way of ‘letting off steam’ at a time of year when little rural work could be done?
The opening paragraph of Prof Alexandra Walsham’s introduction to the 2017 Past and Present article is below. It makes clear that behaviours that started as attempts to enforce norms of personal behaviour became in some cases transformed into rather more rebellious and subversive activities. Prof Walsham also makes the interesting point elsewhere that we have the exchanges because they took place via the traditional mechanism of the letter. In the twenty-first century the corresponding e-mails of IMs might well not have been kept for posterity.
In 1971 Natalie Zemon Davis published a seminal article in the pages of Past & Present, entitled “The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France”. A study of the carnivalesque rituals of mockery through which communities displayed disapproval of moral and social infractions, the essay opened a revealing window onto the festive customs through which unmarried young men publicly humiliated and regulated the sexual and marital behaviour of their neighbours. It also demonstrated the transmutation of these ludic rites into vehicles for social and political protest in urban environments. A year later, a piece on the English counterpart of charivari, commonly known as rough music or the skimmington ride, appeared in the pages of Annales. Written by Edward Thompson, the leading left-wing historian and founding member of this journal, this too examined the social function of the practice of parading offenders accompanied by cacophonous banging of pots and pans. It illuminated the role of this form of plebeian street theatre in publicizing scandal, compelling compliance with accepted norms, and criticizing unpopular authority figures and underlined its quasi-judicial character. Frequently reprinted and constantly cited, both of these essays have become classics of twentieth-century historical writing. They stand alongside two other equally famous Past & Present articles written by these scholars during the same interval of years: Thompson’s “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” and Davis’s “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France”. Providing compelling new templates for the study of symbolic action and collective behaviour, they are among the most widely read and downloaded essays in the journal’s archive.
What Liz Truss did next: there’s no success like failure
When she resigned as Prime Minister Liz Truss had held the post for the shortest time of any occupant of No.10. At 47 she is also the youngest ex-PM since 1828.
Accounts are now appearing of her crazed 44 days. In some European countries she would likely be facing a criminal investigation for what she and her ideological allies got up to. Not in Britain. Indeed an apologia is not on the cards at all.
According to the Sunday Times (11th December) Truss has spent the time since leaving No.10 ‘getting her affairs in order’. She has been on a family holiday and despite being an inept public speaker is pondering getting on the US speaking circuit (after all Theresa May managed it).
She apparently believes that her crazed free market ideas were right it was just tactical issues that meant it all went wrong. She plans to stand again as an MP for which she is still getting a salary of £84,500. She also gets an annual allowance of £115,000 to run a political office. The ST reports that she is considering launching or backing a think tank to promote her ‘ideas’.
Further she has four police protection officers and an official car for life (at taxpayers expense)
Variants of the Communist Manifesto from Hobgoblin to ASLEF
Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in German and an authorised (by Engels) English version translated by Samuel Moore did not appear until 1888.
However there had been an earlier partial translation by Helen Macfarlane which appeared in the Red Republican in 1850. The Red Republican was a Chartist paper edited by George Julian Harney and a friend of Marx and Engels.
In Macfarlane’s translation it was not the now well known ‘spectre’ that was haunting Europe but a ‘fearful hobgoblin’.
A much more recent variant to the Manifesto appeared this week when a contestant on the Christmas series of University Challenge was asked what the last word of the Manifesto was, also the name of Britain’s largest union. He replied ASLEF. Those struggling with the debacle of a Tory privatised rail network might well feel that it would a good idea if there were many more thousands of train drivers employed and trained.
However the actual answer which Paxman read out was ‘Unite’. Whether Unite or Unison is actually the largest UK trade union I’ll leave for others to debate
England cricketer Moeen shaves author Michael Rosen to win Beard of the Year vote
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that England cricketer Moeen Ali has won the vote for Beard of the Year 2022. With over 11,000 votes in the annual on-line poll he shaved the 2021 winner Michael Rosen. Comedian Alexei Sayle came third and poet Benjamin Zephaniah fourth.
The Award was first given in 2000 when the late Frank Dobson won. Author and broadcaster Michael Rosen won the on-line poll in 2021.
The campaigners say that all of the four finalists have demonstrated a positive public image of beard wearing in 2022
A longlist was shaved to a shortlist and after two semi-finals and a final the winner is announced on 28th December
The campaigners say that the criteria for inclusion on the longlist remain the same as in previous years:
A nominee must have had a beard for most of the calendar year
The beard wearer must have provided a positive public image of the hirsute
Beard lengths and styles are not taken into account.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, beards don’t always have the best public image. Many will be familiar with Roald Dahl’s The Twits for example. Beard of the Year aims to counter such prejudice and pogonophobia. Congratulations to Moeen Ali and commiserations to last year’s winner author and Arsenal fan Michael Rosen
As is (hopefully) fairly well known Parliament attempted to ban Christmas, a law of June 1647 forbade its celebration. This was not entirely successful but there were reasons. Christmas was associated with Catholicism, and in effect the ‘old’ ruling orders, while the Parliamentary majority now represented the Puritan ascendancy that disliked the traditions and ideas of the Catholic church.
The Puritans were also concerned, at an official level and certainly amongst local ‘activists’ that Christmas was a time of dissolute behaviour which they felt was ungodly.
Parliament was certainly not totally successful in banning Christmas activities, partly because the less well off in society liked to mark the occasion, if and where they could, their lives being quite tough enough at other times, and also because celebration was associated with the Royalist cause and in the 1650s a symbol of attempts to overthrow the Commonwealth.
At Christmas 1647 a number of Church Ministers were jailed for attempting to mark the occasion.
Down below Christmas 1647 saw a number of riots in defence of celebrating the day.
The most significant disturbances of all took place at Canterbury, where a crowd of protestors first smashed up the shops which had been opened on Christmas Day and then went on to seize control of the entire city.
There is some interesting new-ish research on this here:
As with the Gordon Riots in London in the 1780s we need to be careful in applying modern labels of ‘reactionary’ or ‘progressive’ to such events. They may well have been Royalist influenced, and hence in the context of the 1640s counter-revolutionary, but once they were in progress they became a force that could challenge the existing order, whoever was in charge of it. They were in effect protesting in defence of their own December customs and of being left alone by Government to mark them as they would. It was a defining feature of what was known in the early nineteenth century as the Freeborn Englishman, someone likely to resist overbearing interference by the State in their lives, whichever quarter it came from. It can be seen that depending on the issue or the context that might fall in modern terms on either the right or the left.
England cricketer Moeen Ali voted Beard of the Year 2022.
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that England cricketer Moeen Ali has won the vote for Beard of the Year 2022. With over 11,000 votes in the annual on-line poll he shaved the 2021 winner Michael Rosen. Comedian Alexei Sayle came third
The Award was first given in 2000 when the late Frank Dobson won. Author and broadcaster Michael Rosen won the on-line poll in 2021.
A longlist was shaved to a shortlist and after two semi-finals and a final the winner is announced on 28th December
The campaigners say that the criteria for inclusion on the longlist remain the same as in previous years:
A nominee must have had a beard for most of the calendar year
The beard wearer must have provided a positive public image of the hirsute
Beard lengths and styles are not taken into account.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, Moeen Ali’s victory is well deserved. He unfailingly presents a positive image of the hirsute on and off the cricket field.
A World We Have Lost: where Harold Wilson spent 1960s Christmas holidays
Harold Wilson was Labour Prime Minister from 1964-70 and 1974-76 winning four General Elections in the process. I looked at Nick Symonds-Thomas’s biography of Wilson (The Winner 2022) to see where he spent his Christmas holidays
Certainly in the mid-1960s after he had been elected as PM it was at his home in the Scilly Isles. The week before Christmas Wilson and family took the overnight sleeper train from Paddington to Penzance and thence by helicopter to the Scilly Isles. They stayed until New Year.
In more recent times the world of Prime Ministerial Christmas holidays looks rather different. Rishi Sunak is reportedly spending time at his Richmond Constituency home in North Yorkshire. Keir Starmer keeps details of his vacations quiet reasonably enough to keep the media from disturbing his children, although he did post a picture on Twitter of his partner and himself having a Christmas Day drink at his Kentish Town local.
Details of where Boris Johnson is have yet to appear, perhaps because he is yesterday’s man, but almost certainly in foreign climes at an expensive location paid for by someone else. As for Liz Truss, many might wish that she takes a permanent holiday from politics.
