Six years ago there was a free, exhibition at the Museum of London (then at the Barbican) which marked the anniversary of the release of the Clash’s double album London Calling.
In May 1979 Thatcher had been elected for the first time (majority 40) and the year ended with what was the Clash’s riposte. Anti-racist, anti-authoritarian, pro-rebel. The music and the words went together as did the cover art for the LP.
One thing that struck me visiting the exhibition five years ago this week was that London Calling is one of the ultimate London records. Of course the Clash, Westway to the World, were West Londoners. London Calling though was recorded at studios in Pimlico (off the Vauxhall Bridge Rd) and Highbury New Park in Islington.
The culture of those areas then as now was anti-Tory anti-racist and up for a fightback. The Clash got all that in a record and listening to songs like London Calling or Clampdown again now the relevance sings out. London 1979 but perhaps even more London 2025.
A pity Joe Strummer is no longer around to write a response to the politics of 2025 but we do have London Calling and perhaps in particular Working for the Clampdown a song that could easily have been written with Nigel Farage in mind.
Press Release 22nd December. Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266
A guide to the beard friendly mince pie 2022
December is the season for mince pie eating, but it can provide particular challenges for the hirsute.
The Beard Liberation Front has identified two key issues:
Icing sugar in the beard: this can have the effect of turning it prematurely white and can be difficult to remove. It may also lead to white beard syndrome and people shouting ‘Oi Santa’ at you.
Pastry flakes and crumbs in the beard: If this occurs it is guaranteed that any pogonophobe within 100 metres will shout ‘oi mate you’ve got the remains of your breakfast/lunch etc in your beard’.
There are several ways of avoiding the issues above:
1] Wear a special mince pie beard snood
2] Focus on eating only beard friendly mince pies. In particular pies where the ratio of filling to pastry lies with the former are likely to be more beard friendly.
3] If time and culinary skills allow you can of course make your own beard friendly mince pies
The Beard Liberation Front continues to research the beard friendly mince pie.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, there are some reasonably beard friendly mince pies out there but the hirsute need to choose carefully. For the unwary eater icing sugar and pastry flakes in the beard can be a serious concern
There are times when the class struggle in Britain provokes robust language from Tories. A glance at Editorials in The Times in recent days on strikes reflects an enhanced tone of Bufton-Tuftonism.
When the miners started an overtime ban and then proposed a strike in early 1974 Tory MP’s language went into class war mode.
Peter Crowther Tory MP for Ruislip hoped to have the chance of driving a lorry through a miners picket line while Jill Knight Tory MP for Edgbaston opined that strikers were the enemy of the State (Tony Benn, Diary 29th January 1974)
Fast forward to December 2022 and Tory Minister Steve Barclay stated that health unions were putting the public in ‘harm’s way’ and that they would be responsible for patients suffering.
This despite the fact that Barclay was aware that unions had reached agreements with local NHS Trusts to protect patients during strike action. That led the General Secretary of UNISON to accuse Barclay of being a liar.
The historical point is that when the Tories ramp up the rhetoric of class war it’s because they know they are in danger of losing
Capitalism and Christmas labour hasn’t changed much since Victorian times and below is a research note about the Victorian Christmas in London. Why London? Because that is where the research focused and also because its opportunities for casual work were greater than anywhere else, then and now.
The Christmas period was the best of the winter season for those seeking casual employment even 150 years ago. It was after the festivities had ended in January and February that things started to get really tough.
London in December by the 1860s had started to become a significant place of Christmas activity and commerce and the more so as the Victorian era wore on.
As those with money spent it and enjoyed themselves, those without money could at least earn a little by helping the process along.
As the historian Raphael Samuel noted the development of Christmas as a ‘spending season’ provided for street sales of novelties and holly and mistletoe. He argued that London in December was a ‘paradise of odd jobs’ whether helping scene shift in pantomimes or haul seasonal post.
However in a sense Dickens’ Scrooge and his clerk who was expected to work at Christmas were atypical of the period. The job had long hours, low pay and poor conditions but it was a regular job.
By contrast much mid-Victorian labour was irregular or casual- certainly if it lacked any skilled element- and the parallel with our own times is growing stronger by the year.
As Samuel noted ‘Christmas was the winter harvest for the wandering tribes. When it was over things changed for the worse. January and February were bad months for the working man’, and in 2025/6 the working woman too.
From Ebenezer Scrooge to Simon Thompson. The Liberal Christmas
Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol at speed and it was published on 19th December 1843. It sold 5,000 copies before Christmas Day that year- in a decade that was known as the ‘Hungry Forties’. The similarities with modern Food Bank Britain are striking.
In Dickens’s book Scrooge runs a financial business in the heart of the City of London, off Cornhill, and the author takes us to his ‘counting house’ on Christmas Eve.
Scrooge is in one office and across the way is his clerk Bob Cratchit. The office is barely heated, Scrooge being frugal in most things.
Scrooge comes across people collecting for the poor at Xmas and asks them why this was necessary given that Workhouses existed.
The charitable collector tells Scrooge of the Workhouse that ‘many can’t go there, and many would rather die’. To which Scrooge responds ‘if they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.
Scrooge only reluctantly allows Cratchit ‘the whole day’ off on Christmas Day, before retiring to his nearby lodgings, after dining at a City hostelry.
While the Christmas Carol was a best seller it was not universally well received. Liberal economists, these days known as neo-liberals, complained that while it was all very well making sure that the Cratchits got a Christmas dinner, there was a finite supply of turkeys and plum puddings. It sounds like a Tory Brexit Xmas.
‘If they got these items then someone else would not. Surely it should be up to the market to determine how these things work’ was the view of liberal ideologists in the 1840s.
Dickens was telling a Christmas story but he was also making a political point. He was attacking an economic and political system that saw society as defined by rich and poor with the wealthy rightly doing better than others.
If we look at 2022 we can see any number of Scrooges at work. One example is the Chief Executive of the Royal Mail Simon Thompson.
Mr Thompson wants to turn the Royal Mail into a parcels business where it faces any number of competitors and move it away from post-delivery. Yet no one else does that, Royal Mail has a unique advantage in that area and it has a legal service obligation to every UK address to back it up.
Dickens never suggested that Scrooge was bad at business. Scrooge no doubt, before the visitation of the Christmas ghosts, would have argued the frugality was the key to keeping his business going. Keeping heating and staffing costs under tight control being central to it.
Yet Simon Thompson shows no signs of being any good at business but is eager to copy all the worst aspects of Scrooge.
The Communication Workers Union has reported that in some cases managers are refusing to authorise pay for workers who have to take time off because they are unwell. Here we find a direct echo of the Scrooge mentality. He is annoyed that he has to pay Bob Cratchit for a whole day- Christmas Day- when he would not be working.
His response, again familiar from the Royal Mail, is that Cratchit had better make sure he attended work early on Boxing Day, no doubt to catch up with work that should have been done the day before. That also is an echo of Simon Thompson’s frequent, if changing, demands that posties alter their working patterns to suit the demands, and profit requirements of the moment.
The answer to the Scrooges and the Thompsons of this world is to unionise and face down their liberal market schemes
Winter Solstice heralds start of seasonal beard growth
Beard Liberation Front
21st December
Winter Solstice heralds start of seasonal beard growth
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that the Winter Solstice on 21st December, is also the start of the traditional winter beard growing season.
A beard started on the Winter Solstice is traditionally left untrimmed until Twelfth Night.
The Solstice is traditionally marked by Druids at Stonehenge, often with significant facial hair on display, at the first sunrise of the Solstice, which is on 21st December
The day is traditionally one of celebration for beard wearers who take the chance to toast their hirsuteness with an appropriate beverage.
BLF organiser Keith Flett said, December 21st marks the start of the beard growing season. The reality is that at this time of year it is simply too dark in the morning to shave
Beard of the Year 2022. Second Semi Final. Michael Rosen faces Hamza Yassin
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that voting in the second semi-final for the coveted Beard of the Year title is underway. The 2021 winner, author and broadcaster Michael Rosen will face off against Strictly star Hamza Yassin along with two other contenders.
In the first semi-final Benjamin Zephaniah and Alexei Sayle went through to the Beard Off final.
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 has been shaved to a shortlist and after two semi-finals and a final the winner will be 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, we’re moving into the follicle frenzy part of the year. We expect competition for the coveted Beard of the Year title to bristle
Pigs in Blankets. A tradition that was later invented
Pigs in Blankets, sausage wrapped in bacon, proliferate as Christmas food, either to go with the turkey or as a party food. There are many variants including chicken and vegan for those wishing to avoid meat and foot long versions for those who seek pigs in blankets as a phallic symbol.
The Observer (18th December) published an article noting much of the above and suggested that pigs in blankets in their current supermarket format owe their origin to Delia Smith’s 1990 Christmas recipes book.
Several people on twitter suggested that they had eaten home produced pigs in blankets long before this.
Terence Ranger and Eric Hobsbawm argued that all traditions are in fact invented but clearly in this case Delia Smith reinvented the tradition for commercial purposes which is not quite the same thing.
The Pret Pigs in Blanket roll is the tastiest version I’ve tried in 2022 so far but no doubt others have different favourites
Tony Benn, who died in 2014,kept a very long running diary. Far from all of it is in the public domain but there is enough to get some sense of how leading politician of the left spent Christmas from the 1960s through to the 2010s.
Benn left an enduring legacy to the British Christmas. As Postmaster General in 1966 he promoted the introduction of Christmas postage stamps.
Perhaps unsurprisingly in that context Benn was something of a Christmas card sender himself.
On Saturday 12th December 1998 Benn wrote, ‘I stuck labels on the Christmas cards- a terribly time consuming job. We’re only sending a few hundred this year.
By Saturday 4th December 2004 Benn noted that he had ‘bought £100 worth of stamps…signed, stamped and posted well over 350 Christmas cards. However he added ‘I have a wonderful computerised system’.
On 25th December in the same year he received from Cherie Blair a signed copy of her book ‘To Tony who’s been an inspiration throughout my life’. The bearer of the gift had added that Cherie had told them ‘don’t tell my husband’..
The diary also contains (20th December 1992) Benn’s record that he decorated the Christmas tree ‘as best he could’ and then taken the children to a ‘pizza parlour’ in Chiswick.
There are other entries down the decades a fascinating mixture of the personal and political at Christmas
The Tories NHS Culture War demands full support for action by NHS workers
Like Michael Rosen I owe my l life to the NHS, doctors, nurses and support staff. His poem rightly points out that nurses must look after their own well-being to be able to look after others. Equally the collective power of industrial action to improve pay and conditions will be a source of strength beyond what individuals can achieve on their own.
In particular I owe thanks to nurses, doctors and support staff at the University Hospital of Wales (Heath & Llandough) who through several operations kept me going between May and July and in November this year.
Government Ministers seem to be engaged in class war culture war where they lie about how much meeting the nurses wage claim would cost and refuse to acknowledge the damage they have done to the NHS since 2010. It must be said unfortunately that Labour’s Health Spokesperson Wes Streeting has not done what would hoped and expected and backed the nurses.
The job rests with the trade union movement, with communities and workplaces to underline to Sunak and Barclay that this is one culture war they are going to lose.
