Press release 24th June contact Keith Flett 07803 167266
Boris Johnson voted Pogonophobe of the Year
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has named Tory leader Boris Johnson Pogonophobe of the Year as part of National Beard Week.
In an exclusive poll for the Beard Liberation Front Johnson shaved both Nigel Farage and Donald Trump for the annual if perhaps unwanted accolade.
Along with numerous other downsides Johnson has a record of making pogonophobic remarks about beards both in his Telegraph column and at Tory Conference fringe meetings.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, there has been a lot of comment about Boris Johnson’s hair in recent times, but we might also recall that he has never had a beard. There is clearly a reason for that
Boris Johnson’s pogonophobia
we won’t get anywhere by metaphorically acquiring beards and string vests and allotments – but by systematically pointing out the damage they would do.
Boris Johnson Tory Conference fringe October 2018
National Beard Week 2021
Monday 21st June: Hirsute Personality of the Year: the beard wearer who has made the positive public impact during the year. 2021 winner Gareth Southgate
Tuesday 22nd June: Beard Friendly Sandwich of the Year: the sandwich that goes in the mouth not the beard. 2021 winner: fish finger
Wednesday 23rd June: Hirsute Broadcaster of the Year: the broadcaster whose beard has had the most public impact. 2021 winner Michael Rosen
Thursday 24th June: Pogonophobe of the Year: the most notorious beard hater of the year; 2021 winner: Boris Johnson
Friday 25th June: Beard Friendly Employer of the Year: the field grows wider each year 2021 TBA
Saturday 26th June: Beard of Summer 2021: the third of the four quarterly seasonal Awards 2021 TBA
Richard Osman faces Roy Keane in final ‘Beard Off’ vote for Beard of Summer 2021
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that as part of National Beard Week 2021 Pointless’s Richard Osman and football pundit Roy Keane will join a Beard Off vote for the coveted Beard of Summer 2021 Award.
Indian cricket captain Virat Kohli and football pundit Roy Keane won the first round, while Osman and Scotland football manager Steve Clark won the second.
There have been two rounds of voting each consisting of 4 contenders. The top 2 in each round now go forward for a final Beard Off vote. The winner will be announced on Saturday 26th June as the culmination of National Beard Week 2021.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we expect hairs to be split in the final Beard Off vote
Campaigners send National Beard Week message to Starmer: Change course, grow a beard
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has sent a National Bead Week message to Labour leader Keir Starmer: grow a beard.
The campaigners say that while policies remain important in politics, the image of political leaders in an increasingly visual age has taken on greater significance too.
It is increasingly clear that Starmer’s clean shaven man in a suit image is not cutting through with voters, many of whom prefer the Johnson variant image,
Boris Johnson who has few discernible policies beyond, arguably, handing Government contracts to his friends and allies, has developed a very distinctive image. His unkempt hair and dishevelled appearance is not popular with all but it is easily recognisable.
Keir Starmer by contrast comes across as just another clean shaven middle aged man in a suit, albeit usually with a sharp haircut.
The campaigners say that even now it is not too late for Starmer to look back to Labour’s first leader and the person he is named after, Keir Hardie, and grow a beard.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, a beard would give Keir Starmer some additional gravitas and strengthen his visual presence. Style is a key issue in modern politics and Keir needs to be more authentic and organic. That must mean facial hair.
European Referendum 5 years on. E P Thompson on the contradictions of the EU & being European
The EU Referendum took place 5 years ago.
I voted to remain. I’m no fan of the neo-liberal EU, or neo-liberal Britain. My view was that a ‘yes’ vote would encourage further racism. The left-leave view was that leaving in the EU would provoke a political crisis in UK capital. That it seems to me was also correct. The problem remains that its far from obvious that this will lead in a left direction.
The previous referendum had been called in 1975 by a Labour Government. The socialist historian E.P. Thompson was given space in the pre-Murdoch Sunday Times to present the case for leaving what was then the EEC.
Thompson argued that ‘going into’ Europe was humbug for four reasons:
He noted ‘we are there already’ Britain is part of Europe as commonly defined.
Secondly he argued that the 1975 EEC was not Europe. It should also include ‘Warsaw, Prague and Belgrade’. It now as the EU does of course
He noted that the Common Market defined Europe at its ‘crassiest’ level ‘a group of fat rich nations feeding each other’
He suggested that the EEC defined ‘introversial white bourgeois nationalism’ as internationalism
This then was not in Socialist Worker or the Morning Star but the Sunday Times.
He went on to suggest, returning to his earlier theme that the Euro-Stomach would soon find the need to ‘Euronate’ and this would be done over the British working class.
Yet Thompson was too good an historian and a left-wing theorist not to understand that there were weaknesses in remaining ‘English’
In his open letter to Leszek Kolakowski (1973) Thompson compared himself to the great bustard, grounded and unable to fly with wider intellectual developments. Rather he saw himself as part of a distinctively English tradition which as he noted had strengths and weaknesses:
But I cannot fly. When you spread your wings and soar into the firmament where Kierkegaard and Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers and Sartre and the other great eagles soar, I remain on the ground like one of the last of the great bustards, awaiting the extinction of my species on the diminishing soil of an eroding idiom, craning my neck into the air, flapping my paltry wings. [13] All around me my younger feathered cousins are managing mutations; they are turning into little eagles, and whirrr! with a rush of wind they are off to Paris, to Rome, to California. I had thought of trying to join them (I have been practising the words “essence”, “syntagm”, “conjuncture”, “problematic”, “sign”) but my wings grow no bigger. If I were to try I know very well that with my great bulk of romantic moralisms, my short-sighted empirical vision, and my stumpy idiomatic wings, I would fall – plop ! – into the middle of the Channel.
I belong to an emaciated political tradition, encapsulated within a hostile national culture which is itself both smug and resistant to intellectuality and failing in self-confidence; and yet I share the same idiom as that of the culture which is my reluctant host; and I share it not only through the habits of a writer but out of preference. This, if I am honest, is myself, my sensibility. Take Marx and Vico and a few European novelists away, and my most intimate pantheon would be a provincial tea-party: a gathering of the English and the Anglo-Irish. Talk of free-will and determinism, and I think first of Milton. Talk of man’s inhumanity, I think of Swift. Talk of morality and revolution, and my mind is off with Wordsworth’s Solitary. Talk of the problems of self-activity and creative labour in socialist society, and I am in an instant back with William Morris – a great bustard like myself, who has never been allowed into the company of such antiquated (but “reputable”) eagles as Kautsky or Plekhanov, Bernstein or Labriola – although he could, if given the chance, have given them a peck or two about their gizzards.
Well, that is what I am, and it is a ludicrous predicament. It is an excuse for any amount of silence. Holding for too long, and with too few companions, to an unregarded position breeds – as this letter has already shown – symptoms identical to those of egotism. I have become too much aware, in my silence, of the motions of my own mind; too detached from the thought around me into which my own argument can never be inserted; too stubborn in resistance to assimilation.
Unfortunately E.P. Thompson died aged 69 in 1993 so we cannot know what his thoughts on the current Referendum might have been. His criticism of what is now the EU is clear, but his concern at being isolated from wider European culture suggests that he had in mind the pursuit of a European unity of a rather different kind. That of solidarity and socialism. Hopefully it can still be done.
press release 23rd June contact Keith Flett 07803 167266
Michael Rosen ‘The Face of Bearded Broadcasting’ named Hirsute Broadcaster of the Year
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said presenter of Radio 4’s Word of Mouth and veteran beard wearer Michael Rosen has been named the Hirsute Broadcaster of the Year 2021.
The campaigners say that the coveted Award is usually contested. However in a year when Michael Rosen has returned to broadcasting after being hospitalised with COVID, he was judged to have presented an overwhelmingly positive image of hirsute broadcasting.
In 2020 the Award was shared between George Aligiah, William Crawley and Michael Rosen.
Gary Lineker shaved Rosen for the honour in 2019 but he won the title in 2017 outright and shared it in 2018
The campaigners say that the world of broadcasting remains largely pogonophobic despite Jeremy Paxman’s high-profile comments on the matter in his final months as presenter of Newsnight in 2013
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, Michael Rosen has become the face of Bearded Broadcasting in the last year and is a worthy recipient of the Hirsute Broadcaster of the Year Award.
Harry Kane pushes for Beard of Summer 2021 as he poses with W G Grace portrait at Lords
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that England football captain Harry Kane has made a push for Beard of Summer 2021 by posing with a portrait of one of the greatest ever sporting beard wearers, cricketer W G Grace at Lords on Tuesday
Kane was with the England football team on a special tour of Lords before their successful qualification for the knock out rounds of the European football championship on Tuesday evening.
There are two rounds of voting for Beard of Summer each consisting of 4 contenders. The top 2 in each round go forward for a final Beard Off vote. The winner will be announced on Saturday 26th June as the culmination of National Beard Week 2021.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, there is no question Harry Kane has beard power and his association with W G Grace, one of the great beard wearers, might see him through to the final Beard Off vote on Thursday
A new Royal Yacht is going ahead. It will cost £200m (i.e the taxpayer) unless Johnson can get one of his mates to stump up for it. The Rupert Murdoch Royal Yacht anyone?
Apparently it will be a tourist attraction or a national flagship or one suspects as viewed by OTHER COUNTRIES, a symbol of British silliness.
Yachts however are one of the symbols of the pandemic. Last weekend’s Financial Times How to Spend It magazine had an entire feature on yachts. I’m not sure whether yacht owners read the FT for guidance or if the paper just likes the advertising.
It reports anyway that the during the Pandemic the very rich have become even richer and have some spare cash to spend on a new yacht. The FT reports that 494 superyachts (up from 341 in 2020) are currently being built in boatyards.
It appears that slightly smaller but better equipped yachts are what is required. Things like on-board spas, ski rooms, centrifuges and Artic ice crushers are essential items
As the FT’s yachting correspondent notes they ‘have no real reason’ to exist. They serve no actual purpose. However yacht owners are getting younger, under 40, and as much sailing around in them they want their boat to make a statement when it comes into harbour. Apparently.
Choosing what yacht one wants is reportedly a tricky task. Practical or aspirational. Cost is not an issue either for the super-rich who have created a boom in the market or I suspect for readers of this who may not get much further than the Ally Pally boating lake.
Fish Finger named Beard Friendly Sandwich for second year running
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that the humble Fish Finger sandwich has been voted most Beard Friendly Sandwich for the second year running
Each year during National Beard Week in June the campaigners search for a sandwich that does not have excessive mayo or salad which tends up in the beard rather than the mouth.
With the rise of designer sandwiches the bread around the sandwich filling, whether a traditional slice, flat bread or ciabatta, often fails to contain the contents which can then spill out into the beard even with the most careful eating.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett, With the Fish Finger sandwich being voted the most beard friendly again in 2021 and ham & mustard the runner-up clearly the nation’s beard wearers are prudently avoiding over-filled sandwiches. There was however some argument about whether tomato sauce or mayo in the fish finger sandwich could cause issues if applied over enthusiastically
Beard Friendly Sandwich 2021 Result
1 Fish finger 50%
2 Ham & Mustard 27.6%
3 Cheese & Pickle 14.3%
4 Avocado, tomato, rocket 8.6%
National Beard Week 2021
Monday 21st June: Hirsute Personality of the Year: the beard wearer who has made the positive public impact during the year. 2021 winner- Gareth Southgate
Tuesday 22nd June: Beard Friendly Sandwich of the Year: the sandwich that goes in the mouth not the beard. 2021: Fish Finger
Wednesday 23rd June: Hirsute Broadcaster of the Year: the broadcaster whose beard has had the most public impact. 2021 TBA
Thursday 24th June: Pogonophobe of the Year: the most notorious beard hater of the year; 2021 TBA
Friday 25th June: Beard Friendly Employer of the Year: the field grows wider each year 2021 TBA
Saturday 26th June: Beard of Summer 2021: the third of the four quarterly seasonal Awards 2021 TBA
Richard Osman and Justin Trudeau face off in Beard of Summer 2021 vote
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that as part of National Beard Week 2021 Pointless’s Richard Osman and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau will face off for the Beard of Summer 2021 Award.
Indian cricket captain Virat Kohli and football pundit Roy Keane won the first round
There are two rounds of voting each consisting of 4 contenders. The top 2 in each round go forward for a final Beard Off vote. The winner will be announced on Saturday 26th June as the culmination of National Beard Week 2021.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we expect hairs to be split in Round Two before the final Beard Off vote later in the week
SUMMER SOLSTICE BEARD WILL FLOURISH SAY CAMPAIGNERS
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that a beard started on the Summer Solstice, Sunday June 21st will flourish according to folk tradition
The campaigners say that based on Shakespeare’s play a Midsummer Night’s Dream a beard started on the summer solstice can have magic properties that will allow it to grow unimpeded.
In the play Bottom urges ‘good strings to your beards, new ribbons to your pumps..’
The line refers to the need to find fastenings for the false beards the actors, notably Bottom himself, are to wear for the play they are presenting.
However the campaigners say that while organic knitted beards to celebrate the longest day are fine in reality growing a real beard, where appropriate, is an excellent way to mark midsummer.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said the summer solstice is one of the best times of year to start growing a beard
