The cause of labour is the hope of the world. Happy 2022
The cartoon is by Walter Crane (1845-1915) who was associated with William Morris in the late Victorian socialist movement and drew for the Commonweal, Justice and the Clarion.
In wishing those who look at my social media posts a happy 2022 one can only be very aware that for many it wont be, hence the need to continue to organise and fight for a better world free of exploiters and exploitation.
See on the street barricades (Alex Glasgow, the Socialist ABC)
CAMPAIGNERS SAY NEW YEAR TRADITION OF FIRST BEARDING IS INCREASINGLY POPULAR
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that it is again reviving the ancient New Year tradition of first bearding this year.
At midnight on New Year’s morning the first person with a beard across the doorstep of a house, or on this occasion only a false beard, must be given a glass of imperial stout to marinade their beard in. In return the beard wearer will bring good fortune for the coming year.
First bearding can be when a known visitor with a beard comes to the house, as in first footing, or when someone with a beard already inside steps outside to return again.
The campaign group which opposes irrational prejudice against the hirsute says that the tradition of first bearding is thought to have been as popular as first footing but declined with the more clean-shaven culture after 1945
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, while it seems first footing may be in decline first bearding is growing as an important New Year tradition. We expect many of those who have grown a beard over the Xmas holiday to participate this year for the first time in this ancient and now revived tradition.
GUIDELINES ON FIRST BEARDING
On or immediately after the stroke of midnight on December 31/January 1 await a knock on the door
If the person has a beard welcome them in as a First Bearder
Be sure to answer the door promptly as otherwise the First Bearder may sustain weather damage to the beard.
If the First Bearder has not previously been in the house make sure they then put on a mask to enter and observe COVID protocols
If they attempt to give you a lump of coal, ignore this. It is not part of the modern tradition of First Bearding
Give them a glass of imperial stout to marinade their beard in & wish them a Happy Hirsute New Year
Beard wearers give Boris Johnson New Year’s Honour
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has announced its New Year’s Honours list.
Pride of Place goes to author and Arsenal fan Michael Rosen who has been voted Beard of the Year for the second year running
Most promising newcomer has been named as Liberal Democrat MP Tim Farron (though currently clean shaven again)
The Public Service to the Hirsute Award 2021 has been given to Boris Johnson for remaining clean shaven throughout the year and not bringing beard wearing into disrepute as a result.
The most impressive sporting beard has been awarded to England cricketer Moeen Ali
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, in various ways those named have contributed to another positive year for the hirsute and are fully deserving of a New Year Beard Honour. That includes Boris Johnson who has made a great contribution by not growing a beard.
Robert Maxwell, Labour MP & owner of the Daily Mirror. Paul Foot on working for him
Robert Maxwell was a Labour MP from 1964-1970 and from 1984 until his death in 1991 he was the owner of the Daily Mirror. After his death after apparently falling from his yacht the Lady Ghislaine it became clear that Maxwell had kept his business empire afloat by raiding the Mirror workers pension scheme.
Maxwell was the father of Ghislaine who was found guilty of several offences in a New York Court this week.
The late socialist journalist Paul Foot wrote for the Mirror when Maxwell owned it and below is an extract of his thoughts on that period.
When Robert Maxwell bought the Mirror in the early eighties, he inherited Paul Foot’s weekly campaigning column. Foot insisted on maintaining full editorial control within his column, a condition which Maxwell accepted and only once tried to flout. It was an uneasy professional peace, peppered with accusations from purist lefties that Foot was selling out by working for such an arrant tyrant. He insists that “everybody works for capitalists in one sense or another… and I always remained a strong trade unionist on the side of the workers against the employer… The Mirror was read by working-class people almost all of whom I had a regard for… There was no journalistic compromise… So the business of ‘working for Maxwell’ never really worried me very much.” The crunch came with the arrival of David Montgomery, appointed chief executive by the banks who took over the Mirror after the collapse of the Maxwell Empire.
“Montgomery came in with the specific intention of smashing the unions… He sacked all the casual workers… and almost any journalist who represented any challenge or spirit of independence in the place… I stayed there as long as there was a breath of a fight against him, but in the end it was obvious that I would have to try and overcome that contradiction.” He penned a hatchet job on the Mirror Group management. “It was the only column that was ever pulled – in a way beautifully exposing the whole hypocrisy of the free press, that you can criticise anything except the people who are making profit out of the thing that you’re using to criticise. Ha!”
The above is from an interview that Paul Foot gave to Palash Dave.
There is a newly published biography of Paul Foot written by Margaret Renn (Verso)
Tony Blair to John Prescott on Mandelson’s first resignation. 28th December 1998
28th December 1998
I also think its very unhelpful if this issue is seen, in any sense, New Labour versus Old. Those who venture out on that agenda need to be fairly firmly slapped down since , in my view, the one thing that really would concern the public is if they thought New Labour had somehow gone or diminished with the departure of Peter Mandelson.
Mandelson borrowed £373,000 from another Minister Geoffrey Robinson to buy a Notting Hill house but didn’t declare the loan in the register of interests, a breach of Parliamentary ethics. Both Ministers resigned on 23rd December 1998.
Tony Benn noted in his Diary ‘Blair is terribly weakened’
The text is a note from Blair to Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott released on 30th December 2021
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 Feast of Fools & black puddings. Some historical questions
The Feast of Fools was part of the traditional 12 days of Christmas and took place around January 1st.
It was a world turned upside down affair where authority (in Medieval times that meant religious authority) was relentlessly mocked. Needless to say over time authority hit back and there is little evidence of the feast beyond the eighteenth century.
It was more celebrated in France than England and the example below is from the former country. However there is evidence, via complaints, that the Feast of Fools was marked in places such as Exeter, Lincoln and York and eating black pudding at the altar of the Church was cited in the complaints (Reading Museum).
Black puddings, boudin noir, were seen as delicacies in the Middle Ages which may explain their otherwise rather surprising role in the proceedings
Priests and clerks may be seen wearing masks and monstrous visages at the hours of office. They dance in the choir dressed as women, panders or minstrels. They sing wanton songs. They eat black puddings at the horn of the altar while the celebrant is saying Mass. They play at dice there. They cense with stinking smoke from the soles of old shoes. They run and leap through the church, without a blush at their own shame. Finally they drive about the town and its theatres in shabby traps and carts, and rouse the laughter of their fellows and the bystanders in infamous performances, with indecent gesture and verses scurrilous and unchaste.
Letter from the Faculty of Theology University of Paris 12th March 1445
The most recent research into the Feast of Fools is Max Harris’s Sacred Folly (2011). This is a revisionist account which argues that it suited the Clergy to exaggerate the nature of the event and confuse it with the secular Kalend festival.
Reviewers have both praised Harris’s careful scholarship but raised the issue about whether the ‘confusion’ between religious and secular festivals was not in fact genuine and that the level of complaint about the Feast of Fools over a sustained period does suggest that there were real ‘world turned upside down’ fears.
More research is needed now on instances of subversion at the year end period and for those interested in the role of black pudding in it, some detail on that too…
Boris Johnson has urged ‘caution’ when it comes to social mixing at Christmas and New Year, by a video message before Christmas and a brief interview from Milton Keynes in 29th December,
This is a rare piece of sensible advice from Johnson. It’s just a pity he didn’t start out with this approach some weeks back and then follow it through
This does however beg the question of what Johnson did at Xmas.
There are some, one presumes fans of Scrooge, who think Johnson shouldn’t have had a holiday at all because there is a national crisis. The problem is that capitalism is a system of crisis so on that basis he would never have a holiday. More pragmatically there are clearly those in the NHS and other key areas who didn’t get a holiday over Christmas. However they should have done.
Where Johnson actually was remains unclear. He has said he was in the UK but possibly not at the PMs usual retreat of Chequers.
Again to be clear I don’t care where Johnson is or is not. The point is that wherever it was history suggests that it was with dodgy people and paid for not by Johnson but at best by some doubtful arrangement.
We do know that Johnson likes holidays and perhaps particularly at Christmas
There are some clues in several biographies of Johnson as to where. Sonia Purnell in Just Boris notes that he eagerly participated in his youth in a game to see who could eat the hottest mince pie.
In his adult years he seems to have enjoyed Xmas breaks in India or ski-ing. According to Andrew Gimson’s’ Boris’ at a Spectator Xmas lunch in 2004 he opined about some relationship difficulties ‘put on a good Christmas and it’ll be all right’.
Sonia Purnell in Just Boris notes that in 2010 he took his then wife Marina Wheeler on holiday to India. It was not a short affair. They were still at Serai on New Year’s Eve.
Purnell describes the location as ‘a luxury camp of tented villas in the Thar desert, Rajasthan.. Conde Naste Traveller observed the 24 ‘tents’ around a pool (in a desert) inspired by a traditional Indian step-well represented ‘a new level of luxury’.
Suites for two cost up to £716 for bed and breakfast per night.
In short Johnson is someone who enjoys a good Christmas period which is more than can be said for those who will be using foodbanks or on the streets this December
Christmas 1976. Tony Benn (aged 51) reads the Communist Manifesto for the first time
Diary 26th December 1976
Caroline gave each of us a copy of the Communist Manifesto in our Christmas stockings published in English in Russia..I read the Communist Manifesto yesterday never having read it before, and I found out that, without having read any Communist text, I had come to Marx’s view. Its some confession to make in a diary but the analysis of feudal society, the role of the Church and religion, the class struggle, the impact of technology in destroying the professions, the cash society, the identification of monopoly, and the internationalisation of trade and commerce, all these things had been set out absolutely clearly by 1848 by Marx and Engels. It is a most astonishing thing and I felt so ignorant that at the age of fifty-one as a socialist politician in Britain I should never have read that text before…
Its reasonable to assume that during his marxist phase in the mid-1980s Keir Starmer may well have at least flicked through the Communist Manifesto but given that he has said in a newspaper interview that he doesn’t know what socialism is, he perhaps should have another Christmas time look.
He doesn’t need to worry about reading a Chinese printed copy. He should be able to get hold of the 1948 edition Harold Laski did for the Labour Party to mark 100 years of the Manifesto
