Kmflett's Blog

CAMPAIGN FOR REAL SANTAS

Organised by the Beard Liberation Front

Press release 28th November

Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

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Ho Ho Ho: CAMPAIGN FOR REAL (VIRTUAL) SANTAS 2020 LAUNCHES

The Campaign for Real Santas, which promotes Santas with genuine organic beards, has launched its 2020 initiative to promote real Santas with genuine beards by warning people to be aware of absurd false bearded Santas as the busiest pre-Christmas shopping weekends get underway.

The Campaigners say that with unemployment and under-employment amongst mature men over 50, there is absolutely no reason for anyone to use an assistant Santa who does not have a real beard.

At the same time the Campaign is also keen to encourage more female Santas with organic knitted beards.

In 2020 physical contact with Santas is ill advised. Santas may appear virtually or if in person with secure safety arrangements.

Campaigners are urging parents and children to demand that Santas virtual or actual vigorously tug their beards as a definitive test as to whether they are in the presence of a real Santa or not.

CFRS organiser Keith Flett said, we are launching the campaign early again this year but the reason is hopefully obvious to most. Christmas decorations and lights are up in main High Streets and Christmas tat is everywhere. Our task of exposing false bearded Santas is more important than ever.

THREE STEPS TO SPOT A GENUINE SANTA

1 Ask the virtual Santa to tug their beard. If it comes away, then the Santa is FAKE

2 If the beard remains intact ask the virtual Santa to tug their beard again. If the Santa swears then they are genuine. If they simply repeat a ‘ho ho ho’ mantra they are FAKE

3 The Campaign for Real Santas says that genuine Santas must have just the right mix of bonhomie and grumpiness and a real organic beard.

Notes

The Organic Santa of 2020 will be named on December 18th

The Campaign for Real Santas is organised by the Beard Liberation Front

Black Friday in 2023 is the day after the Thanksgiving festival in the US and a time when commercial enterprises discount stock, marking arguably the real start of the pre-Xmas sales season such as it is this year.

In recent times it has spread significantly to the UK even now into some of the upper echelons of UK retail.

Black Friday has a quite different meaning in British history however referring to the date, 15th April 1921, when transport unions refused to back miners action against wage reductions. This was part of the precursor of the industrial drama that was the 1926 General Strike.

Another impact of Black Friday was the formation of the General Council of the TUC…

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/themes/black-friday-tuc.htm

Wiki on Black Friday

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(1921)

Engels at 200: beard wearer, Pilsner drinker, activist, theoretician, revolutionary

28^th November marks the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich Engels and it is being widely marked.

Engels wrote a landmark volume on the working class in Manchester 1844, much admired by Marx, and was an active participant in revolutionary events in Bavaria and Prussia in 1848/9. He carried the nickname ‘The General’ for his military knowledge and writing. He was of course for some years a Manchester businessman in the family business but throughout an active collaborator with Marx. After Marx’s death in 1883 Engels extended the research and impact of his friends work as well as producing some work of his own.

Some of this has been controversial amongst those who stand in the Marxist tradition but in a short appreciation the key thing to underline is Engels centrality to that tradition.

The fact that he both understood and was partly responsible for Marx’s perspectives is well summed up in the extract below:

Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction. But when it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error was permissible. Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people think they have fully understood a new theory and can apply it without more ado from the moment they have assimilated its main principles, and even those not always correctly. And I cannot exempt many of the more recent “Marxists” from this reproach, for the most amazing rubbish has been produced in this quarter, too. . . .

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21.htm

As perhaps might be expected there are those who seek to draw attention away from the continued importance of such a perspective. The former Labour MP Tristram Hunt has written a partial but entertaining biography of Engels.

Writing in the Observer in November he did emphasise the political importance of Engels writings but underlined that above all Engels should be seen as a bon viveur. A lover of beer, wine and good food. Indeed Engels was all of that (as was Marx) though sadly his recipe for lobster salad has not survived.

While that was true Engels was also a serious revolutionary. It’s not his taste in drink and food that matters in 2020 but his ideas and his politics.

Engels was a figure of profound historical and philosophical significance. Yet what I discovered, as his biographer, was that his vision of socialism could also be richly uplifting: the grisly, corrupt, anti-intellectual egalitarian Marxism of the 20th century would have horrified him. “The concept of a socialist society as a realm of equality is a one-sided French concept,” he said. Instead, Engels believed in cascading the pleasures of life – food, sex, drink, culture, travel, even fox-hunting – across all classes. Socialism should not be a never-ending Labour party meeting, but a life of enjoyment. The real challenge of living in Manchester was that he could find no “single opportunity to make use of my acknowledged gift for mixing a lobster salad”.

https://www.theguardian.com/focus/2020/nov/08/engels-comes-of-age-the-socialist-who-wanted-a-joyous-life-for-everyone

Tristram Hunt 8^th Nov 2020

This post can be found at an excellent Engels200 site:

Beard Liberation Front

25^th November

Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

Campaigners pay tribute to ‘Beard of God’* Maradona

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has paid tribute to the footballer and football manager Diego Maradona who has died age 60.

During his playing career Maradona scored two goals in the 1986 World Cup quarter final against England, one seen as one of the best ever scored, and the other with the assistance of the ‘Hand of God’

Following Argentina’s victory in that World Cup Maradona travelled to Cuba and had the first of several meetings with the late Fidel Castro. It is thought that over time Maradona came to appreciate Castro’s guidance about the importance of beard power.

Maradona wore a Castro tattoo on his leg and one of Che Guevara on his arm

From 2008 Maradona started a career in football management which he was still pursuing at the time of his death.

At this point Maradona moved decisively away from the clean shaven image of his playing days and, taking on board Castro’s counsel, grew a distinctive and gravitas adding beard. In the last years of his life he was mostly hirsute.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, Maradona was famous for his ‘Hand of God’ goal but in later life he came to appreciate, via exchanges with Castro, that real power came not from above but from beards.

*thanks to Toby Wood, Megan Davies & Michael Rosen

Engels explains his aversion to luxury Cuban cigars

A footnote relating to Engels life as a bon viveur, as Tristram Hunt would have it.

This though is a piece of trivia that Hunt missed in his biography of Engels.

The great beard wearer was (of course) fond of Cuban cigars but developed an aversion to some of the best quality produced.

In a letter from London written on 21^st May 1887 to Laura Lafargue in Paris, Engels explained why:

My eye is considerably better since I have taken to smoke different cigars. There was the determining cause of the whole affair. You may laugh but I shall as soon as I have time to explain to Paul (Lafargue) medicinally that the thing was entirely caused by applying too much guano to the tobacco fields of the Vuelta Abajo.

Vuelta Abajo is a tobacco growing area of Cuba. Guano is no longer used

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

Guano was big business in Victorian times and there was a guano war between Spain, Peru and Chile in 1864

SpyCops Inquiry useful to historians but not much else

The first public hearings of the long running Spycops inquiry earlier in November have a lot of mundane police reports where officers were wasting their own time. They also pointed to police  activity which was at best of doubtful legality, such as intervening in the internal affairs of trade unions, and some that was simply outrageous such as undercover officers fathering children with activists they were spying on.

As Tariq Ali giving evidence noted, given the Establishment background of the chair, restrictions on questioning witnesses and failure to provide some information it seems unlikely that when the inquiry does eventually conclude it will lead to anything particularly useful in terms of addressing the behaviour of the police and the Secret State.

What has been provided however are partial but considerable volumes of reports on left-wing meetings and groups.

In that sense they provide a useful resource for future historians both in terms of what it was the police thought it worth spying on and also digitised documents which are unlikely to have been otherwise retained for posterity. Whether that justifies the resource and expense involved is another matter.

Some detail around the public hearings

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/15/undercover-police-abuse-new-intelligence-bill

Beard Liberation Front

Press Release 24^th November

Contact BLF Organiser Keith Flett 07803 167266

Tory MP Ben Bradley’s place on Parliamentary Beard of Year list to be reviewed

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that it will review whether or not Tory MP Ben Bradley finds a place on the Parliamentary Beard of the Year 2020 shortlist, due to be published on 30^th November.

Mr Bradley won the annual on-line vote in 2019 but the campaigners say that a rebuke from Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King, over the MPs’ inappropriate use of her father’s words on social media has raised questions about his suitability for a list that is designed to promote MPs who have provided a positive image of the hirsute during the year.

The campaigners say that no MP, Mr Bradley or anyone else, is excluded from the shortlist for being controversial since an MP that doesn’t say or do things that provoke reactions good and bad is hardly likely to be in the public eye in the first place. However there is a difference between being controversial and bringing the hirsute into disrepute.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we’re not rushing into any decision. We’ll see what Mr Bradley has to say and come to a view on the shortlist at the weekend.

London Socialist Historians

Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

December 7^th Seminar. Has the role of black leader of London Chartism, William Cuffay, been ignored by historians?

The last London Socialist Historians seminar of the Autumn Term 2020 will take place on Monday 7^th December at 5.30pm via Zoom.

It is free to attend but advance registration is essential. Simply click the link below (the e-replacement for the physical seminar register) submit it and you will be e-mailed the Zoom log-in details.

Dec 7th Keith Flett, 150 years since the death of William Cuffay black leader of London Chartism in 1848. Has he been ignored by socialist historians?

https://sas.sym-online.com/registrationforms/ihrbooking_socialist_history39272/done/

On the 150^th anniversary year of his death in Tasmania the seminar will look at whether the life and influence of the black leader of London Chartism, William Cuffay, has been overlooked by socialist historians.

Spring Term 2021

Seminars for the Spring Term 2021 will once again be on Zoom. They will start in late January 2021 and run until March. Details will be available in the coming weeks.

Pubs, food & licensing restrictions. The Carlisle State Management Scheme 1916-1973

The announcement by Boris Johnson that after December 2^nd pubs in England will only be able to open (subject to a 11pm curfew) if they are in the lowest tier of restrictions will, given no additional support was announced, be very bad news for millions in the hospitality sector.

Pubs in the highest Tier 3 will be shut except for take away while in Tier 2 pubs can serve alcohol with a ‘substantial meal’. The only saving grace here is that while Johnson certainly hasn’t a clue what that means, case law suggests that its not all that substantial.

There is of course no evidence of note as to why all this is needed and the reason for that is because there is none. The moves are motivated by a view that drinking less alcohol is good and drinking none at all is best. A key way of achieving that aim is to shut outlets for alcohol. The name for this is temperance but to be fair to the long history of temperance it is a view held only by the extreme wing of the movement which now appears to hold sway. Historically spirits were seen as the key problem (to a degree correctly) and drinking beer was acceptable.

Given the above it might reasonably be asked, where is your evidence?

It lies with the Carlisle State Management Scheme of pubs which ran from 1916 until 1973:

Revealed the 1916 logic behind 10pm pub closing

Some details of the scheme and how it worked are below.

It was driven by temperance which was strongly influential in Government at the time (as now it would seem)but promoted as something a little wider. The aim was to move pubs away from being hard drinking establishments to places where food was served in decent surroundings and pub games and recreation encouraged. A related aim was to move the pub away from being a male dominated environment and make it welcoming for women and children.

The scheme worked well and delivered substantial profits to the Government. It worked too well for temperance campaigners however who before long were complaining that it was making pubs too popular and encouraging women to drink beer..

Some details of the Carlisle scheme

…strict opening hours were enforced, the managers became government employees on a fixed salary and offered no inducement to increase alcohol sales (in fact, commissions were given to the sales of non-alcoholic drinks and food only). The sale of food was actively encouraged and ‘snug’ bars were re-purposed as eating areas. Pubs were made to be attractive to women and families and table service was introduced

Whenever a cup of tea or coffee or food is asked for it is the duty of managers to meet the customers’ requirements, providing that these are reasonable…This applies to both town and country houses. In country houses in particular Managers should endeavour to cultivate a reputation for good catering in the tearooms specifically set aside for the purpose

Carlisle & District State Management Scheme.  Regulation 10

The Cumberland Inn, Carlisle