Jacob Rees Mogg defends continued import of Foie Gras on the grounds of personal choice(his)
The Government is planning new animal welfare legislation but looks set to exclude the import of two items which were set to be banned on the grounds that their production involves animal cruelty (neither are allowed to be produced in the UK).
The first is fur, which apparently is imported from Canada and used in the headgear of the coldstream guards one sees, for example, in Whitehall.
The second is foie gras which is made by force feeding ducks and geese and is imported from France. Jacob Rees Mogg has objected to the ban on the grounds of personal choice- his own it would appear.
Speaking about the potential impact of Brexit in the Commons in 2018 he said there be some initial issues and people should ensure their butlers kept the larder well stocked with foie gras and claret. In 2019 again in the Commons he defended Johnson’s hard Brexit deal by claiming it was the Tournedos Rossini of deals, a beef fillet steak topped with a slice of fried foie gras.
Given that Rees Mogg claims he hates garlic and indeed the French in general is love of foie gras, aide from being indefensible is interesting…
Identities in the Big City: Will the real Keith Flett please stand up?
The post below arises from a twitter exchange with Michael Rosen about identity. I had tweeted that a union member had rung me about an issue (I’m a union officer) and asked if I was the ‘real’ Keith Flett mentioning beards, beer and history. I agreed I was but our conversation was strictly in my professional capacity. Michael Rosen’s original tweet is here:
Important to make some distinctions between the Flett who is attached to a beard, the Flett who writes letters, the Flett who supports a North London football team, the Flett who drinks craft beer, the Flett who displays hedgehogs and/or meals, the Flett who provides hegelian-m..
That does pose the question about whether these various bits of identity are separate or a whole. There is an interesting historical reference here which is discussed in Peter Bailey’s 1979 monograph (Journal of Social History) Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand Up?’
Banks’ reference is to a story by Thomas Wright
In his 1868 story Bill Banks Day Out, Bill a London railwayman goes with his wife and friends to Hampton Court for the day (the day being a Monday, then sometimes not quite a working day known as St Monday..). They set out from a local pub and on reaching their destination they enjoy a picnic of beef, mutton, ham, rolls and bottled ale and a small cask of porter to ‘wash ‘em down’.
Banks notes that Bill Banks would have been seen an example of the respectable and self-improving working man. He borrowed books from the local Institute to supplement his own small library. The day out was to Hampton Court, made possible by his wife’s careful budgeting. The visit to Hampton Court an historic location on which Bill Banks was well read. He appeared to be the model of a late Victorian artisan.
Yet as they drank and ate he got into a dispute with a fellow member of the party. He and his wife then head off to the music hall for some popular entertainment and take a carriage home. Banks argues that this Bill Banks would have been seen as a drunken working man by middle-class commentators in the latter half of his day out.
Who was the real Bill Banks, or were they in fact just different parts of the same person?
Social media recently has quite a bit on the return of mild, primarily dark mild. It appears to have become a trend amongst some who identify as craft beer drinkers. Its mainly on cask (there were old style keg milds, don’t get me started etc..) and breweries have started to produce milds again, often though not always in the 3-4% range.
Of course as has been pointed out some breweries including Boxcar have been brewing mild for a while, but in general it has been hard to find in recent times. Brains in Cardiff started to produce their award cask mild, Dark, again in the autumn after demand had dropped so low that brewing of it had almost stopped in cask (not so much in other formats).
One sees the comment that it was an old man’s drink and so inevitably became untrendy. I probably do qualify at 65 as an old man now but I certainly was not old when I started drinking it in the 1970s. Even then it was a hard to find drink in London (not in the Midlands and North-West) and its drinking was promoted, as it still is, by CAMRA. In short even 50 years ago it was becoming a niche cask drink and CAMRA have promoted a mild in May for a very long time.
Mild of course is a style of beer not a strength but the two became conflated at some point. No doubt beer historians can enlighten us.. However in the Victorian era and certainly up to the First World War when beer strengths were reduced, it was brewed at 5% and above in many cases.
After 1918 and even more after 1945 it was unusual at best to find a strong mild. Tetley’s in Leeds brewed 4 milds including one at 5.5%. My thanks to Ron Pattinson for the point that this was unusual and disappeared after 1945. Chesters’ Fighting Mild, brewed at Ardwick was also reputed to be 5.5% but by the time Twitbreads got hold of it by the 1970s it had gone down to 3.5%.
Perhaps the point is that just as now breweries produce a range of bitters,pales and IPAs of different strengths so this was also the case with milds.
The strengths of some pre-World War one milds has been echoed by a few breweries in more recent times- Sarah Hughes ruby mild is probably the most well-known example but the Redemption/Kernel Victorian mild collab (at 6%) has been brewed again recently and is available on cask.
Mild had a poor reputation back in the day because it was alleged that unscrupulous landlords poured beer from slop trays etc back into the mild cask where because it was dark it couldn’t be detected visually- only when you drank it. Perhaps in some cases, but the real reason I suspect for mild’s decline was that it had become a drink not of old men but of industrial workers who drank numbers of pints of not too strong beer to replace liquid they had lost while working. There are still industrial workers, though not so many, and the rise of lager perhaps took some of the market.
Finally a word for light mild. I used to enjoy drinking McMullen’s AK mild, which is still produced and is definitely not dark. Again mild is style of beer not a colour or strength.
Anyway I’m glad its back. It’ll help me relive my youth….
Heart Union Week 2022: time for trade unions in craft beer
14-20th February 2022 is ‘heart’ unions week. Of course 14th February was Valentine’s Day but the week underlines that ‘love’, or perhaps fellowship, is collective as well as individual.
Events are going on across the world of work. The bottom line idea is to get people to join a union.
One area where it would be good to see unions is craft beer. Only a few craft breweries currently employ enough people to justify a full-scale recognition and negotiation framework. Where they do they’d find that their brewery worked a lot better for having a mechanism for properly sorting out issues. They would also find they’d lose a lot less skilled workers who walk out because they have an issue they can’t see a way of resolving.
For craft beer workers even in small breweries there are significant benefits to union membership. Representation when appropriate of course but also professional advice and help across a wide range of issues.
The reality is though that if you are not a trade union member your ability to do much about issues at work except leave is very limited indeed. And if you are a member then there is the perpetual work of making sure the union effectively represents people- that only comes from an active membership not a benign General Secretary! It will also help if you are actively politically. A change of Government that is actually on the side of working people remains long overdue sadly.
However self-activity is the start. As the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm noted the world won’t change itself for the better on its own. People are required for that, and people organised in some form of collective activity, which is why being in a union is as important now as it was a hundred years ago
Tony Benn on the October 1987 storm: ‘it was like a day that didn’t exist’
Tony Benn’s diary for 16th October 1987 suggests by omission one of the great things about the storm of 15th October 1987 compared to how such matters go on now.
Weather warnings there may have been from the Met but there were no websites to carry them and no social media to repeat them. Unless you had been watching the TV weather on the evening of 15th October (when Michael Fish suggested that a hurricane was not on the way- he was technically right, it was a storm) you might well not have known much until the morning.
The impact on North London was relatively limited, but there was little transport in the morning. Certainly I couldn’t get to work, and in the day before e-mail and mobiles, getting to work meant physically attending a central London office.
I’m pleased to say however that by the afternoon matters had improved enough for my late father and myself to be able to get a bus to the Pigs Ear Beer Festival which back then ran at its original autumn time and in the first venue, Old Ford Hall, Bethnal Green
In the middle of the night we had the worst storm since 1703, with the wind speed in London reaching 94 mph. Trees were torn up all over the place. In Kew Gardens it will take 200 years for the trees that were lost to be replaced to maturity. The weather men never predicted it, though it was actually a hurricane. There are trees lying all over the streets. Caroline has been staying at Stansgate, where there was a power cut. Enormous damage has been done. The whole thing was unreal; it was like a day that didn’t exist, one of those days that has a special character of its own.
Historians say latest Tory edict on teaching Churchill is anything but balanced
The London Socialist Historians Group, which organises the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, has said that the latest Government guidelines on history teaching in schools are designed to promote anything but a balanced approach.
As often in Tory pronouncements on the matter a key focus seems to be on Winston Churchill. The fact that Boris Johnson has written a distinctly mediocre book about him perhaps underlines on reason for the focus.
Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi has picked up on stories that some schools may have stopped teaching about Churchill preferring to avoid discussions about his racism. However a balanced view of history, which is what the guidelines call for would surely demand that Churchill’s bigoted views on some issues are taught alongside his role as Prime Minister in the Second World War.
The historians say that there is little evidence that teachers do not strive to teach history in a balanced way in the classroom and that the guidelines are just the latest chapter in the Tories War on Woke Culture Wars.
LSHG Convenor Dr Keith Flett said, the problem is that the Tories see Churchill as a hero and believe that outweighs downsides in what was a very long political career. That however is itself a partisan political point. Historians seek to tell all of British history, good and bad, which is actually something Boris Johnson has demanded.
Storm Eunice: Beard Wearers warned of possible serious follicle damage from high winds
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that as high winds caused by Storms Eunice hit the UK beard wearers are strongly advised to take special care of their beards.
The campaigners say that while danger to life and limb is the central issue when extreme weather hits, a secondary concern for organic beard wearers is that exposing the beard to high and blustery winds may blow the beard out of shape and can cause permanent hair and cause serious follicle damage in some cases.
The BLF advises the following precautions:
Only venture out on Friday if absolutely necessary (i.e. to visit the pub)
If venturing out secure the beard follicles to the face by wearing a securely fitting snood.
In all other cases stay indoors and wait for the wind to drop
BLF organiser Keith Flett said, the answer is most definitely not blowin’ in the wind today. Storm Eunice poses the threat of serious follicle damage.
The annual vote which aims to determine the St David’s Day Beard of Wales, the Welsh beard that offers the most positive national image, is once again underway.
The Beard Liberation Front says that images of St David suggest that the Welsh Saint himself may have had an organic beard
Welsh rugby prop Adam Jones won the Award in 2013, voted for by BLF supporters, just shaving former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. Another rugby player Leigh Halfpenny won in 2014. In 2015 the Award went to Thee Faction musician Chris Fox in 2016 footballer Joe Ledley and in 2017 to Charcutier Illtud Llyr Dunsford, with Chris Fox winning again in 2018. In 2019 journalist Grant Tucker shaved the opposition to claim the accolade. Michael Sheen won in 2020 and went on to share the Beard of the Year Award with Michael Rosen in December 2020. In 2021 Michael Sheen again shaved opponents for a second time.
It is the tenth time the Award has been given following the traditional UK Beard of the Year at the end December each year and the BLF says it is a mark of Wales as a modern nation on St David’s Day that beards are now playing an increasingly significant role in national life.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, in lockdown conditions beards have boomed even if the First Minister remains resolutely clean shaven himself.
There are two preliminary rounds leading to the final Best Beard of Wales 2022 vote between 25-27 February
Beard of Wales 2022 Round One. Top Two go to a final Beard Off Round
Dogs on picket lines is a noted feature in social media, but 16th February saw another example of Beards on picket lines.
Beard of the Year Michael Rosen appeared at a poetic picket organised by the UCU as part of current strike action to defend pay, pensions and working conditions. Waterloo UCU, part of Kings College, staged the event at the Waterloo campus at what historically was known as Waterloo Bridge House, the London HQ of Post Office telecoms (now BT).
On Thursday the man who has won Parliamentary Beard of the Year more than any other MP, Jeremy Corbyn, joined a Kings College UCU rally at Bush House in central London
BLF Organiser Keith Flett, said Beard Power on picket lines should be something that will make any clean shaven Vice Chancellor think again (although not all VCs are men of course)and all the more so when the beard is wielded by Beard of the Year Michael Rosen or multiple beard award winner Jeremy Corbyn
As a lifelong anti-Stalinist I struggle with any view of Stalin that doesn’t begin with him as the gravedigger of the Russian Revolution.
In that sense Geoffrey Roberts new book on Stalin’s Library is challenging (the Guardian review below reaches a broadly similar conclusion). I heard the author speak at a Socialist History Society launch of the book and without question it was interesting. It is based on archival research and focused on looking at the marginal notes and comments Stalin made in books which were part of his extensive library.
These books form a minority of the library-itself incomplete as it was partly broken up after 1956- and as Roberts notes there have been previous studies of them. He seeks to use them to see if its possible to grasp Stalin’s perspective on the world. I’m not sure he reaches a conclusion beyond the point that Stalin was in his view an ‘intellectual’
I’m not sure Lenin agreed on that but its certainly true that Stalin came out of a Bolshevik culture that prized learning and study. How that related to his lengthy period in charge of the USSR seems problematic. One recalls for example that Harold Shipman was a Guardian reader..
