Marking 20 years of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales voted Beard of Winter 2021
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that competition has bristled for the annual Beard of Winter accolade. On its 20th anniversary founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales shaved the opposition to win the seasonal award. He got 40.8% of the vote
Author Michael Rosen and actor Brian Blessed were joint runners up with 24% each and cricket broadcaster Daniel Norcross brought up the tail
The Beard of Winter is the first of four seasonal awards that lead to the Beard of the Year Award in December 2021.
The Beard of Winter focuses both on fuller organic beards, suitable for winter weather, but also on beards that have made an early New Year impact in the public eye.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we congratulate Jimmy Wales whose has had a long term gravitas adding beard. We’re also pleased to note that the Beard Liberation Front has had a Wikipedia entry since 2006
There were two ‘Trim-Off’ rounds from 17-20 January and then from 21-24 January. Each featured four contenders. The top two from each round featured in a final ‘Beard-Off’ vote from 25-29th January
Beard of Winter 2021 Shortlist
Arnie Schwarzenegger, actor
Tim Farron, MP
Brian Blessed, actor (Through to Beard Off)
Daniel Norcross, broadcaster (Through to Beard Off)
Jack Dorsey, CEO Twitter
Steve Bell, Guardian cartoonist
Jimmy Wales, founder Wikipedia (Through to Beard Off)
Michael Rosen, author and broadcaster (Through to Beard Off)
Marstons currently a pub company with a minority stake in Carlsberg Brewing UK (which now brews the beer) has received a takeover bid from a US private equity company Platinum for its pub estate.
With share prices of UK listed hospitality companies hit by the pandemic they can be an attractive proposition for those with spare money. The Financial Times notes that Platinum is one of a number of US private equity concerns that has ‘dry powder’ that is money they have raised to invest in companies when its attractive to do so.
In that context the bid which is current for a month under UK rules look more like an investment than asset stripping but no doubt if it goes ahead we shall see.
Greene King was acquired by a Hong Kong investment company and the current bid suggests that we may be moving beyond the world where beer companies consolidated and became larger near monopolies in certain areas, to a situation where pubs and beer are seen as a useful thing to have on the balance sheet of concerns that have no particular interest in pubs or beer
Its unlikely to be great news for pubs, beer and jobs though. What price Government regulation to protect the sector one wonders?
Update
The Marstons board has unanimously rejected the Private Equity bid (higher than two made before Xmas) on the grounds that it undervalues the company. That still raises concerns.Firstly that they might accept an increased offer and secondly that a hostile bid might continue anyway- the deadline for that is 26th February. This may just be the first round…
In a rare if modest bit of good news for the UK pub sector, the deadline for the private equity bid has now passed and the bidder has walked away. As the analysts comments below (analysts are essentially people who write about listed companies & provide the ‘sentiment’ on how well or not they are doing & hence guide share prices) indicate Marstons sees a future for itself as an independent-ish entity:
Marston’s rejected a £690m offer from the US group last month, and that now seems to be that. Platinum said: “After careful consideration, [Platinum] does not intend to submit a revised proposal and it will not make a firm offer for Marston’s.” There is the usual caveat that it could come back if Marston’s agrees or another bidder emerges.
But the Hobgoblin and Pedigree brewer seems determined to go it alone. It said: “The Board continues to believe that Marston’s is well placed to benefit from the opportunities in a post-COVID 19 trading environment, following the completion of the SA Brain transaction [to operate 156 pubs in Wales] and harnessing factors such as a reduction in on-trade industry supply, and increased home-working that will benefit pubs in suburban locations.
Michael Rosen’s Missing: a model of research history & a vital message for our times
I wrote the below a year ago on 6th February 2020 and all things considered, albeit with absolutely no thanks to Boris Johnson, its good that Michael Rosen is still around to speak about his family and the process of historical inquiry that led him over 20 years or so to piece together the story published as The Missing.
I went to school in Muswell Hill in the 1970s. It was a left-wing (comprehensive)school and the history of fascism and war was certainly not hidden. At the same time I did not start to learn about the Holocaust and its dreadful impact until I became active as a socialist in 1974.
There is some historical work to be done on this. I think the view was that the Nazis had been defeated, the world had moved on from all that. In Britain with the demise of the Mosleyites, fascism while still around was a marginal presence. Then came the rise of the National Front from the early 1970s as a significant electoral force and to a degree as a street gang. I recall from that time in North London socialist meetings being attacked and smashed up by fascists. In those times I didn’t venture out without keeping a close eye on who was coming the other way and wearing a pair of DMs (Doc Marten shoes with steel toe caps not direct messages for younger readers). Yet the Cable St mural marking the victory of 1936 was not started until 1979.
Hopefully matters have improved a bit since, not least due to the efforts of Holocaust survivors and anti-fascists and anti-racists to make sure that the history of the Holocaust and what it meant is told and understood in each new generation.
Michael Rosen’s book is an important part of that and his presentation and slides told a story of what happened to people simply because they were Jewish. Never again.
Amongst other things I’m a research historian. I convene the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London School of Advanced Study and have done for many years.
As socialist historians we’re left-wing of course but we’re robust in our research. Rigour is expected as are awkward questions and uncomfortable findings.
I mention this because a brief review of Michael Rosen’s Missing, about what happened to some of his relatives in World War Two,has been in the queue for a while.
Rosen is known as an author and broadcaster, a socialist and anti-racist and come to that a beard wearer and Arsenal fan.
He is not known as a research historian but that doesn’t mean he can’t be one.
The Missing is a brief volume of short chapters and some poems.
It does have references and an index at the end but it lacks the kind of academic apparatus that we look for in research history. Where for example are the footnotes??
Partly the answer is that the Missing is a book aimed primarily at young people, aiming to get across in deeply personal terms what the Holocaust actually meant.
But partly it doesn’t matter. Rosen has spent decades researching his family history and the research methods cannot be faulted.
Of course in 2020 the internet can be helpful but can’t be relied on as a definitive source. Rosen doesn’t do that. He seeks out obscure books that mention his family and contacts libraries in France to see if they have any records.
What he finds doesn’t make for particularly happy reading but it is important, vital, even reading for our times.
He notes:
With every passing year, the number of Holocaust survivors gets smaller. We need to keep them the memory of them alive: the people who died and those who survived. That’s partly why I wrote this book.
The other reason, Rosen notes, is because the wider message of The Missing is about refugees and that is still with us.
That means the book is not only fascinating and important history but it has relevance now, as the best history should have.
And the awkward questions raised? Surely why there is not more research on this that gets out of the seminar room and into the public domain, because it needs to be read, understood and discussed
Close shave beckons as 4 bristle for places in final ‘Beard Off’ vote for Beard of Winter 2021
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that competition is bristling for the annual Beard of Winter accolade. The vote is open now and closes at midnight on Friday.
Author Michael Rosen and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales have a narrow lead over actor Brian Blessed and cricket broadcaster Daniel Norcross
The Beard of Winter is the first of four seasonal awards that lead to the Beard of the Year Award in December 2021.
The Beard of Winter focuses both on fuller organic beards, suitable for winter weather, but also on beards that have made an early New Year impact in the public eye.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, competition is bristling for the Beard of Winter, and the result will be a close shave.
The new blended Twitter and web based poll will be in use.
There were two ‘Trim-Off’ rounds from 17-20 January and then from 21-24 January. Each featured four contenders. The top two from each round now feature in a final ‘Beard-Off’ vote from 25-29th January
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said that she doesn’t think Boris Johnson’s forthcoming trip to Scotland is an ‘essential journey’. One wonders if Ms Sturgeon thinks a Johnson trip to the country could ever be regarded as essential but there is a specific point. Surely whatever Johnson is planning to do in the country can be done via Zoom, unless of course it’s a liaison to meet a new mistress with a view to adding to the unknown tally of Johnson offspring.
A good deal of what Johnson has done since he became Prime Minister has no doubt helped the continued political pressure for another Scottish Independence Referendum and the high level of support the SNP enjoys despite a number of not always that well reported ‘issues’.
Even so Johnson and Scotland have never really worked. In 2006 he stood as Rector of Edinburgh University (a post Winston Churchill once held). Johnson secured 200 nominations and his campaign reportedly (Sonia Purnell Just Boris) including signing a female students bare chest.
However his support for Top Up student fees saw a campaign against him ‘Bog Off Boris, you Top-Up Tory’. Johnson had beer thrown over him but again reportedly thanked those involved for ‘refreshing’ him.
He came third to a Green member of the Scottish Parliament Mark Ballard and the former Editor of the Scotsman and Old Etonian Magnus Linklater.
The vote to reject Johnson the Tory in Scotland confounded his London focused campaign team and one suspects Johnson remains puzzled why he is not liked in Scotland..
In more recent times (2020) Johnson managed a controversial ‘camping’ holiday in Scotland where he damaged a farmers field he had pitched a tent on without permission. Most recently he has agreed a Brexit deal that hasnt done any favours to the Scottish seafood industry.
As a positive advert for the 1707 union he seems to fall rather short.
My late father Graham Flett served in the Durham Light Infantry during World War Two and was one of those who was at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in 1945. He never spoke in any detail about what he had seen but it stayed with him for all of his life. He was a regular at Anti-Nazi League protests
Speaking at a London Socialist Historians seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in October 2017 the historian Merilyn Moos reminded of the scale of the Holocaust
Jews were not the only people targeted by the Nazis during the
Communities Minister Robert Jenrick announced in the Sunday Telegraph in mid-January and subsequently in the House of Commons that he plans to make any changes to historic statues and monuments subject to planning laws.
The considerable number of statues and monuments that are already protected (mainly against property developers) are already subject to law. The historian Dan Hicks tweeted that he doubted that statues which are not already covered would be found to be worthy of doing so.
This did not stop Jenrick from using Trumpian language. Anti-racist protesters were described as a ‘baying mob’ while democratically elected local councillors became a ‘cultural committee’ of town hall militants and woke worthies”. If we were to lower ourselves to Jenrick’s level what he is actually proposing is to over-ride local democratic processes with decisions by a coterie of racist Tory Ministers.
Jenrick is right that British history should not be censored. I wasn’t aware that anyone was arguing this but just in case its worth keeping in mind the family history of Tory MP Richard Drax who has been less than keen for his links to Barbados sugar plantations (which he now owns) to be in the public domain (although they now are).
The wider point is that Jenrick was trying to launch the first Tory culture war of 2021. In this case perhaps the aim was to distract from his own woeful performance as Housing Minister which is what he is actually meant to be doing.
It wasn’t a very good attempt as his statement rambled on about plans to protect the wider built environment and cited the late poet and architectural critic John Betjeman as an example of the model he wanted to follow. While Betjeman may have seemed like a Tory in fact he realised that the battle against profit led developers required a wider approach. He appeared for example in a Labour Party TV broadcast in 1962 talking about the matter.
Further bad news for Jenrick came when the City of London Corporation, not normally associated with left-wing socialist views, announced the results of a consultation it had run on Black Lives Matter. It plans to remove two statues of politicians at the London Guildhall who had associations with the slave trade. It is also reviewing other statues and place names in the Square Mile of the City.
Meanwhile across the Atlantic in the days before the end of his Presidency on January 20th Donald Trump published a document on US history from a body he set up in autumn 2020-the 1776 Commission. It was a response to the earlier 1619 Project which had focused on issues of racism and slavery in US history. Perhaps needless to say given it was Trump none of the people responsible for the document were historians. They were all right-wing ideologues.
Joe Biden talked in his Inauguration Address about the need to tackle ‘systemic racism’ in the US. While socialists will query given his previous record as Barack Obama’s Vice President how much he actually will do about it.
One thing that was done however on the day Biden took office was that the 1776 Commission report which the Trump White House had posted on-line just a few days before to be taken down.
Its wording sounded curiously familiar. It claimed the US was ‘the most just and glorious country in all of human history”–the nation’s great founding truth. But anti-Americans are disregarding this great patriotic truth’. Replace US with UK and you have the present UK Government’s position.
Taking down statues is hardly an important task for 2021 but calling out right-wing attempts to rewrite history remains important.
It is 40 years (Monday 26th January 1981) since the ‘gang of four’ Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams made the Limehouse Declaration and formed the Council for Social Democracy.
Ultimately they split from Labour to form the SDP which in due course became what is today the Liberal Democrats.
Self-evidently I was never a fan and the SDP had elements in it that were Cold War, anti-Communist, Atlanticists who was I particularly un-fond of. It also had however numbers who might arguably be characterised as Fabians, who believed in equality, and progress and were keen to see these things actually happen in British society.
Tony Benn noted of the supporters of the Council for Social Democracy ‘it was the middle class coming out in support of a break from the Labour Party’.(7th February 1981). He also noted that the ‘BBC is now the voice of Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins’ underlining that the left’s focus on the media has a long history. There was without doubt sympathy for the SDP in the BBC (some might reflect it was better than its historic tendency to accommodate Tory views) but it was also of course rather newsworthy as the first split in Labour since 1931.
While 2019 saw fresh attempts to reconfigure what is now known as centrist politics at the Parliamentary level they gathered little support and the Liberal Democrats poll ratings remain resolutely in single figures.
The 40th anniversary was marked by a piece in the Times by current LibDem leader Ed Davey and a statement by the party currently known as the SDP whose politics have nothing at all to do with sentiments of the Limehouse Declaration.
It is a little too early to understand the historical impact of Limehouse but some might think it was more of a moment than a movement.
The move to replace the existing $20 note which features former President and slave owner Andrew Jackson had been blocked by Trump who unsurprisingly was a fan of Jackson.
As the BBC report the logistics of producing a new note means it will be a good while before it actually happens but it will no doubt annoy ‘anti-woke’ activists on both sides of the Atlantic.
It is probably best seen as an outcrop of the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement but don’t expect a UK banknote to appear featuring Mary Seacole or William Cuffay in the near future.
Of course the symbolism of a $20 note on the poorest Americans, often ethnic minorities, who have little money, will quite rightly be mixed. Recognising the history of slavery is important but so is dealing in practice with its substantial legacy.
COVID Mortality amongst the low paid: yet more people the Government has never heard of
Figures released by the Office of National Statistics on 25th January underline that dreadful as the COVID death toll has been the impact has been disproportionately on the lower paid.
Table 6 shows that while 11 Chief Executives died 107 Care home workers did over the same 9 months. 118 large goods vehicle drivers, 140 taxi drivers and 209 security guards also lost their lives due to COVID.
These are low paid jobs that cant be done from home and the Government’s attitude on self -isolation and benefits mean that all too have often they are in work when they shouldn’t be.
Its not something that features in Ministerial press briefings.
