Kmflett's Blog

Beard Liberation Front

9^th September

Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

Campaigners say anti-pogonophobia training essential for Johnson’s ‘Rule of Six’

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that while it supports the Government’s new ‘Rule of Six’ limiting the number of people who can meet in one group indoors or outdoors implementation will require a programme of anti-pogonophobia training.

The campaigners say that this is a clean-shaven Government, quite unable to tell one person with a beard apart from another. There is a danger that the self-styled COVID-Marshalls and others may see one or two beards and assume there are numbers of them.

The Beard Liberation Front says that beard recognition training is essential for anyone involved in implementing the ‘Rule of Six’ and the BLF stands ready to help out.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, while it is true that beards are omnipresent they are not the same beards. If someone starts seeing multiple beards they need to get help for their pogonophobia

The Campaign for Real Conkers

Media Release. Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

9^th September

Conkers: the ideal game for new social distancing regulations

The Campaign for Real Conkers, that opposes bans on conker playing and unnecessary rules and regulations in games has said that that with the 2020 conker season now open it is the ideal game for new social distancing regulations in England that will apply from 14^th September.

Early indications are that 2020 will see a good crop of conkers and windy weather has already seen some fall from trees.

The campaigners say that while they are maintaining their usual ‘anything goes’ approach to conker games, to encourage people to play without arbitrary rules, in 2020 some COVID-19 safety guidelines will apply.

Campaign Organiser Keith Flett said, conkers requires only two people and they would normally be socially distanced. Our 2020 guidelines however provide additional safety measures. We hope to see Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson playing a game of conkers to underline how safe it is.

Guide on how to play real conkers safely in 2020

1] Select your conker. Do this yourself. DO NOT use a conker provided by someone else who may give you a poor specimen.

2] Do not allow your chosen conker to be handled by others and once selected immediately sanitise it.

3] There is no specific kind of conker that makes a good game winner. Large conkers may more easily splinter for example. Some prefer conkers with flat and sharp edges

4] You may use the conker ‘as is’ known as ‘organic’. Alternatively you may seek to harden it by baking it, soaking it in vinegar etc. There is no guarantee that an artificially enhanced conker will perform any better than an organic one.

5] Drill a small hole through the conker. A nail will often achieve this. Again you must do this yourself

6] Thread the conker through the hole you have drilled. A strong chord, perhaps a shoelace is best

7] You are now ready to play.

8] Please wear a mask when playing and make sure your opponent is also wearing one

9] Make sure that the chord is long enough to allow you to stand at least 1 metre plus away from your opponent. This would generally be the case as space is required for the conker swing.

10] Players take alternate turns to try and hit and destroy their opponent’s conker

11] Those with poor aim may hit the knuckles of their opponent more often than the conker so you may wish to wear gloves.

12] If the conker does come into contact with an opponent please sanitise it before a further round

13] The winner is the player who determines their opponents conker unusable in further rounds, usually by causing it to splinter into two or more pieces

14] Play safely and enjoy!

7^th September 1857. Engels visits Portsmouth & is not impressed by the military

In September 1857 Engels spent several weeks in Ryde on the Isle of Wight.

As he noted it was only 30 minutes journey to Portsmouth. He wrote to Marx with his impressions on 8^th September.

He noted that ‘In Portsmouth one might almost be at home in Germany. One is barely aware of the NAVY in the town which by contrast is lorded over by the subaltern, the false dignity, the affectation of reserve, and the strangulated English that goes to make up your OFFICER and GENTLEMAN. Moreover, almost everyone goes around in uniform.

Engels watched the 47^th Regiment who had been in the Crimea and were newly back from the Mediterranean drilling.

He noted that ‘the Commanding Officer was very calm but as with us there was there was cursing and swearing within the companies… A Prussian lieutenant’s comment would be: the chaps lack drill.. the modern stuff either not introduced at all or rottenly done

Engels of course was known as ‘The General’ had some military experience and wrote on military matters

Priti Patel, E P Thompson, Extinction Rebellion & the Rule of Law

No one could ever accuse Priti Patel of being a liberal or for that matter of being competent.

Her latest outburst (extract  from Guardian report below) brands Extinction Rebellion as ‘criminals’. That is her way of describing people exercising a democratic right to protest. As the senior police officers she was addressing noted there is no need for new laws to address ER protests (there are numbers already- properly used or not, that is for the Courts not Ms Patel) and neither do they constitute criminal activity because while they may annoy authority they are not violent.

She said XR was “attempting to thwart the media’s right to publish without fear nor favour”, and claimed their campaign of civil disobedience was “a shameful attack on our way of life, our economy and the livelihoods of the hard working majority”.

“I refuse point blank to allow that kind of anarchy on our streets,” the home secretary told the virtual conference.

“The very criminals who disrupt our free society must be stopped. And together we must all stand firm against the guerilla tactics of Extinction Rebellion.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/08/extinction-rebellion-criminals-threaten-uks-way-of-life-says-priti-patel

The historian E P Thompson took a view of the Rule of Law in his book Whigs and Hunters and a minority one for a Marxist as he recognised.

His view was that while law was an instrument of class power, as Priti Patel undoubtedly sees it, it was also something that was contested with conclusions in specific matters not a foregone conclusion. In that space rights to protest and liberties exist. Ms Patel doesn’t like that and may try to change the balance of it, but the weight of history is against her.

Thompson wrote in a brief conclusion to Whigs and Hunters, a book about late eighteenth and early nineteenth century battles over the rights to land and land use:

We reach then, not a simple conclusion (law=class power) but a complex and contradictory one. On the one hand.. the law did mediate existent class relations to the advantage of the rulers; not only is this so, but as the century advanced the law became a superb instrument by which these rulers were able to impose new definitions of property to their even greater advantage.. On the other hand the law mediated these class relations through legal forms, which imposed again and again, inhibitions upon the actions of these rulers

Historical work in progress

Beard Liberation Front

8th September

Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

Barbe de Tour de France vote bristles on towards Paris

France’s Kevin Reza

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that it continues to keep the 2020 Tour de France under close review for all matters beard related.

The 2020 Tour was delayed from earlier in the summer but is still taking place at a time when COVID-19 infections in France are rising.

Criticism has been made that the event is driven primarily by commercial and broadcasting interests rather than a central focus on participant and spectator safety.

The campaigners say they are monitoring the daily stages of the Tour and the Beard of the Tour 2020 vote is now open with a winner to be announced on 19th September.

Beards have been particularly controversial in the Tour with a Belgian team banning them on the grounds of hygiene at one point.

Conversely German rider Simon Geschke has his own beard balm while France’s Thibaut Pinot may have suffered some follicle damage after he fell off his bike on Saturday and subsequent back issues saw him drop out of contention. He remains on the Barbe de Tour poll though.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, each day more beards are challenging in the Tour and our beard experts are keeping a close watch on the leading folliclists.

As often in Beard Liberation Front polls the vote is not so much about winning beards but those that make the positive public impact during the race. However clearly there is a focus on front runners as others, no matter how impressive their beard, may make less impact.

Barbe de Tour de France 2020

Sagan (Slo)

Getschke (Ger)

AlaPhilippe (Fra)

Cousin (Fra)

Soupe (Fra)

Roglic (Slo)

Pinot (Fra)

Herrada (Spa)

Yates (GB)

Reza (France)

Hirschi (Swi)

Beard Liberation Front

6^th September

Media Release

Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

Campaigners say new BBC boss Tim Davie must act on pogonophobia

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that new BBC Director General Tim Davie must act on the issue of pogonophobia- prejudice against the hirsute- at the national broadcaster.

When presenting Newsnight on BBC2 Jeremy Paxman in the autumn of 2013, wore a beard for several months before giving in to pressure to shave it off in early 2014, called out the BBC’s pogonophobia.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-25635272

However the number of hirsute newsreaders remains, at best, very limited, underlining that at senior levels at New Broadcasting House, there is still a view that people who wear beards are hiding something and cant be trusted. This is one of the oldest pogonophobic prejudices.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, while as far as we can check Tim Davie doesn’t appear to have ever had a beard his speech to BBC employees in Cardiff does indicate a willingness to make sure that the BBC is more inclusive of Britain in 2020 than it has been. That must mean not just what people say but how they appear as well.

Tim Davie’s Cardiff speech.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/speeches/2020/tim-davie-intro-speech#:~:text=Speech%20by%20Tim%20Davie%2C%20Director,on%20Thursday%203%20September%202020.&text=Good%20afternoon%20everybody.,the%20very%20heart%20of%20Cardiff.

Professor Niall Ferguson’s view of TikTok is bad history

Prof Niall Ferguson is a right-wing historian. He studied under the late Prof Norman Stone known  as ‘Stone Age’ at Oxford, who was a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher.

Ferguson has written thought provoking history including an interesting book on counter-factualism- that is what might have happened in history rather than what did. One can read his history without having to sign on to his invariably right-wing views.

Norman Stone was an historian who enjoyed, hugely, promoting controversial and unpopular views, whether they were soundly based or not. Ferguson has learnt the art and its made him a popular commentator in the broadsheet media.

He currently writes a syndicated column for Bloomberg.

His latest effort looks at the video sharing App TikTok. For those not familiar this allows users to upload short videos of themselves and to build up a library of posts, visible to other users. TikTok has Chinese origins but is owned independently in countries around the world where it operates including the UK.

Tik Tok doesn’t work in the same way as Twitter or Facebook. Rather its based on AI (Artificial Intelligence) which allows it to build up a record of what has been posted by an individual. Ferguson claims that ultimately China could use this to track and control people.

Why China would want to do that is not explained but it suggests a Trumpian Sinophobia, fear of China, based on the reality that the President has spent the last 4 years wrecking America’s status as a world power, while China has been developing as a significant presence.

Before the 1917 Russian Revolution, the secret police had the largest amount of files on those they deemed to be enemies of the Government of any country. Ultimately this didn’t save the Tsarist regime. Even if one follows Ferguson’s Sinophobia it’s bad history to suggest the conclusion that he does.

Rather Ferguson is making a political point, underwriting Trump’s plans to ban TikTok in the US

Ferguson admits in the article that, twitter aside, he isn’t familiar with social media, but in the piece he uses a couple of entertaining references to how such culture wars have worked in the past. They are similar to the way Eric Hobsbawm illustrated historical points with topical examples.

Hobsbawm’s examples were sharply drawn, Ferguson’s less so.

He points to the CIA influence tours of black American jazz musicians to Eastern Europe in the 1960s as part of an earlier culture war. The initiative fell apart as the world saw from Rosa Parks on the realities of racism in the US.

Perhaps the US culture Ferguson refers to did persuade French youth that the Red Army wasn’t the way forward though? He suggests that after the revolt of 1968, the promotion of rock music, jeans and a wider lifestyle got young people to love free market capitalism.

The more practical impact it had on the world was to inflict Johnny Hallyday on us, a sort of French copy of Elvis Presley.

Ferguson writes in the piece

In 1986, the French leftist philosopher and comrade-in-arms of Che Guevara, Jules Régis Debray, lamented, “There is more power in rock music, videos, blue jeans, fast food, news networks and TV satellites than in the entire Red Army.” The French Left sneered at “Coca-colonization.” But Parisians, too, drank Coke.

As Ferguson must have noticed whether or not the French were drinking coke and enjoying US and UK soul and rock music it hasn’t stopped them protesting.

TikTok is in fact just a video sharing App, although American youth might be forgiven for making generally unfavourable comparisons between Trump regime and the Chinese Government.

This post originally appeared in the Morning Star

Breweries in Tottenham from Gripper Bros (1760) to Redemption (2010)

Bell Brewery 696 Tottenham High Rd N17 (Brewery History Society)

Redemption Brewery in North Tottenham (very near Spurs) recently tweeted that they were the first new brewery in the area for almost 100 years. In fact I think they were the first for 107 years since the Tottenham Lager Brewery in South Tottenham closed in 1903.

The tweet brought a query about Gripper Bros another Tottenham brewery based at 696 High Rd N17 (also near Spurs). The Bell Brewery opened in 1760 and was taken over by Whitbread in 1896. Whitbread used it as bottling storage area. At that time they were promoting a huge increase in production of their bottled beers- which were bottle conditioned at that point.

Brewing may have continued for some decades after 1896- the records are in the London Metropolitan Archives and Grippers owned an impressive number of pubs in the wider North London area, a few of which are still with us. I suspect that they became Whitbread pubs after 1896.

Gripper Bros also owned the Stag Brewery, Chase Side, Enfield.

Whitbread’s used the buildings for storage until 1983.

Gripper Bros pub estate

http://breweryhistory.com/wiki/index.php?title=List_of_Gripper_Brothers_pubs

History of Tottenham Breweries

There were 2 local brewers in 1824 and 5, including Jeremiah Freeman and son, in 1845. (fn. 112) Frederick Freeman and John Fullagar owned Tottenham Brewery and Gripper Bros. owned the Bell Brewery in 1862. (fn. 113) Both firms survived in 1890, when Otto Vollmann managed the Tottenham Lager Beer Brewery and Ice Factory (fn. 114) for a German company which had bought Grove House on the closure of the school. (fn. 115) Grippers’ premises were bought by Whitbread & Co. in 1896 and turned into a bottling depot in the same year, although some of the older brewery buildings, on the east side of High Road south of Park Lane, were still used in 1924. (fn. 116) Fremlin Bros. had a bottling depot and stores at no. 20 White Hart Lane from c. 1908 until the 1950s. (fn. 117)

Victoria County History

There is more detail about the Tottenham Lager Brewery here:

The Tottenham lager brewery operated in the late nineteenth century and closed very early in the twentieth century.

http://zythophile.co.uk/2010/05/24/so-what-was-the-first-purpose-built-lager-brewery-in-the-uk/

The only obvious thing left now are the gates, although it’s possible that some buildings and a chimney on what was the site of the brewery may be related to it.

More details can be discovered in Gambrinus Waltz by master beer writers Boak and Bailey

https://boakandbailey.com/2015/04/gambrinus-waltz-first-review/

Beard Liberation Front

^8th September

Campaigners say beard & mask etiquette is a key autumn issue

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that as autumn draws on and beard wearers often let their beards develop organically, the question of beard and mask etiquette has been brought into focus.

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has posted a picture of a new mask on social media which effectively covers 95% of his award winning beard.

The Beard Liberation Front has previously had an informal view that some of the beard should be left in view beyond the mask.

Clarification has been issued about whether any part of the beard to be seen outside of a mask might be confused with clothing or chest follicles. The ruling is that any beard hair beyond the mask is valid, the length of it is not relevant.

The campaigners say that these questions are ones that much exercise pogonophobes- beard haters. Some claim that the mask cannot be worn effectively unless the beard is shaved off. This is only true for medical masks not those in general day to day use.

Others claim that the mask must cover the entire beard. Again this is not true. The purpose of the mask is to cover the nose and mouth. Beards cannot pass on COVID-19.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we do think the mask, while covering the nose and mouth, might reasonably allow some of the beard to show. How much is shown is entirely up to the wearer.

However Jeremy Corbyn is clearly taking a different approach and his opinion counts amongst beard wearers.

Morning Star 5th September

It has been reported that one of those who responded to Dominic Cummings call for ‘weirdos’ to join the Civil Service has subsequently been dismissed for tweeting that live rounds should be used against Black Lives Matters protesters. He has subsequently apologised.

It suggests however that the parameters of how the State should approach protests which were set as E P Thompson noted, after Peterloo in August 1819 when 18 people were killed by the Yeomanry and hundreds injured still apply. Different ‘rules’ apply to the treatment of industrial disputes as Thompson again noted- ‘henceforward strikers or agricultural workers might be ridden down or dispersed with violence’. However he suggested, when it came to democratic protest after Peterloo ‘Even Old Corruption, knew, in its heart, that it dare not to do this again’.

However the matter remains current as can be seen by reaction to the Extinction Rebellion protests in early September and before that, and also still current, Black Lives Matter protests.

Newspaper reports have suggested that the Government might classify such activity as ‘criminal’. According to the Murdoch Times (6.9.20) protesters might be treated as ‘saboteurs of democracy’ with new laws designed to criminalise protest.

The voice of reason that is the Metropolitan Police Federation has called for protests in London to be banned.

The Six Acts passed after Peterloo in 1819 aimed to do much the same thing. They did not of course work. Protests grew.

A reminder if it was needed that the democratic right to protest and the parameters that exist around it need to be protected perpetually against the illiberal and authoritarian