August 1st is Yorkshire Day. One can think of some great and good people associated with the County and some who perhaps don’t fall into the category. One name that rarely comes up is that of Engels
Bridlington is a Yorkshire seaside resort known at least by labour movement veterans as the location of the 1939 Bridlington Agreement which aimed to stop trade unions ‘poaching’ members from each other.
Well before that it had become a favoured summer holiday destination for Engels, his partner and others.
He appears to have first visited in 1868(perhaps before however). He was still visiting in the early 1880s.
He wrote to Kugelmann from York on 31st July 1868 that he was on his way to Bridlington with his spouse, Lizzie Burns. He added in brackets ‘I bet you couldn’t guess how the name is pronounced’.
By 6th August, Engels was back in Manchester writing that he had been to Bridlington for the weekend and planned to return and take a holiday. Unfortunately an employee at the Manchester mill where Engels worked had gout and he had to stand in for him.
Engels wrote again to Marx from Manchester on 12th August noting that he had been again in Bridlington from 7th to 10th August 1868 and had made some ‘quite interesting’ geological studies. He now planned to return for 10 days from 14th August, the employee with gout being on the road to recovery. He gave Marx the address of Mr Burns, 3 Burlington Place, Bridlington Quay, Yorkshire.
In fact the stay was rather longer as Engels wrote to Marx from Bridlington Quay on 22nd August that he planned to return to Manchester on 26th or 27th August.
Unlike some of the resorts in the South of England visited by Marx or Engels or both of them in the 1850s,60s, 70s and 80s, Bridlington doesn’t appear to have recognised Engels visits there.
With Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden’s enthusiasm for putting up statues perhaps this is the moment for a statue of Engels on Bridlington Quay?
Beard Campaigners promote key phrase for Latin teaching in schools
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has decided to promote a key phrase that must feature prominently in Gavin Williamson’s plan to introduce Latin teaching in schools.
It is: Barba ante liberation
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, personally I prefer de omnibus dubitandum attributed to Descartes and also Marx’s favourite aphorism but the BLF Latin Sub-Committee makes policy here.
Who is the ‘Celeb’ who will appear at the Ambridge fete?
Obviously we don’t know. Nigel Farage although he would go down well with certain Ambridge residents is otherwise engaged. Football is never discussed in the village so that rules out Gareth Who? Is it at last time for Tony Blair to make one of his rare appearances?
Who will be the 'Mystery' Celeb at the Ambridge village fete? (Round 2). @MichaelRosenYes was nominated in Round 1
The BBC is busy promoting the new cricket related game The Hundred on all available platforms except one very notable one: Ambridge. Why is Tracey not planning a trial game? Why is it not being discussed in The Bull?
Adam was very boring again this week but its stopped now
In recent times the Archers has got to some lengths to move villagers characters beyond one-dimensional caricatures. We can see in them good and bad as is often the case in the human condition, in a material context obviously. Even a good capitalist is not actually a good person. Adam however remains determinedly one-dimensional. A man of much bluster and it must be said boredom.
Five Days A week
Not quite the Beatles song but its progress..
The Ambridge Socialist Editor on the Grundys: ‘Shamelessly Partisan’(Times Literary Supplement)
The Times Literary Supplement has reviewed the new Academic Archers volume, Flapjacks and Feudalism.
On Private Passions (Radio3 18th July) Carole Boyd talked about Lynda Snell and why having someone with a degree of grit and contrariness in Ambridge is important. The Ambridge Socialist still doesn’t think she got it right on The Bull though.
While Labour’s finances boomed under Jeremy Corbyn despite the fact that he’s not super keen on capitalism they seem to be doing less well under Sir Keir Starmer who is more of an enthusiast.
However Labour’s finances (although perhaps not personal donations to Starmer) are relatively transparent.
The same can hardly be said of Tory Party funds. The Party has a limited membership base (still far less than Labour). Party members can be relied on to do lots of unpaid work when it comes to winning Elections which after all is what both main parties aim to do. Without that funds are required.
Unlike Johnson himself(he claims) the Tory Party is currently well funded. It is the party of big business so you’d expect that. Except that this is not where much of the funding comes from.
The key fund raiser is Old Etonian (obviously) Ben Elliott who is Tory Co-Chair. Elliott runs a business called Quintessentially which specialises in catering to the whims of very rich people. Hence Elliott the FT reports is very well connected.
There is a Tory Advisory Board (perhaps a bit like a left-wing Political Committee) that gathers monthly to hear from Johnson or Rishi Sunak. The FT suggests that a requirement for membership is a donation of at least £250K. Key members are not in fact captains of industry but Thatcherites, mirroring the direction the Tory Party has gone in recent decades.
For example attenders at the June 2021 gathering in Kensington included Rishi Khosla (banker) Peter Cruddas (online trading) and Howard Shore (Shore Capital).
Other key players include Mohamed Amerst (telecom deals) Lubov Chernukhin (partner of former Russian Minister Victor Chernukhin), Alan Howard(hedge fund manager) and Rosemary Said (arms trade connections).
More generally the FT reports that some of the largest Tory donations come from Property Companies.
Labour quite rightly has raised the question of whether the above represents cash for access, a 2021 version of Cobbetian Old Corruption. The Cameron/Greensill affair and lots of issues around Hancock suggest the closest scrutiny is required.
The politics here is key. Brexit was meant to be about getting back control of all things ‘British’ from the EU. In reality as the FT reveals the key funders of the 2021 Tory Party are people whose interests lie in making money wherever it can be made across the globe. Investment in British industry and research, which Brexit or not, would not be a bad idea, not least jobs wise, hardly features.
The Financial Times Magazine (31.7) has published an investigation into how the Tory Party is financed (not by members obviously). I’ll post on that separately. However it also provides an update on Boris Johnson’s own finances.
Those who have to get by on sickness benefit or face a cut in universal credit may wonder if Johnson is really ‘broke’ as he claims. It’s what nineteenth century radicals called Really Useful Knowledge, an understanding of the reality behind the Johnsonian rhetoric.
Johnson’s Finances
Before becoming PM (July 2019)
£830,000 p.a including MPs salary, £275,000 Telegraph column, £88,000 book advance(not yet complete) £120,000+ speaking engagements (rate £40,000 per hour)
As PM
Salary £157,372 No.10 flat (free but taxable as a benefit in kind)
Other wealth
£1.2m house in Camberwell (with Carrie Symonds)
Grade 11 listed cottage, Thame, Oxon. Current rental £4,350 per month
20% share of Johnson family home, Exmoor
Johnson is not exactly badly off as PM but one wonders what he spent the £830K a year he previously earned on?
The Hundred cricket competition (10×10 ball overs) is now well underway.
It has been much criticised- mostly rightly so, but there are some pluses.
Let’s start with who is watching. Some games (mostly weekend) ones are free to air on BBC2. The viewing figures for the first game on the first Wednesday (a women’s game) were 1.95m 1.78m BBC 170,000 Sky. For the men’s game on the Thursday there were 2.5m in total with the BBC accounting for 2m
I don’t think it’s a secret that viewing figures for cricket on Sky pay channels are for the hardcore. Getting cricket on free to air adds lots of viewers and lots of potential cricket fans. The only people who cant really grasp this are the ECB who run English and Welsh cricket.
Secondly The Hundred is attracting people to watch women’s cricket- both in the ground and on TV. Most should discover that the standard is high and the games as exciting as the mens. Perhaps now the ECB will pay women players equally. Perhaps in addition as a public service broadcaster the BBC when they are promoting The Hundred on TV and radio will actually mention the point and discuss it.
Then there are the downsides. As several people have tweeted me, The Hundred is T20 cricket with fewer balls bowled.
Indeed. The alleged attempt to make cricket simpler to understand for new fans has led to a playing conditions manual of many pages and minor tweaks to terminology and practice that have been going in short form cricket since the Gillette Cup which was 60 overs a side in a day.
The BBC are overselling it as ‘amazing’. On occasion, it is, just as the T20 is. Are the crowds new? Not really though there are probably more women and younger people attending (a plus). Indeed the ECB have already had a moan that the evening crowds of men drinking beer and singing familiar songs is not the right image. They had best to get to work on electing a new crowd then.
While The Hundred is meant to be a City based competition in fact the teams are artificially constructed with no organic relationship to their location at all. It makes for ‘amazing’ individual performances though which are interesting to watch.
Clearly its clashing with existing forms of cricket T20, 50 over and County. Could it not have been sorted out simply by tweaking the T20 and not paying management consultants lots of money to ‘design’ a not really new competition? I think so.
Of course the ECB would argue that in order to get the BBC to show it the game needs to run to time and T20 (often maddeningly) does not. The Hundred has a timer after which if the bowling side has not completed 95 of the 100 balls they get a fielding penalty. Its only been a few matches but its obvious that once we take into account time-outs, stoppages for injuries and checks on decisions, The Hundred will begin to drift as the T20 has long done.
George Dobell’s incisive analysis below suggests we are on our way to the 10 over game..
I posted this on 18th August 2011 a few days after the Tottenham riot which took place after the police shot dead a young black man Mark Duggan on 4th August 2011.
I was Secretary of Haringey TUC at that point, a post I no longer hold, although I remain a delegate.
I’ll have more to say about Tottenham 12 years on but I see no reason not to look again at the view I took then.
Can you predict a riot?
As Secretary of Haringey TUC, the local arm of the trade union movement that covers Tottenham, I have become increasingly fed up with those who argue that people in the area had no reason to riot on 6th August because circumstances are worse elsewhere.
According to the July 2011 figures the unemployment rate in Tottenham was 8.4%. That continues to be the highest in London, though certainly not the highest in the country. It might explain, for example, why there was not a riot in Chelsea [2.6% jobless] but it can’t positively explain what happened in London N17 just a couple of minutes-walk from where I am typing this.
There are two key points to make I think.
Firstly, historically speaking, it has never been possible to predict a situation that would definitely lead to a riot. To argue that such things are spontaneous is simply bad history. It just says ‘we don’t know’ who it was. As the two young men who tried to organised a riot via Facebook and got a draconian sentence as a result found out, simply proclaiming that one will happen doesn’t work either.
Historically, though works remains to be done on this, I’d say that ninety-nine situations out of a hundred where an angry crowd- or mob- has gathered and there is potential for a riot, it does not actually occur.
Usually the spark is an over-reaction by the authorities.
That may well have been the case in Tottenham on 6th August when a peaceful march to Tottenham police station to demand answers about why police had shot dead a local man Mark Duggan two days earlier, appears to have attracted the attention of an over-zealous officer who, according to video evidence, seems to have hit one of the protesters.
I wasn’t there at that moment and such incidents, historically, which perhaps take place over a matter of seconds are always difficult to fathom out.
That incident however might well have been enough to spark the burning of police cars that then took place. It probably would not account for the wider rioting along Tottenham High Rd.
The second point is that anyone active in the area should have known well enough that the potential for a spark to ignite a riot was there.
The unemployment total and very low level of vacancies is a statistical reflection of a situation where numbers of young and not so young people in the area feel they have little stake in society or hope that the current system will provide them with even the basics of a decent life.
It might be argued that unlike the pre-industrial riot where those involved had few other means of making their point, in 2011, there are political parties, trade unions, community structures etc. Indeed there are and all of them are active in Tottenham.
The issue is that they are seen as not being able to provide answers.
The Labour Governments from 1997 saw the problems Thatcherism had created in the area and took some action to address them. It was not enough because to really shift matters a much more robust attitude to market capitalism which has failed the area since the 1970s would have been needed.
On top of all this came more recently the removal of the EMA, giving young adults less reason to attend college, and huge cuts in youth services.
Anyone of these factors on their own would not be enough to create a riot, and even the combination of them does not guarantee it.
The fact remains that on 6th August a section of the population in Tottenham spoke out loudly and visibly about how they feel. The result was messy and pretty unpleasant for those who lost homes. Unfortunately when social tensions explode and an attempt to change society is made the outcome often is a bit messy and confused. That cant detract from the power of the statement
That doesn’t detract from the fact that even if nothing is solved by what happened in Tottenham on 6th August, questions are posed and issues raised that must be answered
Ethiopia’s Barega, Gold medal winner. Note chin beard
Beard Liberation Front
30th July
Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266
Olympics Men’s Tracks events: does a beard enhance success?
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that preliminary investigations indicate that facial hair can enhance the chances of success for men in Olympic track events.
It has been a ‘common-sense’ view amongst some athletes that the fewer follicles on the head and the rest of the body the better. According to this theory, approved of by barbers, this allows the athlete to move more quickly through the air as well as on the track.
However the BLF says that in reality provided facial is focused- full scale hipster beards are unlikely to work-facial hair can harness air currents and use them to promote a successful performance.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, it’s the dialectics of hirsute athletics. Our thesis is that the beard enhances performance. The antithesis is that it might make it harder to run for example in windy conditions. The synthesis is that the beard, properly pruned and crafted, can in fact harness the air currents and lead to a faster run.
What do TV/Streaming figures for The Hundred tell us about the ECB?
There are lots of things (many critical, a few not so bad) to say about The Hundred but a look at facts (as Gradgrind might say) is always a useful reality check.
Viewing figures for the Hundred (free to air/streamed BBC) (pay Sky) are released selectively to illustrate a perspective.
Picking a way through this can be done
Some games (mostly weekend) ones are free to air on BBC2. The viewing figures for the first game on Wednesday 21st July (a women’s game) were 1.95m 1.78m BBC 170,000 Sky. For the men’s game on Thursday there were 2.5m in total with the BBC accounting for 2m.
On Saturday 24th July a men’s game screened on BBC and Sky got 836,000 viewers(most will have watched free to air).
The ECB who promote the competition have briefed that women’s audiences for the early games were between 36% and 39% of the total. For the T20 which is screened only Sky pay channels the comparable figure was 27%. Perhaps this tells us that free air to cricket attracts a better gender balance against a much larger audience but it requires more thought and more figures
I don’t think it’s a secret that viewing figures for cricket on Sky pay channels are for the hardcore. Getting cricket on free to air for any kind of game adds lots of viewers and lots of potential cricket fans. The only people who can’t really grasp this are the ECB who run English and Welsh cricket.
Exactly the same picture can be found in TV coverage of the Tokyo Olympics. The IOC have sold the majority of the broadcast rights to pay channel provider Discovery who have licensed a limited amount of free to air coverage to the BBC.
FT journalist Henry Mance has tweeted the comparable viewing figures so far. 26 milion have watched the BBC and 1.7 million Discovery. Profit at the expense of promoting interest in the sport.
Geoffrey Boycott on The Hundred: ‘no one watches if cricket is boring or tedious
These days we don’t have to endure Geoffrey Boycott on Test Match Special. His opinions can be found in the Telegraph and he has of course opined on The Hundred. An edited version is below.
An irony alert sounds throughout. Boycott wants to keep an ‘open mind’ something he is well known for. He notes he doesn’t ‘dislike’ The Hundred and after all no one watches boring cricket, which may explain Geoffrey’s sustained absence from England Test sides in the past.
To his credit he makes the entirely correct point that the ECB should promote Test cricket as much as it does The Hundred but then backs 4 day Tests. As someone who watched Boycott bat one might ask if that would be long enough for him to complete his first innings on occasion?
‘The Hundred is a concept for today’s society. People think that just because I love Test cricket I will not like the Hundred but I do,’ Boycott wrote in a column for the Daily Telegraph.
‘We should all keep an open mind because over the years when times have changed cricket has always adapted.
‘It cannot be a bad thing if people enjoy watching cricket, whatever the format. Every type of sport is played or watched for fun. I have watched a few Hundred matches and I don’t dislike it.
‘Nobody plays or watches if cricket is boring or tedious. Is the Hundred my favourite form of cricket? No. But there are some skills required — no doubt about that. Hand-eye co-ordination, improvisation, inventiveness are all more important than technique in 100-ball cricket.
‘The Hundred is giving people who have no chance of affording Test match tickets a chance to go and enjoy cricket with their kids. What’s wrong with that?’
While Boycott has no qualms about 100-ball cricket, he says it is ‘sad’ that administrators have not ‘promoted’ and ‘sold’ Test cricket in the same way.
And the Yorkshire cricket legend fears Test cricket will disappear in ‘many countries’ in the next few decades if the red-ball game continues to be neglected.
‘The sad thing for me is that the administrators have spent so much money on promoting and selling the Hundred but have done nothing to increase the enjoyment of Test cricket,’ he added.
‘There should be room for both formats but we are only selling the short game. Test cricket has not changed for yonks.
‘The administrators don’t promote it or force the over rate up. They have not tried to move the game along by having a real go at four-day Tests.
‘That is a sadness for cricket because if they don’t do anything then in 20-30 years Test cricket will be lost in many countries. We will have the Ashes and England will play India but other than that the game will be gone.
‘Eventually we will see other countries struggling to make Test cricket pay and if we don’t promote the longest format as much as the Hundred then when the older generation who watch it die off the youngsters will not replace them because the format will never have been sold to them.’
