Kmflett's Blog

The 2022 CAMRA Good Beer Guide. Still essential but not comprehensive

The 2022 CAMRA Good Beer Guide is now available, a little later than usual but understandably so.

It remains a unique guide because it is consumer driven. Not like Trip Advisor but in the framework of a consumer movement the Campaign for Real Ale.

Its not a Guide where commercial enterprises pay for entries. Rather all the pubs included are visited and checked by local CAMRA members.

Inevitably there will be unevenness. For areas which the pub drinker is familiar with they probably already have a view where the best beer is to be found. For areas which the reader doesn’t know or rarely visits the Guide remains indispensable.

That said it is a guide to good cask beer. I’ve been a CAMRA member since 1975 and I do regard well brewed and well served cask as the pinnacle of the brewers art. The Guide points the reader to where some of the best can be found.

However in 2021 Good Beer is rather more than that. CAMRA spent a great deal of time discussing beer served from what most reading this would call a keykeg- unpasteurised beer served from a plastic container where gas is used but doesn’t interact with the beer- and agreed it was real ale. The Guide has a symbol for it at the beginning. I haven’t scrutinised every entry but it doesn’t look as if it’s been used.

That means some pubs that sell excellent beer are not included. Further they are likely to be frequented by younger drinkers who are not CAMRA members and don’t understand the importance of a consumer organisation of drinkers. This is clearly work in progress.

I’ve commented elsewhere about the inclusion of Wetherspoons pubs. Its Good Beer Guide not a guide to good businesses but I do wonder why individual Spoons pubs are included. Nearly every Spoons sells cask beer, some good, some average. Why not just say that if there is a Spoons in the area its worth a look (if that’s your thing) and leave more space for indy bars?

Finally it is unfortunate at best that given the last year there is no mention of racism and Black Lives Matter. CAMRA has a good policy on this and noting that good beer served in good pubs doesn’t include discrimination wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Still, all that said, if you want to know where to find a good pint of cask beer the Good Beer Guide is as I say above, essential

The Ambridge Socialist

November 21^st

Lynda is God

After thought Eddie Grundy has decided not to play God in the Ambridge Mystery Plays. Hence Lynda has now stepped in and taken complete control. She will now play God herself. This will require a re-fashioning of Grey Gables to resemble a Roman Court (or something) which has got even Oliver muttering

Tony agrees to modernise

Tony has agreed with Tom that its time to modernise at Bridge Farm and get a new potato picking machine. He also thought it was time to hand decision making over to a younger generation but quickly realised (or at least Pat did)that this did not mean Natasha. Her business enterprises are to be banished to Sawyers.

Eddie & Clarrie

Why Eddie & Clarrie want to reaffirm their marriage vows is for them. However they have now abandoned plans to use Grey Gables and will hold it in the cider barn instead. The dead pheasant will be moved and mistletoe put up..

In London: bring back Ambridge Extra

Ruairi is in a London (as a student) Ben has been there with Beth and they met Ruairi. Brian and Jennifer planned to go to London until it became clear that Ruairi had no intention of talking to them. Assuming this is not just pre-publicity for HS2 the days of Ambridge Extra are missed. We’d then know what is going on…

Happy Birthday to Dinosaur Brian Aldridge.

Brian Aldridge was 68 on Saturday. Once a dinosaur always a dinosaur

Beard Liberation Front

Media Release 20^th November

Contact BLF Organiser Keith Flett 07803 167266

Beard Liberation Front confirms that when it comes to Grant Shapps not all beards are equal

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has confirmed that when it comes to Transport Minister Grant Shapps not all beards are equal.

The point was raised by the Londoners Diary in the Evening Standard this week in relation to the earlier BLF statement that Shapps would not be eligible for the Parliamentary Beard of the Year Award

SW1A

The Beard Liberation Front have announced that Grant Shapps is to be barred from their Parliamentary beard of the year contest. Shapps, now clean shaven, had been pictured in Dartmoor with bristly chops. The BLF blasted his beard as “one of convenience” because they said it only appeared after a bike accident left him unable to shave. Aren’t all beards created equal?

Shapps appeared with a beard at the re-opening ceremony for Okehampton rail station this week. However it is believed that the beard relates to temporary shaving issues that Shapps has had following a recent bike accident.

The campaigners have clarified the equality of beards issue.

The BLF does not judge beards, beyond applying a basic dividing line between stubble and a beard (the Spaghetti Western test). It is however concerned that a beard has a degree of permanence particularly in respect of awards like Parliamentary Beard of the Year.

Secondly the BLF does make a broad judgement about whether the public impact of a beard and its wearer promotes a positive view of the hirsute, or otherwise. In some cases it is felt that some beard wearers bring the hirsute into disrepute.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we don’t judge between beards but we do look at their public impact. We hope Grant Shapps keeps his new beard and it is viewed positively but the BLF jury is out as it were.

The Rittenhouse verdict underlines that the Rule of Law doesn’t exist in America

The left generally are not enthusiasts for the ‘rule of law’ and particularly employment law. Those who fulminate about the importance of judges and the law are often seen as being Tories intent in preserving the practices of an unjust society. Often they are.

The acquittal of Rittenhouse in the US underlines however what the rule of law in a class society is about. Rittenhouse was part of a white armed militia that sought to provoke anti-racist protesters. He then murdered two of the protesters and seriously injured a third.

He claimed this was self defence and he was acquitted on that basis. Right-wing US politicians cheered the verdict, those to the left and anti-racists didn’t. President Biden noted that he wasn’t happy with the verdict but it was a jury decision.

Indeed it was a jury decision but it might be argued that they had been misdirected by a judge seen as sympathetic to racism.

This was not the rule of law. Rittenhouse murdered two people and was in the area to cause trouble. That is not self-defence. The verdict reflects a view that its ok for white people to murder black people but not vice-versa, as many have pointed out.

Of all the post-1945 figures to have considered the Rule of Law the one who arguably wrote most powerfully on it was E.P Thompson.

He devoted a concluding section of his book Whigs and Hunters to the matter. In the book Thompson looks at the eighteenth century Black Acts which listed a growing number of often petty offences for which offenders could be hanged. It was the period of the ‘Bloody Penal Code’. In practice matters often did not work quite like this as Jurys refused to convict people.

Thompson recognised that defending the Rule of Law from the left was not a popular thing to do. He noted that ‘I stand on a very narrow ledge, watching the tides come up’. [p260]. However he argued that ‘it is not possible to conceive of any complex society without law’ [p260].

Indeed as he knew well from his researches, ‘for as long as it remained possible, the ruled- if they could find a purse and a lawyer-would actually fight for their rights by means of law’ [p261].

This was not just an individual thing but a collective position. Thompson argued that the rhetoric of the plebeian crowd, of the free born Englishman’ was centrally focused on ’inviolable privacy.. habeus corpus…equality before the law’ [p264] In other words a workable system of law was basic to a defence of popular rights.

He recognised of course that the law was  ‘devised by men of property as a defence against arbitary power’ [p264] but argued that a system that provided defence against arbitrary use of power by authority was important to working people as well as the bourgeois [p266].

In short Thompson saw ‘a whole inheritance of struggle about law’. The Rule of Law and what it means is important in any complex society but it is also something to be argued about, and struggled over.

The Black Acts decreed that many should hang for petty offences. Not that many actually did.

The Rittenhouse verdict was the exercise of arbitrary power. In that context in the US the rule of law would be a step forward. To achieve that the principle of no justice, no peace will be important.

When Andrew Marr had a voice: The Flett-Marr correspondence

Andrew Marr has quit the BBC to become a presenter on LBC and ‘find his voice’. I’m not sure what voice he now has but 25 years ago it was on the left. That might well surprise many who know him only for a more recent period.

His Wiki entry suggests that as a student he was both a Maoist and a supporter of the broadly Trotskyist AWL. Anyone who knows the left will grasp that holding the two positions at once would require some difficult ideological contortions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marr

In fact it’s probably likely that he was at least loosely associated with the AWL.

Certainly when he was Editor of The Independent (1996-98) we had engagements from time to time on matters of the left. One example is below. However it would seem that as Bob Dylan noted, Things Have Changed

Letter: Baffled by 1917? Just ask Trotsky

Keith Flett

The Independent Thursday 27 March 1997 00:02

Sir: As a research historian I am very much in favour of Andrew Marr’s suggestion that we “should honour the people in disorganised archives who burrow through individual life stories” (“Makers of their own tragedy”, 26 March). I am less happy however at his implication that Orlando Figes has somehow written the history of the Russian Revolution according to Tony Blair.

What Figes has done is to uncover a number of interesting new details about the revolution while adding very little to our overall understanding of it. This is mainly because Figes, focusing on what the Russian people themselves did, misses the huge significance of the Western attack on the revolution from 1918. The revolution survived, but most of those who made it were killed in the misnamed Civil War with the White armies.

For a general understanding of 1917 and after, John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World and Trotsky’s mammoth History of the Russian Revolution remain by far the best guides. To these it is the task of the research historian, I’m afraid, merely to add footnotes of qualification or embellishment.

KEITH FLETT

Convenor, London Socialist Historians Group

London N17

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TUC researcher Alex Collinson has been doing some interesting research on the relationship between wages and beer prices. You can find the full set of graphs at at his twitter @Alex_Collinson

Obviously the picture is quite general looking at average wages UK wide and likewise for beer prices. Even so the position is broadly clear. You can get less beer now for your earnings than you could, certainly before 2008. Collinson suggests that very recently the balance may have tilted back a little towards beer being more affordable.

Time perhaps to bring the Assizes of Ale which sampled the quality of beer and set prices up to the late eighteenth century…

A history of the present: Farage on racism & English cricket- carry on discriminating

Nigel Farage is, or claims to be, a cricket fan and is sometimes seen at high profile cricket matches. He has also appeared on Test Match Special’s View From a Boundary.

British racism and imperialism has a long history, much of it still untold, but Farage is a reminder that it exists in the present as well as the past.

Following his appearance at a Commons Select Committee to discuss his experiences of racism in cricket, former player Azeem Rafiq admitted and apologised for making an Anti-Semitic tweet ten years ago.

This led very quickly to Farage and others tweeting that given this was the case Rafiq’s account of racism in cricket could now be ignored and matters could carry on as before. Again that is part of the history of how official society has dealt with such matters. The carpet is lifted and unpleasantness is swept under it. Farage reminds us that the attitude remains.

There are two points here.

Firstly Rafiq’s owning up to an entirely unacceptable tweet doesn’t in any way invalidate his points about racism in cricket or remove the need for investigation and change.

Secondly an assumption that just because someone can see (and experience) one form of discrimination and oppression doesn’t automatically mean that they understand other forms of it.

That is the work of political education and building solidarity and action against the division that a society based on class exploitation has as part of its mode of operation. Rafiq has played a small but important part in challenging one part of that, but it requires the work of many.

Calling out the unpleasant intentions of Farage and the like is part of that too and has been going back into history.

Noting that the English left had perhaps (it can be argued) not developed such a significant body of theory as in some other countries, the socialist historian E P Thompson noted that this was partly because there was ‘so bloody much to oppose’ in what the British imperial Government was up to…

Equal Pay Day: 54 years since the Equal Pay Act the fight continues

20th November is Equal Pay Day in 2024.

Its two days earlier than in 2022 meaning the equal pay gap is getting worse

In summary due to unequal pay with men, women at work will in effect work for the rest of 2024 for nothing compared with how much their male colleagues are paid.

The TUC has called for action in four key areas to address the issue:

>Mandatory action plans to tackle the pay gap

➡️End to discriminatory recruitment practices

➡️Day one rights to flexible working

➡️Investment in childcare

It is 54 years since the Equal Pay Act was passed and 49 since it was implemented in 1975

Given that it has been illegal to pay unequally for equal or like work since the 1970s one might question how it is that there is still an equal pay issue at all. After all there are meant to be no, no go areas for law and order so one might expect transgressing employers to face the full force of the law.

A problem of course is that law doesn’t come cheap and people earning an average wage are certainly not in a position to engage a lawyer unless of course they are a member of a trade union.

Unionised workplaces generally have lower equal pay gaps because workers can address the issue collectively.

That said while the focus on the lack of equal pay and the recognition that it is an issue does represent progress the fact that unequal pay remains a significant issue underlines how difficult it is to make lasting progress and why persistence across generations is the key to doing so.

Finally the gender pension pay gap is now also an issue that needs to and is being campaigned on as well.

https://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/News/equal-pay-day-2024-will-be-20th-november

Beard Liberation Front

18th November

Contact BLF Organiser Keith Flett 07803 167266

Grant Shapps not eligible for Parliamentary Beard of the Year campaigners say

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that Transport Secretary Grant Shapps is not eligible for the Parliamentary Beard of the Year 2021 shortlist.

Shapps appeared with a full beard at the re-opening ceremony for Okehampton rail station on Wednesday. However it is believed that the beard is simply one of convenience after Shapps had a recent accident on his bike that may make shaving problematic.

The BLF says that Shapps would need to have more than a temporary beard and to display a positive image of the hirsute in the public eye and it is thought he would fail to meet the criteria for the shortlist on both counts.

Eight candidates will attempt to shave each other for the coveted annual accolade. Last year’s winner Stuart Anderson MP has mislaid his beard during the year and does not feature.

The winner of Parliamentary Beard of the Year will be announced on 14th December

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we’re always pleased to see more MPs wearing beards but Mr Shapps needs to show more hirsute consistency before becoming eligible for any BLF Awards

Parliamentary Beard of the Year 2021 shortlist

Jeremy Corbyn, (Independent, Islington North)

Andy McDonald (Labour, Middlesbrough)

Jon Trickett (Labour, Hemsworth)

Stephen Crabb (Tory, Preseli)

Stephen Kinnock (Labour, Aberavon)

Colum Eastwood (SDLP, Foyle)

Stewart McDonald (SNP, Glasgow South)

Simon Fell (Tory, Barrow & Furness)

Voting will start on 1st December. Two preliminary close shave rounds will provide four finalists for a Beard Off round with the result announced on 14th December

Beard Liberation Front

Media release 18th November

Contact  BLF Organiser Keith Flett 07803 167266

First Beard of the Year Close Shave vote open

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said the first Close Shave round for the Beard of the Year 2021 is now open.

Railway broadcaster Tim Dunn faces off against Test Match Special’s Dan Norcross, poet Benjamin Zephaniah and musician Brian Eno. The Top Two will go through to the final Beard Off rounds in December.

Author and broadcaster Michael Rosen and England football manager Gareth Southgate are among four beard wearers guaranteed a place in the final Beard Off rounds from 15th December. They have won hirsute accolades during the year.

Eight others will go into two preliminary rounds to determine a further four follicle fashionistas who will also feature in the December Beard Off rounds.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, Beard of the Year is the hairiest and most hotly anticipated event of the beard wearers year. Michael Rosen was joint winner in 2020 but competition will bristle again this year.

Beard of Year 2021 long list

Michael Rosen Beard of Spring/Autumn 2021

Jimmy Wales Beard of Winter2021

Richard Osman Beard of Summer 2021

Gareth Southgate Hirsute Personality 2021

_______________________________________________________________

Moeen Ali, England cricketer

Tim Dunn, railway enthusiast & broadcaster

Steve Bell, cartoonist

Benjamin Zephaniah, poet

Billy Bragg, musician

Daniel Norcross, Test Match Special broadcaster

John Whaite, Bake Off to Strictly

Brian Eno, musician

Preliminary rounds: longlist to final shortlist

Thur 18 November to Mon 22 November. Top 2 go through

Thur 25 November to Mon 29 November. Top 2 go through

Final Beard Off rounds from Dec 15