Some right-wing commentators and Tory politicians have suggested that because the England football team take the knee against racism and injustice before Euro2021 games they have somehow become Marxists.
As I told Emma Smith at Goal at the start of the Championship, this seems rather unlikely. In short, nothing so romantic:
Still we can apply a Marxist analysis to the progress of the England team so far:
1 In taking the knee against racism and injustice the England football team embraced one of the basic principles of Marxism- solidarity.
2 The 2-0 victory over Germany suggested the team have progressed further and understand that success in the struggle is not about heroic individuals but the collective action of the team.
3 The 4-0 victory over Ukraine suggests that the reading group organised by Southgate during training of Engels Dialectics of Nature has grasped how to turn quantity into quality.
4 There remain outstanding contradictions, and the struggle to turn theory into practice will continue against Denmark on Wednesday
Thanks to Philosophy Football for planting the idea…
Vince Casey finds Lurve at Lower Loxley. He may be human
Following on from a recent change in Archers Editorial policy there has been a week (currently 4 episodes)of BBC reports on life at Lower Loxley.
Elizabeth was having a Staycation and was joined by Vince Casey. The Ambridge Socialist analysis of Vince has attracted interest all week. It’s fair to say that he appears to be a more complex character than initially thought with evidence of some human features alongside his hard headed approach to the meat business.
While Elizabeth and Vince occupied the bridal suite (but did not appear to have showered together) Freddie and Lily were meant to be looking after business. What exactly this meant was not entirely clear but Lily was late on the first day having had a one-night stand with a work friend, which it seems was enjoyable(and why not).
Meanwhile Call Me Russ’s divorce papers came through. Obviously he used the occasion to tell Lily that getting married would be a bad idea. Meanwhile he was working on a new ‘art’ exhibition involving some kind of masterwork likeness of Lily.
Vince fell off a horse and injured his, er, groin and later in the week fell asleep at the drive-in movie after eating one too many of Rex’s Lower Loxley hog rolls. All human life was indeed there.
We could have done without an appearance by Vince’s mother Idris- the function of which was to provide a bit more Vince backstory. The last time a mother showed up in Ambridge she claimed to be related to mass murderer Rob Titchener….
This week’s Ambridge Socialist poll
Ambridge Socialist poll. Is Vince Casey, abattoir owner, also a human being?
The England football team take a Marxist approach. Has Southgate resolved remaining contradictions in the team?
Guardian Letters 1st July 2021
In taking the knee against racism and injustice, the England football team embraced one of the basic principles of Marxism – solidarity. Their 2-0 victory over Germany (Report, 29 June) suggests they have now progressed further and understand that success in the struggle is not about heroic individuals but the collective action of the team. If Gareth Southgate can address remaining contradictions in the side, this could be their year.
Keith Flett
Tottenham, London
As a footnote to Keith Flett’s analysis, both goals against Germany came from the left wing.
I’ve divided my time between Tottenham and central Cardiff (where my partner lives) for over 25 years and when the first lockdown was announced in March 2020 I was in Wales and pending further changes to restrictions spend more time here than I previously did in 2021.
Hence in the week of the 73rd birthday of the NHS I was able to take the ten minutes or so walk from the house to pay tribute to the founder of the NHS Nye Bevan who died 61 years ago in 1960.
There is a statue of Nye at the end of Queen St, one of the main Cardiff shopping streets (think Oxford St but pedestrianised for many decades). Nye’s statue looks out over Cardiff castle.
Nye’s statue looked as it if had been cleaned for the anniversary, free of its usual decorations (think seagulls).
As a labour historian (albeit Nye is not my period) I’ve read a good deal about Bevan. He’s never struck me as being always the easiest person to get on with and when you consider that battle he had to bring the NHS into being in 1948 that is just as well. He also had a very clear opinion of the Tories who opposed its introduction.
Even so Tony Benn described him in his diary (7th February 1951) as ‘open, honest, good-humoured and devastating.
Since the fall of Edward Colston in Bristol there has been much discussion about which statues should come down and which should go up.
There are though some statues that must never be toppled, and Nye’s is one.
Football’s Coming Home NOT going to the barbers. 96% back Southgate’s Beard Power
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that calls in the Guardian for England football manager Gareth Southgate to shave his beard off before Saturday’s European Championships quarter final have got a decisive thumbs down in a special BLF poll.
96% of those voting backed Gareth Southgate’s Beard Power with just 4% saying he should shave for victory.
Southgate is the first ever England football manager, going back to Walter Winterbottom in 1946, and 1966 aside, his clean shaven predecessors have not been notable for their significant success.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, Gareth Southgate’s beard must stay. The clean shaven revisionists demand for him to shave completely ignore the reality that Beard Power is a key part of the England’s team’s strategy. The victory against Ukraine underlines how important Southgate’s approach is.
Guardian 2nd July 2021
What a shave! Must Gareth Southgate’s beard go for England to win Euro 2020?
While agreeing wholeheartedly with Keith Flett’s Marxist analysis of the England football team’s prospects (Letters, 30 June), I cannot help noting that no bearded manager has ever led England to success in an international football tournament. Perhaps a barber might offer advice?
Gove ,the Tories & privacy. Whither the Freeborn Englishman?
It has been reported that Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine has split up from her husband Michael Gove. There are two children and these situations are difficult even for the very wealthy. They have appealed for privacy. Certainly I have no wish to know more.
On the other hand on the wider issue Gove and privacy is not something that can be passed over.
In summer 2020 when pubs were open in many areas a requirement of admission was that you scan a QR code using the NHS Covid App on your mobile so that if COVID infection was reported this could be tracked and traced.
I had no issue with doing that and I did. Later it became clear that the privateers running the system at vast expense to the public and vast profit to themselves hadn’t bothered to check the data.
It was the world of Sinecurists and placemen that William Cobbett wrote of before the 1832 Reform Act. People who held profitable Government jobs not because they were any good at them or often did them at all but because of who they were and who they knew.
Cobbett wrote in Rural Rides:
There was no harm in them that I know of beyond that of living upon the public, but, where were their merits? They had none, to distinguish them, and to entitle them to the great sums they received.
These matters were perhaps more related to the now departed Hancock who backed privacy for his own affairs but not for everyone else.
Gove has been behind in 2021 the trialling of COVID Passports at events in May onwards. Again other issues are present
I’m fully vaccinated. The NHS App my GP Surgery uses shows electronic proof of that. However that is not the App Gove’s system is using and that is not of course the NHS Covid App either (there are good reasons around privacy for that).
Investigating how I could get an officially approved vaccine passport on the separate NHS App I noted that the requirements are in fact very close in terms of proof of identity to the Government’s plans for voter ID.
Again its not a question of either getting vaccinated or showing proof- I fully support both- but concern as to whether this is the opening to an ID card system which I oppose.
Without any guarantee the data gathered will be used and used properly, Gove’s latest plan certainly offends against Cobbett’s Freeborn Englishman who disliked nothing more than the State interfering in his private affairs. The Freeborn Englishman was as likely to appear on the right as the left but was not a figure then or now to be dismissed lightly. He was above all an anti-authoritarian figure.
Shears Inn, Spen Valley. Luddites met here in the 1810s
Batley & Spen. Parliamentary politics & beyond
I was pleased that Labour won the Batley and Spen By-Election since the alternative was a Tory victory. I was particularly pleased, given the context, that the assorted far right and fascist candidates got a derisory vote.
You can read various theories about who did or did not vote for which candidate. However it is a secret ballot and while actual canvassers might have some idea even that cant be certain. As Lenin noted elections are a very crude measure of the popular mood but at least they do offer some view of it.
I wasn’t in anyway involved (although I have been involved in numbers of election and by-election campaigns)and heard only one ‘inside’ report during from the campaign from a socialist historian who is a Labour member and lives in the Constituency.
By-Elections historically are fairly robust affairs and Batley and Spen was no different. One reads of reactionary tactics by supporters of Labour and George Galloway for example. Quite what the specific truth of them was I clearly cant say but they do speak to the logic of electoralism. If your key aim is to get votes and get elected (not a bad thing in itself btw)then saying what some of the electors want to hear, rather than persuading them of your views, may occur.
Disreputable tactics in elections are a bad thing but also reflect a certain no holds barred aspect of democratic politics which is often managed out by the media in terms of views expressed. That doesn’t make many of the views any more acceptable but is a rather a reminder that they need to be addressed and countered.
A look at E P Thompson’s summary of Westminster Elections in 1802 and 1805 between supporters of the Tory Government and radical backers of the French Revolution in the Making of the English Working Class provide a useful context. Tumults, street processions and riots were not unknown.
So too does Ralph Miliband’s 1961 history of Labour’s first 50 years, Parliamentary Socialism. He reflected that Labour is above all a Parliamentary Party. Socialism comes very much second.
I’ve always had the opposite view.
I’m not an anti-Parliamentary socialist but I’m definitely an extra-Parliamentary one. Beating the Tories has its place and on occasion being in Government can achieve modest beneficial changes.
More than that – think the creation of the NHS- is also possible with what the Victorians called pressure from without. That is organisation and campaigns in communities and workplaces.
Winning Batley and Spen was good but Black Lives Matter, and campaigns on climate change and defending the NHS are what is really causing the tectonic plates to shift if anything is.
Gareth Southgate’s Beard Power can help England win the Euros: ignore clean-shaven revisionists
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that calls in the Guardian for England football manager Gareth Southgate to shave his beard off before Saturday’s European Championships quarter final are completely wrong.
Southgate is the first ever England football manager, going back to Walter Winterbottom in 1946, and 1966 aside, his clean shaven predecessors have not been notable for their significant success.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, Gareth Southgate’s beard must stay. The clean shaven revisionists demand for him to shave completely ignore the reality that Beard Power is a key part of the England’s team’s strategy
Beard Liberation Front poll. Clean Shaven revisionists in the Guardian are demanding Gareth Southgate shaves his beard. We say his Beard Power is a key part of England's #Euro2021 success. What do you think?
What a shave! Must Gareth Southgate’s beard go for England to win Euro 2020?
While agreeing wholeheartedly with Keith Flett’s Marxist analysis of the England football team’s prospects (Letters, 30 June), I cannot help noting that no bearded manager has ever led England to success in an international football tournament. Perhaps a barber might offer advice?
40 years of the Special’s Ghost Town. A history of the present
June 2021 marked the 40th anniversary of the release of the Specials single Ghost Town. It went on to spend three weeks at Number One in the charts in the summer of 1981.
Recorded in Leamington Spa and produced in Tottenham, the single is now part of social history capturing the disaffection and impact of the first years of the 1979 Thatcher Government.
It has been re-released to mark the anniversary but its significance goes far wider than the music charts. It speaks to an experience of particularly younger people under a Tory Government that is not so different in 2021 despite the passage of four decades.
The idea for the song, both the lyrics and the musical style came to the Specials Jerry Dammers as the band were touring the UK in 1980. They saw the first impacts of Thatcherism, with closed shops and businesses and people begging on the streets.
The following year saw the first reaction to this with riots, starting in Brixton in April 1981 and by the summer when Ghost Town was to be heard coming from car radios, a much wider area. Unemployment had risen to 2.5 million and the Metropolitan Police were engaged in the racist policing exercise branded ‘Operation Swamp’
It seemed like the music and the political reality were matching.
Dammers went on to produce the political anthem Free Nelson Mandela in 1984 before pursuing wider anti-racist music and cultural work.
40 years on the re-release of the song is a reminder of the times in 1981 but also that life under another Tory Government is not significantly different. The pandemic of the last year has had a specific impact but before that 10 years of Tory austerity had seen the pattern of joblessness, crumbling high streets and racist policing reassert itself, after the limited, pre-2008, adjustments of the New Labour years.
In short Ghost Town is a history of 2021 as much as 1981.
It goes wider than that however. An indication came from the unlikely source of the Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty. Speaking to an NHS Confederation conference on 17th June, Whitty made a rare foray into historical contextualisation.
He argued that the areas of the country where COVID had hit hardest, were clearly defined, and invariably featured, during periods when infections rose.
He specifically mentioned Bradford, Leicester, parts of London and the north west, that have been hard hit over the last 15 months but also areas where deprivation is most noteworthy.
He went on to argue that a map of Covid’s biggest impact now and a map of child deaths in 1850 would look remarkably similar.
His view was that there were areas where deprivation had been prolonged and deeply entrenched not just over 40 years but over 170 years. It was a devastating indictment of the history of market capitalism although not one, of course, that attracted the attention of much of the media.
It is unlikely that Chris Whitty will be singing a rendition of Ghost Town at his next Downing St press conference but the lyrics of 1981 still speak to our times:
Cant go on no more,
The people getting angry,
This town is coming like a ghost town
That of course is specifically and particularly true for many in the music and wider culture fields, many of whom have not been able to work due to restrictions since March 2020 and who the Government has mostly overlooked when it comes to financial assistance. Time to be angry indeed.
The England football team take a Marxist approach..
Guardian Letters 1st July 2021
In taking the knee against racism and injustice, the England football team embraced one of the basic principles of Marxism – solidarity. Their 2-0 victory over Germany (Report, 29 June) suggests they have now progressed further and understand that success in the struggle is not about heroic individuals but the collective action of the team. If Gareth Southgate can address remaining contradictions in the side, this could be their year.
