Stuart Hall on the importance of understanding & analysing the present
Jenny Turner has written a lengthy piece in the LRB on the late Marxist theorist Stuart Hall, who some might call a genuine cultural Marxist. She is appropriately critical of Hall’s Marxism Today,New Times period but finds elsewhere in his writings a sharpness of insight that remains relevant.
I was struck by this passage towards the end of Turner’s piece. Being an historian of the present has never been more urgent
Hall made clear that we must direct ‘our attention unswervingly to what is specific and different about this moment’, think about our problems ‘not as you’d like them to be, not as you think they Hall made clear that we must direct ‘our attention unswervingly to what is specific and different about this moment’, think about our problems ‘not as you’d like them to be, not as you think they were ten years ago, not as they’re written about in sacred texts, but as they really are’.
The Financial Times has published a break down of the cost of coffee. For many, particularly those that commute for work, it is a daily essential.
Prices are, as with many other things increasing- 7.9% a cup since January. While labour costs make up a considerable proportion of the cost of a cup no barrista is getting rich. They however are likely to still be better off than those who grow the coffee beans, the price of which is declining.
Meanwhile the price of milk has increased by 30%. 98 million cups of coffee a day are consumed each day in the UK and the market (post pandemic) has increased by 36%
Someone is making money here but its not the coffee bean grower or the person who serves you your tofu spice pumpkin latte
The Beard Liberation Front has cautioned on the use of pumpkin beard oil this Halloween. It is perhaps inevitably an American invention but the campaigners say that while it is certainly an innovative use for pumpkins compared to beers and food recipes, rubbing extract of pumpkin in the beard needs to be done with care.
An example of Pumpkin Beard Oil is here but other brands are available:
BLF organiser Keith Flett said I’ll be sticking to the occasional marinade of the beard in imperial stout myself, and I note there is a barley and hops and whisky barrel aged beard oil available. For those who want something a little sweeter but still seasonal, pumpkin beard oil may work. However the application of pumpkin beard oil needs to be done in controlled conditions, probably in the shower in case any adverse sticky reaction requires it to be flushed out of the beard.
Update
The South Wales semi-autonomous section of the Beard Liberation Front has also suggested that using pumpkin oil on the beard may attract late season Wasps and should be avoided for this reason
2022 Beard, Shorts & Sandals Season. Late October re-opening
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that the 2022 Beard, Shorts and Sandals Season which opened in April and closed at the end of September will re-open for the last weekend in October with very mild weather for autumn forecast
The campaigners say that while it is very likely that climate change is largely responsible for the unseasonably warm weather, and this is not good news for the hirsute, in the short term a brief reprise of the 2022 Beard, Shorts and Sandals season is possible.
The 2022 Season saw a widespread adoption of beards, shorts and sandals particularly during the regular periods of warmer weather
2022 Season guidelines(late October revision)
1] Shorts should ideally be three-quarter length-‘culottes’ for the 2022 season.
2] Footwear should be casual. There is a considerable range of sandal type footwear now available. Some leaves parts of the feet and toes open to public view, while some does not. The BLF is not prescriptive about the matter.
3] Socks should usually not be worn. However there is no definitive policy on this currently.
3a] If the beard, shorts and sandals are to be displayed in relatively busier urban areas it is likely to be prudent to wear closed rather than open casual footwear and ankle socks, not visible to others may be worn.
4] There is no prescription or definition on what type of beard may be worn, or how this may match with the shorts and sandals. This is left up to the individual. However in late October more organic beards are preferred.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, this is the first time we have ever re-opened the Beard, Shorts and Sandals season so late in the year. It is not good news about climate change but in the very short time it does give the hirsute another chance to flaunt their beards and fashionable shorts and sandals in public
Beard Friendly Pub of the Year, Cock Tavern E8, in 50th Edition of Good Beer Guide
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that it is pleased that the Cock Tavern in Hackney, the pub that has won the Beard Friendly Pub of the Year vote more often than any other pub, features in the 50th edition of the Campaign for Real Ale’s Good Beer Guide.
The Guide describes the Cock as ‘friendly’ and the BLF has noted that in this it meets a key part of the criteria for a Beard Friendly Pub, that it is welcoming to the hirsute and non-hirsute alike.
The Beard Friendly Pub of the Year vote did not run in 2022 due to the impact of the pandemic on pubs but it is planned to hold the 2023 vote in January as usual.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we have long lobbied the Good Beer Guide to include a ‘beard friendly’ symbol for pubs but the inclusion of the Cock in the 50th edition at least is a nod in the right direction
Parliamentary Democracy: A Crisis of Legitimacy 1820-2022
As the TUC met in Brighton figures were released by Megaphone that showed that in my area of North London 50% of people were spending less on food and a similar number had cut back on heating as colder weather arrives. Meanwhile over 15% had skipped meals they could no longer afford to eat.
This situation is not just the result of the disastrous hard right experiment that was Trussonomics but of 12 years of Tory austerity focused.
As Truss departed the focus was not on a General Election but on who the next Tory Prime Minister who would run things for the few not the many should be.
Looking at events of the last few weeks it is reasonable to suggest (though you might struggle to find the point in much of the media) that Parliamentary Democracy is undergoing a legitimation crisis.
The term was popularised by Jurgen Habermas of the Frankfurt School of critical theorists. Habermas broadly used it to look at how a Government run on the principles of a market economy dealt with a population that mostly preferred a moral economy. For the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci however a legitimation crisis of Government took place when its hegemony over society fractured and became the basis for a political struggle
A bare majority of 180,000 Tory members elected Liz Truss as Tory leader and hence PM in early September. Given that it costs £25 a year to be a Tory member it might be questioned how many of this small number are genuine Tories as opposed to entryists backed by Nigel Farage determined to push to the Tories even further to the right.
Within a month it become clear that Truss was not capable of performing the role of Prime Minister. Tory MPs moved on to discussing who might be a suitable candidate to replace her. In short yet another PM without an electoral mandate.
The issues facing many on the cost of living, public services and housing suggest that a General Election is needed. Until one is called there remains a crisis of Parliamentary Democracy and its legitimacy.
Tory Ministers chunter on in the Commons about tofu eaters and a mythical anti-growth coalition while ordinary people struggle to pay their bills.
It is not new. Parliamentary Democracy has undergone numerous crisis where its legitimacy was questioned and alternative ways of defending the rights of the many were sought. Henry Hunt who spoke at Peterloo and was subsequently arrested frequently argued that the Government lacked legitimacy. It did not have popular support.
Peterloo was about basic democratic rights but not just in the abstract. Protesters wanted a political say on the cost of living, in particular basic foods like bread, the price of which the Government kept artificially high with Corn Laws.
In 1820 after Peterloo a series of gatherings around the country were held with a broad plan for rising. It didn’t come off but in the Making of the English Working Class E P Thompson noted the range of issues at stake:
Oppression of the Poor
Taxation
National Debt and was laid on the necessaries of life
The Corruption of Ministers and how many thousands a year were expended on them
Two hundred years ago but it sounds very contemporary. Not least because in the wake of Peterloo the Government passed the Six Acts designed to restrict and criminalise the right to protest. In her brief tenure as Home Secretary Suella Braverman steered another Tory Public Order Bill through Parliament which made it a crime to even think about protesting.
Protest and survive both in 1820 and 2022 was not just a slogan but a practical imperative.
This post first appeared in the Morning Star
Update: Braverman & Legitimacy
The re-appointment of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary just days after she was sacked underlines the crisis of legitimacy in the current Government. She was sacked by the last PM Truss reportedly for leaking official documents. Braverman whose actions suggest she is a racist was at odds with Truss over immigration and economic policy. It might be exaggerating to suggest that Braverman was leaking secrets (after all the main current UK secret is Gareth Southgate’s plan to win the World Cup & Braverman is unlikely to have access to that) but it is a matter of trust and accountability.
Neither was much observed in the Johnson Premiership but Sunak claimed he was different. Yet the reality is that he owes his Premiership to Braverman’s support but every day she remains as Home Secretary undermines his Premiership. Sunak was elected by no one (twice) and his reluctance to seek legitimacy by calling an Election will surely lead to more crisis and extra-Parliamentary protest and action
Sunak resumes Tory Culture Wars attack on North London. Dog whistling
At Prime Minister’s Questions on 26th October Rishi Sunak made clear that Tory Culture Wars attacks on North London will continue.
The origins of the Tory obsession with North London remain, perhaps, unclear. The last two Labour leaders and the current one live in North London. So what? Boris Johnson lived for years in Islington.
The attacks can perhaps be traced back to Priti Patel in 2019 when she used the term North London Metropolitan Elite. The dog whistle of this statement was so loud that the Jewish Board of Deputies asked her to stop using it.
Cultural Marxism, apparently to be found in North London, became the Culture Wars term of choice
More recently Liz Truss focused on people who live in North London Townhouses and take taxis to the BBC. The current Home Secretary Suella Braverman is also no doubt a North London hater, her recent comments about Guardian reading, tofu eating, wokerati leaving not much doubt about where they were aimed.
Right-wing commentators argue that there is nothing more to this Culture War than poking fun at the dress and eating habits (etc) of North Londoners. Yet aside from the wealthy, Boroughs like Haringey and Islington have some of the poorest areas in the UK.
Culture Wars may seem like fun but they have a political purpose and the dog whistle of Anti-Semitism is heard clearly enough by those who want to listen
Prime Minister’s Questions 26th October
Keir Starmer
I know the right hon. Gentleman has been away for a few weeks, but he should have listened to what has been going on for the last two months. Anyway, I have to say I am surprised that he is still defending non-dom status. He pretends he is on the side of working people, but in private he says something very different. Over the summer, he was secretly recorded at a garden party in Tunbridge Wells, boasting to a group of Tory members that he personally moved money away from deprived areas to wealthy places instead. Rather than apologise or pretend that he meant something else, why does he not now do the right thing, and undo the changes that he made to those funding formulas?
The Prime Minister
I know the right hon. and learned Gentleman rarely leaves north London, but if he does, he will know that there are deprived areas in our rural communities, in our coastal communities and across the south, and this Government will relentlessly support them because we are a Government who will deliver for people across the United Kingdom. He mentioned the last few weeks, and I am the first to admit that mistakes were made, and that is the reason I am standing here, but that is the difference between him and me. This summer I was talking and was being honest about the difficulties that we were facing, but when he ran for leader he promised his party he would borrow billions and billions of pounds. I told the truth for the good of the country; he told his party what it wanted to hear. Leadership is not selling fairy tales. It is confronting challenges, and that is the leadership the British people will get from this Government.
ONS figures which looked at the cost of supermarket own brand and budget products over 12 months have shown increases that one suspects will not be discussed or even recognised around Rishi Sunak’s Cabinet table.
The hike in the prices of staple food items is huge. What is not huge in many cases are the pay rises to cover it. Meanwhile the Chancellor still seems to be pondering not raising benefits in line with inflation which stands at over 10%.
The ONS figures represent really useful knowledge, an index of a crisis where millions will struggle to pay to heat and eat in the months to come.
The People’s Assembly backed by a range of unions and campaigns has called a national protest for Saturday 5th November in central London (Embankment, midday). It’s a start
Black History Month: the Leader of London Chartism in 1848, William Cuffay
Below is a summary of a talk I gave to a group of Westminster socialists on 26th October 2022.
The life of William Cuffay was first detailed in Peter Fryer’s landmark book, Staying Power. Since then Martin Hoyles has produced a biography but there is still a good deal that remains unclear about Cuffay’s life (1788-1870)
The criticism is made that some of BHM is commercialised and sometimes more about broader culture than history but popular history which allows the raising of questions like, imperialism, race and racism, is something the left has struggled to achieve for decades.
One of the greatest black historians and activists CLR James wrote on the subject in 1969 that it was ‘history that black people & white people & all serious students of modern history..have to know’
The general details of the life of William Cuffay are now quite well known. Indeed his Wikipedia entry is tolerably accurate. Born in Chatham, his father was from St Kitts and a cook on a British navy ship. He was apprenticed as a tailor moved to London around 1819 and by the 1830s he was an active trade unionist and Chartist.
Cuffay became a leading figure in London Chartism in the 1840s. He was the Secretary to the Chartist Land Company which aimed to allow workers to opt out of industrial capitalism and return to the land as smallholders in Chartist settlements.
By 1848 Cuffay had become the leader of London Chartism. He organised the Chartist demonstration on Kennington Common on Monday 10th April 1848. In he Chartist delegate meetings that followed Cuffay argued for a more aggressive challenge to the Government on the vote than the national leadership was prepared to entertain.
He was tried and convicted for his alleged part in a revolutionary conspiracy in August 1848. Transported to Australia, Cuffay remained politically active in Tasmania until his death in 1870, aged 82.
Cuffay left no papers and wrote no autobiography so what we can recover of his life comes from newspaper reports and a few official records.
Mark Gregory has done excellent work about Cuffay’s activities in Tasmania. In the UK the digital version of the Chartist Northern Star paper- available free on-line- has made trawling for reports of Cuffay a good deal easier.
How we can make sense of Cuffay’s life.
There are two key points.
Firstly to see Cuffay in the context of the ‘Black Atlantic’ a concept developed by historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in their book the Many Headed Hydra. The point is that there is an imperial link between the Americas, the Caribbean and the UK in the nineteenth century.
That link is slavery, slave ships and the British navy. In the 1790s around a quarter of the British navy was black.
Cuffay the son of a black sailor on a British ship was born in one of the central points of the British naval empire- Chatham.
He found his way to the very centre of that Empire in London, where he organised as a Chartist to try and bring it down. Prevented by the State, he found himself shipped to another part of the Empire-Tasmania, where he continued to be active.
The second point- something pointed out to me by Lord Bill Morris is that Cuffay was the organiser of London Chartism, the man behind the great demonstration of 10 April 1848.
Perhaps Cuffay’s imperial background uniquely fitted him for that role. It may explain why he continued to be active into old age when others did not.
During a speech to the Tory Conference in 2019 the previous Home Secretary Priti Patel criticised the ‘North London Metropolitan Liberal Elite’.
She did not elaborate as to who such people might be.
However we do have evidence of one such person. They lived in an area that for a period elected a Liberal Democrat MP post the Iraq War and is certainly heavily in favour of remaining in the EU
Crouch End in North London is not the kind of place where you’d expect to find a Tory in 2022. But it was a little different 50 years ago and the area elected Tory MPs until 1992.
While delving into the (unpleasant) undergrowth and background to the previous Premier’s rise to No.10 I noticed a brief sojourn in Crouch End.
In July 1965 Johnson’s father Stanley and mother Charlotte left Oxford for Crouch End. They stayed only to October 1965 deciding to spend the winter with Boris, who was just over a year old at the time and newly born Rachel (September 1965) in an Exmoor cottage.
I havent (yet) been able to locate where they lived in Crouch End (a blue plaque surely beckons) but perhaps even then the Johnsons were able to detect that the area was not really the kind of place for Tories, at least on Priti Patel’s analysis.
Johnson went on to live in Islington, North London for some years when he was marred to Marina Wheeler. The last PM Liz Truss despite claiming to hail from various places around the UK was a confirmed West Londoner. Its not known if it has has an elite.
Tory references to a ‘metropolitan elite’ and ‘cultural marxism’ continue. The current regenerated Home Secretary Suella Braverman is an enthusiast for identifying such types, although she hails from Brent in North-West London. The enemy within perhaps?
