Starmer: can Labour afford another Arsenal fan as Leader?
Arsenal fans together: Jeremy Corbyn & Keir Starmer
Jeremy Corbyn, the outgoing Labour Leader, was a well-known Arsenal fan. Its not known what impact his support had on the Labour vote on 12th December (except in Islington).
According to a YouGov prediction of who it wants to be the next Labour Leader Keir Starmer is Labour members favourite.
Starmer too is an Arsenal fan.
On 19th December 2014 the Guardian conducted an interview with Starmer which noted:
an Arsenal fan who says he spends what little free time he has playing football
Man of the People Boris Johnson’s New Year holidays. A brief history
In 2019/20 Johnson now PM, has spent the Christmas and New Year period at a private island Mustique with his current partner rather than his wife. Traditionally that would have been viewed in a poor light for a Tory leader (not doing it but the fact that’s public) but times change.
It is a pattern, although as a biographer notes usually the New Year holiday in an exclusive foreign location was in the past to repair relations with his wife after an episode with another woman, rather than to underline it.
10 years ago when London Mayor, as Sonia Purnell in Just Boris notes, he was at Serai on New Year’s Eve with his wife.
Purnell describes the location as ‘a luxury camp of tented villas in the Thar desert, Rajasthan.. Conde Naste Traveller observed the 24 ‘tents’ around a pool (in a desert) inspired by a traditional Indian step-well represented ‘a new level of luxury’.
Suites for two cost up to £716 for bed and breakfast per night.
Still as PM Johnson’s Government has just increased the minimum wage by 51p an hour. It is the cost of the 2020 holiday (allegedly a ‘gift’) and the public demonstration of luxury when millions are in poverty that is the issue here. Who Johnson does or does not have as a partner is a matter for him and the partner.
Jeremy Corbyn shaves Michael Rosen to win Beard of the Decade vote
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that after competition bristled in an on-line poll, Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has shaved the opposition to win the title Beard of the Decade.
Corbyn received 60% of the several hundred votes cast in the poll that was run between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.
Author and broadcaster Michael Rosen was second and cricketer Moeen Ali came third
When the poll was last run, ten years ago, Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis beat Fidel Castro. He was the only person to feature on both lists but was unplaced in 2020.
The campaigners say that the criteria for the Beard of the Decade list was that the individual had worn a beard consistently over the last 10 years and had a significant positive impact in the public eye.
The BLF says that Jeremy Corbyn’s beard has been a political symbol and central to British political life for much of the Decade just past.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, Jeremy Corbyn has a done lot for diversity in politics underlining that political leaders don’t need to be clean shaven white blokes like Boris Johnson. It wasn’t enough for Labour to win the General Election but Jeremy’s beard power has been recognised in this vote.
Vote for Beard Friendly Pub of the Year 2020 is now open
Boak & Bailey
The Beard Liberation Front has said that the vote for the annual Beard Friendly Pub of the Year is now open and will close at midday on Sunday 12th January
BLF Inspectors have been surveying pubs for beard friendliness for the past couple of months (criteria below) and have now finalised a list including several nominations from drinkers.
It is obviously not possible to visit every pub and every location and there is a write-in space on the poll. Any pub getting more than 1% of the overall vote will join the poll.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, the criteria for inclusion on the list are below. We are not interested in pubs where someone once saw a person with a beard at the bar. It is rather more serious than that, but it’s not that serious…
The criteria for the Award include:
Beard Friendly Pub: a pub that welcomes the hirsute and often has a significant number of hirsute customers, including but certainly not confined to those with modern styles of beards.
Beard Friendly Ambience: a pub that may have fewer hirsute customers but is welcoming to the hirsute through some bearded bar staff and beard friendly beers, plus has a generally relaxed atmosphere for all.
The campaign group says it welcomes diversity in both appearance and drinking. The truly beard friendly pub will have a genuine mix of customers not just a load of old blokes grumbling about life.
The list includes a range of pubs, bars and tap rooms without attempting to classify into sections
The 2019 winner was the Cock Tavern in Hackney
The Beard Friendly Pub, Bar, Tap of the Year Short List 2020
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that after competition bristled in an on-line poll, Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has shaved the opposition to win the title Beard of the Decade.
Corbyn got 60% of the hundreds of votes cast in the poll run over the period between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day
Author and broadcaster Michael Rosen was second and cricketer Moeen Ali came third
When the poll was last run, ten years ago, Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis beat Fidel Castro. He was the only person to feature on both lists but was unplaced in 2020.
The campaigners say that the criteria for the Beard of the Decade list was that the individual had worn a beard consistently over the last 10 years and had a significant positive impact in the public eye.
The BLF says that while Mr Corbyn is clearly not universally popular, witness the 12th December Election result, there is no question that his beard has been the one that has made most impact in public life over the last 10 years
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we congratulate Jeremy on winning the Beard of the Decade. It won’t be a consolation for losing another, less significant vote, a few weeks ago but it places him up there with the great beard wearers of the modern era.
The fact that the ICC which runs cricket globally is looking at the future of the Test format from 2023 underwrites the discussion and it must be said that most who have commented are at best not unequivocal supporters of a 4 day format.
Before that is reviewed however there is a more pressing matter: climate change.
The Guardian reports that the forthcoming Australia v New Zealand may be interrupted or even abandoned due to poor air quality. That of course is related to the dreadful bush fires in Australia. While they are hardly unknown the scale of them is, and it would take a very sceptical person not to see climate change as being at least a factor.
On a more mundane level Vaughan’s call for 4 day Tests has received a number of responses both in the Telegraph (where it appeared) and in the Murdoch Times.
Most commentators seem clear that the call for 4 day Tests is driven not by players but by administrators keen to fit even more cricket and money making opportunities into the year. As Mike Atherton notes in the Times the idea that shorter Tests would give players more rest is not likely to occur in reality.
The Telegraph reported that Surrey who are the most profitable English and Welsh County were also opposed to any change on the basis that the existing format brought in money that keeps the County game going.
On the plus side it is suggested that a 4 day Test would mean that matches could return to always starting on a Thursday although I’m not quite sure this fits with Administrators plans to shoehorn more games into the calendar. Neither am I sure that it really matters all that much now in a sporting world in general where games of some kind are going on more or less all the time somewhere.
Atherton in the Times makes the more profound point that 4 day games would destroy the fundamental nature of Test cricket (albeit an absolute requirement that a Test match be 5 days has only existed since 1979 it appears):
‘time after all, is the essence of Test cricket: it allows for the pitches to deteriorate and the game to take its natural, rather than artificial, course’
I agree. Ebb and flow is the very essence of Test cricket but not much valued by those who measure is profit and loss
New Year’s Day: The Feast of Fools & Turning the World Upside Down
Each of the Twelve Days of Christmas had some festivity associated with it but the one that gained the widest purchase beyond Twelfth Night itself was the Feast of Fools, which took place around January 1st.
An account of the Feast of Fools suggests that it was very much a World Turned Upside Down occasion, Carnivalesque in its disrupting of the established order and hence not approved of by senior clergy:
Participants in the Feast of Fools reversed all customary rules of proper church behaviour. Instead of presiding over religious services with dignity, seriousness, and reverence, they brought the coarse, lusty, irreverent behaviour of the carnival to church. After their wild mass, they often roamed the streets in an equally wild, mock religious procession. In some places merrymakers chose a bishop or archbishop of fools to preside over the celebration. As insignia of his newfound rank he wore a bishop’s mitre and carried a bishop’s staff. Clerical participants in the follies often dressed in street clothing, including women’s clothing, masks, garlands of greenery, or even in fools’ costumes.
If you are thinking of a way to celebrate the New Year and disrupt the traditional Sunday atmosphere of a Bank Holiday, re-enacting even part of the Feast of Fools might not be a bad idea.
The wider issue is what the impact of this custom was, banned by some religious authorities in the Middle Ages because it was so disruptive.
The Feast of Fools is a central element in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night but here it cast very much as a ‘letting off of steam’ mocking authority so that authority can return secure for another year. By contrast Bakhtin, particularly in his work on Rabelais sees the Feast as underwriting the Carnivalesque, a subversion of authority that is not so easy to put back in the box.
The Feast of Fools, a festival of the oppressed to start 2025?
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that 2020 is set to start with the highest numbers of beard wearers since 1945
National No Shaving Day takes place on Wednesday 1st January.
The BLF says numbers are set to mark the day by starting a beard similar to Beard of the Year winner Rylan Clark-Neal or runners-up Stig Abell and Jeremy Corbyn
The hirsute campaigners say that 1st January is the best day in the year to start a beard. With many out celebrating until the early hours the last thing most want to do in the morning is to shave. As it is a Bank Holiday the beard can be started in the privacy of the wearer’s own home.
The BLF has provided the following guidelines to starting a beard on Wednesday:
Step 1: do not shave
Step 2: by early afternoon, wash the face and comb through the developing stubble
Step 3: during the afternoon rub some craft beer, or if you must, lemon juice, into the developing facial hair to nourish it and promote growth
Step 4: In the evening you can begin to trim and style the proto-beard
BLF organiser Keith Flett said, Beards are set to be big again as 2020 dawns, with not only record numbers of trendy designer beards but also a continued resurgence in the traditional organic full bearded style
In the Making of the English Working Class E P Thompson is fully alive to the contradictions involved in popular patriotism.
He notes that while in the 1780s and 1790s a reactionary Church and King mob would often attack radicals after Waterloo in 1815 and up to and beyond 1848 the same mob became a radical crowd, ready to protect the most radical candidates on election hustings.
He noted in his chapter on the Free-born Englishman:
The Gordon Rioters of 1780 and the ‘Church and King’ rioters in Birmingham in 1791 had this in common: they felt themselves, in some obscure way, to be defending the ‘Constitution’ against alien elements who threatened their ‘birthright’. They had been taught for so long that the settlement of 1688, embodied in the Constitution of King, Lords and Commons was the guarantee of British independence and liberties, that the reflex had been set up- Constitution equals Liberty- upon which the unscrupulous might play. And yet it likely that the very rioters who destroyed Dr Priestley’s precious library and laboratory were proud to regard themselves as ‘Free-born Englishmen’. Patriotism, nationalism, even bigotry and repression, were all clothed in the rhetoric of liberty. Even Old Corruption extolled British liberties, not national honour, or power, but freedom was the coinage of patrician, demagogue and radical alike. In the name of freedom Burke denounced and Paine championed the French Revolution’.
The contradictory currents in popular thinking and aligning them with progressive rather than reactionary attitudes has, as radicals on the hustings knew, real benefits. It is also not without real problems.
