Kmflett's Blog

Only a Pawn in Their Game?: Bob Dylan and Trotskyism

Bob Dylan was 81 earlier this week and there was of course some comment, special programmes etc.

One thing, unsurprisingly, that was missing was that Dylan in the early 1960s didn’t just sing protest songs he had far left politics. The lyrics of some of his earlier songs could not have been written as they were without an understanding of such a perspective.

Much of that work was inspired by Dave Van Ronk who was then and remained until his death in 2002 a (broadly) orthodox Trotskyist.

Dylan picked up a great deal from Van Ronk’s music- not least his re-working of House of the Rising Sun but his profound grasp of the politics of early 1960s America may well have owed something to Van Ronk as well. Several commentators have highlighted for example Dylan’s Only a Pawn in Their Game as a complex analysis of racism and the US white working class. It still has great relevance.

Van Ronk, again broadly, was the subject of the Coen Brothers film Inside Llewelyn Davies which featured both beards and cats. His Guardian Obit from 2002 is here:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/feb/13/guardianobituaries

There is a good deal on this in a book by the late Mike Marqusee on Dylan and the 1960s,Wicked Messenger.

Beard Liberation Front

28^th May

Beards, Empathy & Solidarity: a complex dialectic

Following a question raised by joint Beard of the Year 2020 Michael Rosen, the Beard Liberation Front has taken a preliminary look at the complex issue of whether beards are felt or perceived to be empathetic.

The campaigners say that the first step is to go beyond the ‘man with a beard’ pogonophobic stereotype and understand that a range of beards may be received differently depending on the context.

Figures who are seen as traditionally hirsute such as Wizards, such as Dumbledore and some Professors are thought to combine wisdom with their beards. Hence they may be seen stroking their beards while dispensing wise words to inquirers.

Politicians are more problematic. Jeremy Corbyn, who has won the Parliamentary Beard of the Year Award more often than any other MP, is generally thought to have an empathetic beard even by those who don’t like his politics.

However the fuller facial hair worn by Corbyn in the 1980s was often seen as a militant beard offering the empathy of solidarity to some but perhaps not others. The axis between empathy and solidarity requires further investigation.

It is difficult to imagine even in the unlikely event that he grew a beard that Boris Johnson would be seen as empathetic.

The BLF also highlights the now quite widespread category of the sports beard. This is not generally about empathy at all, and certainly not to opponents, but rather performance.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, there is a complex dialectic at work. In some cases there may be a correlation between wearing a beard and empathy. In others there is not. To suggest an automatic link is we feel verging on the pogonophobic.

In March 1854 a Parliament of the Poor met in Manchester. Link to recording of seminar on its history

The 1854 Labour Parliament was held in Manchester at the People’s Institute in Ancoats. It lasted for two weeks.

It was neither like a Labour Party Conference or a TUC Congress, taking place before either existed.

The moving spirit was the leader of post-1848 Chartism and ally of Marx and Engels, Ernest Jones. The Parliament was focused around one of the best known nineteenth century industrial disputes, the 1854 Preston Lock-Out, which features in Dickens Hard Times.

Yet the Labour Parliament was not about trade union struggle, although it welcomed trade unionists, or about political representation in the Commons. Rather it sort to organise to find a way to change the world in favour of ordinary people.

As E P Thompson wrote in the Preface to the Making of the English Working Class: in some of the lost causes of the people of the industrial revolution we may discover insights into social evils we have yet to cure’

Seminar Details

Monday 24th May at 5.30pm Simon Hannah on the Labour Parliament of 1854.

Link to recording

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/t_bYFuGH6ByuRRrT46pClmBCH0fBU8Dj3nl5AUBOvOP5R5SpyBqC2wsqQFtR4YHe.ywokBNBHprCkB1vw

Passcode: sy1i+3=X

Dominic Cummings: Beyond the History Man. A career in campaigning

Dominic Cummings appearance before a Commons Committee on 26^th May has sparked some interest in his back pages.

While its not difficult to find out his career trajectory, understanding it is more complex.

I’ve relied mainly on a piece written by the FT’s George Parker on January 16^th 2020, before the current crisis. At this point Cummings was known as a key figure in the Vote Leave campaign  (from 2015). He appeared as senior advisor to Johnson when he became PM in July 2019.

Parker sees Cummings as dishevelled in appearance and idiosyncratic in terms of ideas, not so different to Johnson.

Cummings (b. 1971) went to Durham School (founded 1414) and then to Oxford. Here he was taught ancient history by Robin Lane Fox (the FT’s gardening columnist) and Norman ‘Stone’ Age who did modern history. He got a first class degree.

Stone had done pioneering historical research in Eastern Europe in the 1960s so perhaps its not surprising that he encouraged him to spend time in newly market capitalist Russia after graduating in 1994.

He appears to have mostly slept on the sofa of a Telegraph journalist and got work as a broker or analyst (though he didn’t speak Russian). A Mirror report from 2019 suggest Cummings spent much of his time drinking and having sex which would also have appealed to Johnson.

Cummings returned to the UK in the late 1990s and became director of Business for Sterling which campaigned against the Euro. Later in 2004 he was a leading figure in a successful campaign to frustrate a Labour Referendum to set up a North-East Regional Assembly.

From 2007 to 2014 Cummings was Special Advisor to Michael Gove including the period after 2010 when he was Education Secretary.

Cummings doesn’t appear to have been a Tory member (and had no real reason to be so unless he wanted to be an elected politician which doesn’t seem to fit his CV at all). He might reasonably be thought to be on the political right by background and education but aside from blogs hasn’t produced material on his philosophy, worldview etc.

Having researched and written this piece I’m pondering comparable figures….

Museum of the Home’s Slave Trader statue & why it’s still up.

I noted this week an update to the petition calling for the statue of the slave trader Sir Robert Geffrye to be removed from the front of what is now the Museum of the Home in Hackney. Despite a consultation with the local community finding it should be taken down its still there. Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden has weighed in to demand it stays.

The petition however seemed to think that the people to complain to were the Mayor of Hackney and the local Labour MP Meg Hillier. No doubt neither are perfect but unfortunately it’s not their decision.

The Chair of the Museum Samir Shah is one of a small number of people appointed to a new Heritage Advisory Board set up by Dowden. He announced this in the obvious place to do so, the Sunday Telegraph on 15^th May.

The purpose of this Board is to enforce Dowden’s policy of ‘retain and explain’. Shah has publicly backed this.

The Museum is due to re-open shortly after a period of repair. The statue is still there so it has been retained so far. One wonders what has been done about the explain bit?

2021 Beard, Shorts & Sandals Season: The Big Issue Vote- socks

Beard Liberation Front

27th May

Media Release contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

2021 Beard, Shorts & Sandals Season. The Big Issue Vote: socks

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that with another Bank Holiday weekend the 2021 Beard, Shorts and Sandals is set to open on Sunday May 30th

The BLF says that it has relaxed guidelines for the 2021 season and brought in a new framework governing types of footwear, length of shorts and the controversial issue of socks:

1] Shorts may be half length (to the knee) or three-quarter length-‘culottes’. The length of shorts is particularly important as climate change may mean that unprotected legs get sunburnt.

2] Footwear should be casual. There is a considerable range of sandal type footwear now available. Some leave parts of the feet and toes open to public view, while some does not. The BLF is not prescriptive about the matter.

3] Socks may be worn, depending on individual preference. If the beard, shorts and sandals are to be displayed in busy urban areas it is likely to be prudent to wear closed rather than open casual footwear and ankle socks, not visible to others may be worn.

4] There is no prescription or definition on what type of beard may be worn, or how this may match with the shorts and sandals. This again is left up to the individual.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, socks are always the most controversial issue during the Beard, Socks and Sandals season. It is an issue that seems to divide the beard, shorts and sandals community. Ahead of the start of the season on Sunday we are holding an advisory vote.

Dominic Cummings: History man from the (Norman) Stone Age

Dominic Cummings is in the news again. This happens from time to time and its never for entirely good reasons.

Cummings left Downing St at the end of 2020 after his apparent plans to re-organise the Civil Service were blocked

Cummings was taught modern history at Oxford by Prof. Norman Stone who died in 2019. Stone’s most well-known work was on the Eastern Front in the First World War and it’s not likely Cummings had much historical knowledge to impart about, for example, epidemics during his period at No.10

What Stone will certainly have impressed on Cummings is the public role a right-wing historian can play. Stone was a larger than life character, a controversialist, fond of a drink or two and sometimes rather more than that. He was also on occasion known for being abrasive and rude.

Otto English (Byline Times January 2020) has noted of the period when Stone was at Oxford:

Stone was an arch manipulator who specialised in malice, abuse and dismissiveness of those with whom he disagreed. He was a man lost in his own self-absorbed myth, who had an over-arching belief in his intellectual prowess over those of others.

Stone appears to have taught Cummings well. Indeed he got a first-class degree.

The problem is to assess who between Cummings and Johnson is the bigger liar. Both have a formidable track record.

When Dominic Cummings apologised about Gove’s history curriculum

Dominic Cummings has a history of ‘apologies’. Below is an extract from a review Prof Richard J Evans wrote of a 2019 biography of Michael Gove. He refers to a meeting with Cummings, then a special advisor to Gove, where Cummings apologised for Gove’s botched attempt at a new history curriculum.

Cummings worked as Gove’s special advisor from 2007 until 2014 so its reasonable to infer he didn’t tell his boss that he had criticised him.

(Niall)Ferguson had stated in one of his early articles in defence of Gove that it was safe to say I wouldn’t be among those consulted about the new curriculum. But he was wrong. Gove sent his special political adviser to see me. A slim, balding, casually dressed, youngish man came into my Cambridge office and flopped into an armchair. ‘Well’, he said, ‘we’ve fucked up, haven’t we?’ It was Dominic Cummings.

This wasn’t quite what I’d expected. Special political advisers usually dress fairly formally and don’t use that kind of language about the policies favoured by their political masters. But I couldn’t help agreeing with him. History, I said, had among other things the aim of producing independent-minded adults who could read critically and think for themselves. ‘I’ll buy that,’ Cummings said. We plunged into a lively discussion that went on for an hour or more. I formed the impression that he was someone who pursued his own line of thought irrespective of what convention dictated. He had, after all, I realised, studied history at university himself.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n17/richard-j.-evans/the-demented-dalek

Richard J Evans review of biography of Michael Gove London Review of Books 12^th September 2019

Beard Liberation Front

26th May

contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

Jeremy Corbyn at 73 demonstrates how a socialist beard is sustainable 50 years

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers has sent birthday greetings to veteran supporter Jeremy Corbyn who is 73 on 26th May.

Corbyn has won the Parliamentary Beard of the Year Award a record 9 times.

The campaigners say that his beard, an ever present feature of his politics, demonstrates how radical facial hair can be sustainable over many decades.

Jeremy Corbyn was first elected MP for Islington North in 1983 when he had a full socialist backbench beard.

By the early 2000s this had been tempered by many years of campaigning, the mid-period Corbyn.

He was Labour leader between 2015 and 2020 and here the beard became a central part of his leadership, the mature-period Corbyn.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, there is much to learn from the ages of Jeremy Corbyn’s beard and its sustainability over many decades. His beard has easily been the most impactful in UK politics over the last 50 years

Taking the Knee: a tradition has been invented

I along with many others will be ‘taking the knee’ at 6.00pm on Tuesday 25^th May in solidarity with George Floyd the black man murdered by US police in Minneapolis.

Taking the knee is quite a recent protest tradition. It began, probably, in the US often involving sports players kneeling rather than standing for the US national anthem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._national_anthem_protests_(2016%E2%80%93present)

It had not previously been much taken up in the UK not least because in most contexts there isn’t much concern if people don’t stand up for God Save the Queen or mumble their way through the words at sporting events.

Over the last year taking knee has become a symbol of standing racism and injustice.

In that sense, as the seminal work on tradition by George Rude and Terence Ranger argued a tradition has been invented, and all the best traditions are invented.

That said there is an historical precedent.

January 1819 at the Manchester Theatre Royal, soldiers attacked Henry Hunt supporters who refused to uncover, take off their white hats for God Save The King, just months before the Peterloo Massacre took place in August 1819 where Hunt was the speaker.

That’s one of the issues with inventing traditions of protest. If you look hard enough you can often find someone has done something similar before but it wasn’t carried on. Hopefully this time it will be until justice prevails.