Kmflett's Blog

Crisis, what crisis? Christmas 1973

Christmas 2023 is one of crisis for many, albeit a crisis engineered mainly by the Tory Government.

Is it then the worst Christmas ever? Here it must be remembered that the media has very little or no historical memory and it is getting worse. Nearly all journalists including those who are meant to be ‘serious’ are now more interested in clickbait stories of the moment rather than context.

Let’s think back to Christmas 1973, still very much in living memory.

Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody was No.1 in the charts (No.2 was by someone we don’t mention anymore).

Yet there was a huge crisis.

The miners (the UK still relied heavily on coal for power) had begun an overtime ban and Tory Prime Minister Heath had announced a 3 Day working week starting in the New Year. This actually happened in practice. The power went off with little specific warning for lengthy periods and that was that until it came back.

Meanwhile the price of oil had doubled in a matter of weeks.

Tory industry minister and ex-industrialist John Davies told his family, ‘We must enjoy this Christmas for it may be our last one.’

In his diary, Tony Benn noted:

‘Dinner with Wilfred Brown, head of Glacier Metals, who believes we are headed for a slump and food riots and that there must be a National Government… At the Commons I saw John Biffen who told me Enoch Powell is waiting for the call.’

Heath addressed the nation and said ‘we shall have a harder Christmas than we have known since the war’

In the end the miners announced a strike, and Heath called an election on the basis of whether the Tories or the trade unions governed Britain. The voters decided it wasn’t Heath.

Beard Liberation Front

21^st December

Winter Solstice heralds start of seasonal beard growth

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that the Winter Solstice on 22nd December, the shortest day, is also the start of the traditional winter beard growing season.

A beard started on the Winter Solstice is traditionally left untrimmed until Twelfth Night.

The Solstice is traditionally marked by Druids at Stonehenge, often with significant facial hair on display.

The day is traditionally one of celebration for beard wearers who take the chance to toast their hirsuteness with an appropriate beverage.

BLF organiser Keith Flett said, December 22nd marks the start of the beard growing season. The reality is that at this time of year it is simply too dark in the morning to shave

The Ambridge Socialist

20^th December

70 years of class struggle in Borsetshire

Archers slavery: Moss sells the slave workers. His arrest beckons

Philip Moss has sold ‘his’ three slave workers to gangmaster intermediary Victoria as he continues to try and cover his tracks and move to Wales.

The BBC broadcast a discussion between the three slave workers this week which revealed them to be people with learning difficulties:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/disability-55259019?fbclid=IwAR3mT8M0_rH4HN9WlYLCWckr3ANQBQ0a5CHcns4K1Q7oN2VHoE7Q4XB3Kgg

This provoked considerable discussion but underlined the point that as workers and human beings they should not be owned by anyone and be able to take advantage of the protections that the law provides.

Moss’s decision to move is high risk and surely even Sergeant Knacker Burns will now twig there is something not quite right in the state of Ambridge

10 years since David Archer murdered Nigel Pargetter

It is 10 years since SATC when David Archer pushed Nigel Pargetter off the roof of his ancestral home Lower Loxley to his death. The matter remains controversial but appearing on DumTeeDum on 18^th December Pargetter (Graham Seed) confirmed that he had indeed been pushed by Archer

Tracy doesn’t go to the Maldives

Roman is off to play King Lear in the Maldives for a year. Tracy isn’t.

Grundy Turkey crisis resolved by appeal to Oliver Sterling’s moral economy

Johnson has no set political perspective, it just depends on what is convenient, but he had a period as Mayor of London when he espoused the moral economy, a patrician approach to the poor.

Oliver Sterling, owner of Grey Gables, is a consistent moral economist however, and this week saw him bidding for turkeys at an auction to cover a shortfall of the traditional Grundy birds. Not exactly the politics of the Ambridge Socialist but compared to Johnson 2020 style decent behaviour

I was sorry to read today of the death of the Canadian marxist scholar Leo Panitch

Panitch wrote widely but he had a specific role in the British left and perhaps in particular the discussions about what an effective socialist politics might be and how that related to the Labour Party and to the various efforts down the decades to build and sustain movements independent of it.

He took over a key role in the annual Socialist Register which had been founded by Ralph Miliband and John Saville as part of the 1960s New Left.

In the Guardian letter below, remembering John Saville (24th June 2009) Panitch well sums up the role the Socialist Register played and plays and the political tradition that he stood in

Leo Panitch writes: Not long before I took over from John Saville (obituary, 16 June) as co-editor with Ralph Miliband of the Socialist Register, I heard him deliver an unforgettable keynote address at a conference held in Winnipeg in 1983 to celebrate the centenary of Marx’s death. Particularly vivid was his description of how the soldiers in his army unit in India cast their votes in the 1945 general election. Virtually all of them – officers included – voted Labour. When the news of the landslide victory arrived, the atmosphere was one of revolutionary excitement and enthusiasm. The next day, he added, “the counter-revolution began”. He would later chronicle it in his remarkable history of Ernest Bevin’s first two years as foreign secretary, The Politics of Continuity. The steely realism that always tempered his socialist commitment was always in evidence. When he and Miliband founded the Socialist Register in 1964, they committed themselves to a type of scholarship and politics that would, through a critique of communism and labourism, help steer the left in the direction of a new independent socialism. Their central guiding principle, as they put it in the first volume of the Register, was that “dogmatic reiteration cannot, any more than crass empiricism, provide answers to the problems of the present”.

Beard Liberation Front

19th December

Contact BLF Organiser Keith Flett 07803 167266

Beard Liberation Front says Beard Power sees Bill Bailey dance his way to Strictly 2020 winner

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has congratulated veteran beard wearer Bill Bailey on winning Strictly Come Dancing 2020 with his dancing partner Oti Mabuse

The campaigners say that Bill Bailey brought a new sense of beard power to the dance floor with some amazing dances.

The comedian and now dance champion is currently in the ‘Beard-Off’ vote for the final Beard of the Year vote on 23^rd and 24^th December

Beard of the Year will be announced on 28th December.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we send hirsute congratulations to Bill Bailey and Oti Mabuse. At this difficult time beard power has proved victorious.

Beard of the Year 2020 Shortlist

Michael Rosen (winner Beard of Summer & Autumn)

Michael Sheen (winner Beard of Wales)

Peter Coles (winner Beard of Ireland)

Richard Osman (winner Beard of Spring)

David Olusoga (historian)

Stormzy (musician)

Bill Bailey (comedian)

Lenny Henry (actor)

Marx and Engels at Christmas 1874-79

Collected Works Vol. 45

Below are references to Christmas and the New Year in the correspondence of Marx and Engels in the second half of the 1870s. The correspondence is far from complete but it does suggest that while both Marx and Engels marked the New Year, it was Engels who gave Christmas presents. That is obviously no surprise as he had the money to do so, while Marx didn’t.

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht 7^th Jan 1875

Happy New Year!

Engels to Philipp Pauli 16^th Dec 1876

Yesterday I sent you, carriage paid, per CONTINENTAL PARCELS EXPRESS and thereon per German Imperial parcel post, a crate addressed to: Dr Pauli, Mannheim (Chemical Works, Rheinau),

Germany, containing a PLUM PUDDING for your wife, a currant cake baked for you by my wife, a book, a small box of handkerchiefs and a small ink-pot for Pumps….

…..The small crate also contains some Christmas evergreen, holly with its ritual red berries, for sticking into the pudding when it’s dished up. The holly’s right on top, so that the customs men get their fingers pricked.

Engels to Hermann Engels 18^th Dec 1876

 … Love to Emma and the children, and the compliments of the season

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht 9^th January 1877

D’abord,” a Happy New Year to you and family and all our friends

Marx to Thomas Allsopp 1^st Jan 1878

I hope one good thing the new year will do—act beneficently upon your health… The whole family send you their new year wishes and you know that they come from the heart

Engels to Johann Becker  11^th Jan 1878

Avant tout, a Happy New Year to you, and may it bring you less in the way of troubles and burdens than the previous one!

Engels to Johann Becker 18^th Dec 1879

…..So you’ve deprived me of the pleasure of giving you an unexpected Christmas treat. Well then, I have drawn a money order for five pounds sterling, against which, according to the rate here, 126 frs should be paid to you over there — as will, no doubt, be done without delay.

Campaign for Real Santas

Media Release 19th December

Contact Keith Flett 07803 16726

MICHAEL ROSEN VOTED BEST ORGANIC SANTA 2020

The Campaign for Real Santas which believes that only Santas with genuine, organic or knitted beards should be deputies for Santa, world famous for his organic beard, has said that in the on-line poll for the best Organic Santa 2020, author, broadcaster and Arsenal fan Michael Rosen has bearded Brian Blessed for the annual honour.

Michael Rosen represents both the bonhomie but also the gravitas that any genuine Santa has and is also on the shortlist for Beard of the Year 2020. He scored 66% of the vote with runner-up Brian Blessed on 23%.

The campaign says that there are still far too many Santas with fake beards around, when genuine Santas with real organic beards are available

The campaigners have urged parents and children to visually check the beards of Santas they encounter as a test as to whether they are in the presence of a real Santa or not. If the Santa is not real and the beard is made of cotton wool a visual inspection should make this clear.

CFRS organiser Keith Flett said, when it comes to the best Organic Santa we were looking for real facial hair of course but also someone who can represent the complexities of Santa in a positive way. Of course Michael Rosen is known as an author and a broadcaster but in 2020 perhaps in particular he has been rightly voted the best Organic Santa of the year.

The vote was open for 24 hours from 00.01 on Friday 18^th December

Shortlist

Philip Ardagh, author

Brian Blessed, actor

Bob Dylan, musician

Michael Rosen, author, broadcaster & Arsenal fan

Liz Truss launches culture war on equalities via Foucault

Equalities Minister Liz Truss has launched another Tory Culture War on equalities in a speech on 17^th December.

It didn’t of course actually say much specific except that the Tories plan to end unconscious bias training in the Civil Service.

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/fight-for-fairness

One entertaining passage referred to the late French philosopher Michel Foucault who died in 1984.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault

Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish has relevance in 2020 in particular. However this wasn’t what Truss was on about.

Unfortunately the reference has been deemed to be party political and not allowed in an official speech and cut from the version now on-line. The text is below.

Foucault was a student of another French philosopher Louis Althusser, the nemesis of English Marxist historian E P Thompson. Indeed in the Poverty of Theory, Thompson’s attack on Althusser, Foucault does get a passing mention.

Thompson is critical of both Althusser and Foucault’s structuralism. He argues:

One can study how concepts are engendered one after the other within determined categories. But neither time itself nor, consequently history, can be made the object of a concept’

Thompson’s point is that it is not structures but people that make history.

Truss’s argument is that equalities agendas have focused too much on polices and statements and not enough on grappling with the problems faced by individual people.

No doubt but that doesn’t mean the policies need to be abandoned. They are there as a way of holding power to account if it doesn’t actually act on them.

Judging by the very unequal composition of employees in Truss’s own department it could be a good place to start.

Truss on Foucault

“While we were taught about racism and sexism, there was too little time spent making sure everyone could read and write.

“These ideas have their roots in postmodernist philosophy – pioneered by Foucault – that puts societal power structures and labels ahead of individuals and their endeavours.

“In this school of thought, there is no space for evidence, as there is no objective view – truth and morality are all relative.

“Rather than promote policies that would have been a game-changer for the disenfranchised like better education and business opportunities, there was a preference for symbolic gestures.”