Kmflett's Blog

Dominic Cummings: an historian from the (Norman)Stone Age

Norman Stone with characteristic cigarette

Dominic Cummings is in the news again and each time it happens his reputation for doubtful (at best)views and activities is enhanced.

On this occasion Cummings has been attending meeting of SAGE which is meant to be a group of scientists who advise the Government on COVID-19

Cummings might qualify as an expert in one thing- history. He has first from Oxford in ancient and modern history.

His tutor for the modern history part of the degree was the late Norman Stone who died last year. My obituary is below.

A rather sharper appreciation was provided by Richard Evans in the Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/25/norman-stone-obituary

Norman Stone 8 March 1941 – 19 June 2019

Norman Stone the right-wing historian has died aged 78.

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

Stone, known in his time as Stone Age, was a Thatcherite who both wrote speeches for the Tory leader and wrote a controversial column in the Sunday Times. In a sense he is part of social history himself now.

A history Professor at Oxford in the 1980s he played a broadly similar role in terms of promoting right-wing ideas, historically focused, as Niall Ferguson now does. However Ferguson’s reputation is arguably rather more substantial than Stone’s was.

Stone had a solid background in research history and is a reminder if one is needed that the historical Establishment in Britain is, on the whole, very much on the right, despite the advances of women’s history and the more limited impact of socialist history.

Stone was known to like a drink and I don’t recall ever seeing him when he did not appear to have had one or two. However he was a speaker who you could not but engage with, pithy points and thoughts kept on coming.

I remember him particularly at a History, the Nation and the Schools conference organised by History Workshop at Ruskin College in 1990. I criticised the decision to invite Stone (The History Workshop Movement, History Workshop Journal 1991). The substance of my criticism was that while the presence of Stone provided some entertaining historical theatre, it possibly didn’t help a more serious discussion on the subject of history teaching in schools, a subject MPs were debating again in Parliament this week.

He leaves a legacy of some decent historical research and a reminder that it is not just the left who politicise history but the right too.

Beard Liberation Front

Media Release

25^th April

Contact: Keith Flett 07803 167266

Lockdown beards set to become permanent as Unilever reports reduced demand for razors

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that it looks like the lockdown beards numbers of men have grown while working from home in recent weeks are set to become a permanent feature of life.

Unilever has reported a decline in razor sales due to people ‘shaving less’ and expects the change in buying patterns to continue into the medium term.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, growing a beard is an individual thing so up to now we’ve really only had anecdotal evidence of the scale of lockdown beard growth. The Unilever report suggests that it is significant and that it is here to stay.

The shift to home working had also sapped demand for grooming products such as shampoo and deodorant, with Alan Jope conceding that people “shaving a bit less” was hitting demand for razors. (Guardian & Financial Times reports 24^th April)

The Ambridge Socialist

24^th April

How much do you know about Philip Moss?

With another Archer-less Friday the Ambridge Socialist is launching a quiz about the past and present of gangmaster Philip Moss

1 What was the first building job Moss did in Ambridge?

For Shula repairing the hunt kennels roof

2 Moss likes bird watching but is he pro or anti-hunting?

Pro-hunting

3 Eddie Grundy doesn’t get on with Moss. Why?

Eddie feels Moss always quotes a lower price & costs him work

4 Where did Moss first meet his current partner Kirsty?

At a meeting on Aldridge’s pollution of the Am

5 What is Moss’s son & business partner called?

‘Gav’

6 Moss’s son was ditched by his partner. What was her name?

Kelly

7 What nationality is Moss?

Welsh

8 What Ambridge Estate does Moss currently live on with Kirsty?

The Beechwood Estate

9 What name does Moss use to describe the slave labourers he has?

The horses

10 Where is Moss’s builder’s yard & what does he claim is opposite to it?

Hollerton with a builders merchants opposite

Henry Hunt,(1773-1835) is associated with several locations in the UK including Bristol where he owned a brewery in 1809/10,Manchester where he was the speaker at what became known as the Peterloo Massacre on 16th August 1819 and Preston where he was MP between 1830 and 1833.

He also lived in London and when an MP had a house in Stamford St, Waterloo,just south of the Thames.

This makes a brief intervention in a Parliamentary debate about the building and cost of access to the new London Bridge (opened August 1831, replaced 1973) by Hunt of some interest.

The debate took place on 13th February 1832. John Briscoe the MP for Surrey (all of it, this was the Unreformed ‘rotten Boroughs’ Parliament) had complained that the construction of the new bridge had shut out the view on the south side (by what is now Borough Market) of part of Southwark Cathedral (as its now called)the Lady Chapel. The Church had been restored between 1818 and 1830.

Hunt did not agree that the matter was worthy of consideration and felt that enough consideration

Mr. Hunt

said, that the Bill was for the London side of the bridge, and moreover the Committee had given those at the Surrey side all they had asked for. He was no Antiquarian, and though he might be considered Gothic, he must say that, in his opinion, what was called the Lady Chapel was a nuisance, by shutting out the view of the beautiful church.

Note the distinction that Hunt makes between the ‘London side of the bridge’ and the ‘Surrey side’. Clearly Hunt was no fan of South London as it now is

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1832/feb/13/london-bridge-approaches-bill#S3V0010P0_18320213_HOC_7

Beard Liberation Front

24^th April

Facial Hair & the 1916 Dublin Easter Rising

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has marked the 104^th anniversary of the Dublin Easter Rising on 24^th April 1916 with a review of the facial hair of those centrally involved*

It says that while most were clean shaven several did wear moustaches including James Connolly possessor of probably the most distinctive republican socialist moustache in modern history.

However the campaigners say there is irony in the moustache wearing since the British Establishment, and particularly perhaps the officers of the British Army who the Rising was specifically aimed were also known for a tendency to wear moustaches.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, there is a crucial distinction between those who fought at the Dublin Post Office 104 years ago and the British Army when it comes to facial hair. James Connolly’s magnificent moustache was forged in the heat of the class and national struggles. That wasn’t true in the same way for Army officers.

• Thanks to Paidraig Belton @PadraigBelton for posting on this

Lockdown Beards: The New Yorker reviews the Beard Liberation Front

The New Yorker has written on Lockdown beards, (23^rd April 2020)

Their perspective (I think) is summarised in this line:

Rather than saying, ‘I have given up on the world,’ the achievement beard declares, ‘I am away, but not gone.’ ”

While I didn’t speak or correspond with the journalist who wrote the piece (although I would happily have done so) it also summarises what it takes to be the worldview of the Beard Liberation Front. Its rather like a decent Wiki entry. Its not inaccurate but neither does it really capture the perspectives of the BLF in the round.

Anyway a link to the full article is below. The New Yorker is paywalled but you should be able to read this for free

Feelings about facial hair are constantly shifting—for every Donald Glover or Dennis Hopper, there are associations with the alt-right, or reports that people find the bearded unsexy and untrustworthy. Keith Flett, the spokesperson of the Beard Liberation Front, calls the stereotypes and discrimination “beardism”—or outright pogonophobia. A “Marxist trade unionist & beard campaigner,” per his Twitter page, Flett views beardism in the workplace as a form of respectability politics, constraining the lives of “anyone who does not conform to the stereotype of a young, single white man in a suit.” American politicians, it is thought, suffer at the ballot box for their facial hair, while Sikhs and other religious minorities face violence for their visibility. Jeremy Corbyn, the eight-time winner of the U.K.’s Parliamentary Beard of the Year, is, to his critics, according to the BBC, “almost a caricature of the archetypal ‘bearded leftie.’ ” However, Flett, whose organization dispenses the annual honor, told the Independent, after Corbyn’s sixth win, that the award would have easily gone to the hereditary peer Lord Hylton, who wears a broad, corn-silky billy-goat scrim, if the octogenarian and his fellows in the House of Lords “knew anything about how to vote.” (Flett reports Russian interference in the 2018 contest.)

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/video-dept/the-rise-of-the-quarantine-beard

The Spectator on the Chartists rally for the vote 10^th April 1848

The future of the Spectator continues to be a matter of speculation. It has been continuously published since 1828, which is a significant achievement. It has also managed to keep a reactionary political stance throughout as the extract from its comment on the Chartist demonstration for the vote on Kennington Common on 10^th April 1848 shows. It goes on to argue that education is required so that the working classes can learn their position in society but also complains that the physical condition of the demonstrators reflects a workforce weakened by poverty…

The deliberate under estimate of the size of the protest and the demeaning commentary on those attending has remained a feature of right-wing commentary on demonstrations ever since, as those attending protests on Gaza since October 2023 will have noted.

The Spectator 15^th April 1848

Topics of the Day

Monday-Its Lessons

The adventures of Monday were a great lesson to the Chartists and their more turbulent allies among the working classes. They had challenged the Government and the friends of order to a trial of strength; and their own display was a pitiable exposure of weakness. They threatened to come in hundreds of thousands; and they could not with all the appendages of a London crowd, must more than a tithe of the threatened numbers. To swell the show, they were content to assort with Irish Repealers, mere anarchists, and ragamuffins of various kinds, towards whom they have no sympathy. As they marched along in their separate contingents, the aspect of physical weakness in the greater part was painful. No settled councils guided them: violence was compensated by wavering; the delegates quarrelled amongst themselves on the very platform; the leaders were distrusted by the body of the meeting…..

On World Book Night I’m dipping into E P Thompson’s 1963 classic The Making of the English Working Class.

A long book,full of stories of struggle, the development of a radical working class culture, battles with the Government, not always successful.

In times like these I find myself turning to the book itself full of accounts but historically referenced ones,and often researched around WEA classes he taught in Yorkshire in the 1950s.

For example he references the example of the Sheffield radical Wolstenholme,jailed without charge for months in 1817, who wrote to his wife with some difficulty because ‘have broke my specttacles’. Such instances of persistence and resilience speak across the centuries

How the Hornsey Journal reported the Battle of Wood Green 23^rd April 1977

The Hornsey Journal a local paper covering the Hornsey, Crouch End and Muswell Hill areas of Haringey closed in 2012.  Its history is here:

https://www.britishpapers.co.uk/england-london/hornsey-journal/

The local press is under pressure as never before currently and far from all of it is progressively inclined.

However the front page of the Journal the week after the fascist National Front tried and largely failed to march down Wood Green High Rd in North London on Saturday 23^rd 1977 in what became known as the ‘Battle of Wood Green’ was exemplary.

It underlined local disgust both from many who had fought in World War Two, then only just over 30 years distant that Hitler lovers could be allowed to march but also concern from younger residents that the fascists were aiming to intimidate them and, if they got a chance, worse than that.

As it happened the march was mainly stopped by protesters as it entered Wood Green High Rd. The story of that is here:

https://kmflett.wordpress.com/2017/08/13/the-battle-of-wood-green-23rd-april-1977/

Why St George’s Day should be a Public Holiday

Unlike Billy Bragg I’ve never felt particularly tempted to try and wrestle St George, what is known of his actual existence or his myth, from the political right in the UK.

Why the right want St George, who wherever he was born, was certainly not English, is perhaps less obvious. He was a military saint and he was a Christian. Plus he has been around as an icon for a long time in English history.

Shakespeare’s Henry V contains the still oft repeated phrase ‘Cry God for Harry, England and St George. As a military and a religious man St George fitted the ideology of the Crusades well

We can agree then that if the reasons for George becoming an English saint, along with being the saint of numbers of other countries, are a little obscure, given the length of time he has been at it he at least has squatting rights to the title.

St George was a soldier in the Roman Army of Emperor Diocletian and was persecuted and killed for refusing to give up his Christian faith.

Given that the Romans had occupied Britain, and that there was some Christianity in the country some kind of connection can be seen.

That said the slaying of the dragon was not a reflection of some ancient English rivalry against Wales but mythic.

Leaving aside an argument about whether the left have not, in the main, been as patriotically English as the right [whether they should have been is another matter] and hence have equal claims to St George, it is also possible to see him as a symbol of the oppressed and poor- which was certainly what the majority of Christians were during the time of the Roman Empire.

I think however that in pursuing that argument the left has the weight of some centuries against it.

In the 1890 preface to the German edition of Marx’s Capital, Engels dealt with the case of Professor Brentano, who had accused Marx of making up a quotation from Gladstone in the book. Engels refers to the Professor as the ‘St George of the German Manufacturers Association’ engaged in slaying the ‘infernal dragon’ of Marx.

In 1941 in the Journal of the History of Ideas we find Goldwin Smith writing an article on Marx and St George. On the face of it the piece is a puzzle as it contains no actual reference to the Saint. The point is of course that St George stands for England, and Smith while finding Marx’s ideas interesting concludes that they weren’t really the thing for the English.

I wish those still trying to reclaim St George from the traditions of the right good luck but I think there is another way in which we could usefully proceed.

There is some evidence that going back to medieval times 23rd April was a feast day as people celebrated St George. Of course this year the pubs won’t be full of people toasting the dragon slayer with beers of that name or similar.

Why not however make St George’s Day a national holiday as Labour has proposed?

As the TUC regularly reminds us Britain has far fewer holidays than elsewhere in Europe and while the rest of the UK wouldn’t want a holiday to mark St George they could have one for David, Patrick and Andrew at the appropriate time.

That way the right can celebrate their version of St George, while the left and everyone else can reflect on the great British traditions of Saints Days, feasts and holidays.