Kmflett's Blog

‘Man of the People’ Farage prefers red wine to a pint of beer

In an unusually perceptive report for the paper, the Daily Star, having spoken to some of Nigel Farage’s acquaintances, has noted that his ‘man of the people’ pint of beer act is just that, an act

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/777351/nigel-farage-beer-brexit-party-wine-european-union-mep-elections

While Farage is often pictured with a pint of beer in his hand (and a cigarette in his mouth), often Greene King IPA or Spitfire, in reality his private tipple is more likely to be red wine.

Its hardly new for politicians to promote a public image which is not their private selves. Harold Wilson was invariably seen puffing on a plebeian if not proletarian pipe in public. In private he was a brandy and cigars man as befitted arguably a former Oxford Don.

Wilson went to some effort to keep his private imbibing habits private (although it remains a matter of dispute). Farage has given interviews where he drinks a pint of beer and then goes on the wine so for Farage watchers the Star story is not news as such.

Even so while many people do prefer red wine to beer (I drink both but not at the same time) Farage’s appeal is to a core beer drinking audience of mainly senior men (like myself). I’m not a supporter of course, but the fact that Farage’s man of the people image is a deliberately constructed fake reflects much about the man and his politics.

Beard Liberation Front press release

Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

8th May

Campaigners welcome Prince Harry’s statement that Baby Archie has been born with a beard

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that it welcomes the news that baby Archie born to Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, will continue the recent hirsute tradition of the male side of the British Royal Family

The father Prince Harry is a consistent beard wearer even declining to shave his beard for his wedding to Meghan despite pressure from Establishment pogonophobes.

On Wednesday, the first public pictures of the new baby appeared and Prince Harry noted that Archie already had some facial hair

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry joke royal baby ‘has facial hair’ in first video

While both Prince Philip and Prince Charles wore beards in their youth they have remained resolutely clean shaven in recent decades. Harry has confirmed a distinctive break with the beardless tradition and the campaigners say they hope that the new baby will continue it.

BLF organiser Keith Flett said, Archie is the first Royal baby to be born with a beard underlining how important hirsuteness is in national life in 2019

Craft beer in supermarkets: the race to the bottom continues

In the nineteenth century there was something known as the slop trade. Items such as shoes and clothes were made cheaply by cheap labour to undercut very similar but more expensive products.

The trend was addressed in two ways. Workers unionised to try and drive out cheap labour, while employers sought to corner the market and drive out competition.

The trend continues of course with supermarket own brands being cheaper than branded goods but also perhaps slightly less good quality.

Craft beer, particularly with the arrival of cans has become an increasingly familiar feature on supermarket shelves with outcries each time a well-known craft brand appears on the shelves. Bottle shops rightly note their business is being damaged while those many on low wages can find decent beer at an affordable price. There is more than one side to every story.

The difference with the wider market is that the beers on offer cheaply in supermarkets are not inferior quality. The four packs of Thornbridge Jaipur that Tesco sells for £6 are both excellent value and excellent beer.

It was only a matter of time of course before the leading undercutter Lidl got in on the act. Previously they have sold anonymous ‘craft’ beer cans. Now they have announced a craft beer festival from May 2^nd now in store. Some of the beers on offer are unexceptional but 4.8% and 4.4% pales from respectively from Oakham and Vocation are highly drinkable. The price? £1.29 a can.

Meanwhile not to be outdone Waitrose are selling a mixed case of 6 bottles of the latest Fullers and Friends release for £10.

This is good news if you like good beer and are on a limited income. It may be less good news for brewers looking to make some return to pay wages and invest in the future of their business

Beard Liberation Front press release

Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

7th May

Jurgen Klopp wins automatic place on Beard of the Year 2019 shortlist

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that after Liverpool’s 4-0 victory against Barcelona on Tuesday evening to win a place in the Champions League Final in Madrid, Liverpool manager, and veteran beard wearer, Jurgen Klopp will have an automatic place on the Beard of the Year 2019 shortlist.

The shortlist is announced in late November with the winner revealed just before New Year 2019 following a public on-line poll.

The current Beard of the Year 2018 was shared between cosmologist Peter Coles and TV doctor Xand Van Tulleken

BLF organiser Keith Flett said, there is 6 months to go before the Beard of the Year poll gets underway but Klopp’s beard in the context of Liverpool’s famous victory tonight will live long in the memory

My thanks to veteran Peteborough leading citizen, discerning beer drinker, fellow Guardian letter writer and beard wearer Toby Wood, for a picture of Wetherspoon’s Tim Martin addressing a Brexit Party rally in the City tonight. My understanding is that Farage is also there.

For the avoidance of doubt while I’m not the biggest fan of the EU (although like 76% of Tottenham residents I voted remain) I regard the Brexit Party as racist and something no one on the left, however defined, should be anywhere near.

I’ve been struggling to enter Wetherspoons pubs for a while due to Martin’s increasingly aggressive pro-Brexit stance. He appeared at the 2018 Tory conference and has been pictured knocking about with Farage and Rees Mogg.

So what you might say? After all historically nearly all leading brewers were part of what was known as the Beerage, Tories who gave money to the Party. If you entered one of their pubs and drank beer you were indirectly donating money to the Tory Party.

The Beerage still exists at regional brewery level. Fullers were part of it (the Board not the workers) until Asahi too over on 29th April. One of the few positive aspects of Big Beer however is that it doesnt do things like donate to the Tory Party. When you are a worldwide beer company you need to focus on getting along with whatever Government is in office in the countries you sell beer in.

All that said on the whole, unless you knew about the Beerage, you probably wouldnt notice drinking in the pubs of its brewing members. They did not on the whole produce beer mats and posters at Election times telling customers to vote Tory.

Tim Martin’s recent approach, for example in his Wetherspoons pub tour, has been to promote Brexit while arguing it with customers. Now he seems to be taking a more upfront approach. More upfront certainly than the historic Beerage.

I will struggle to enter a Wetherspoons pub even more.

Spiked, Climate Change & E P Thompson’s Chiliasm of Despair

Spiked as some may know is a veteran opponent of climate change campaigners and its no surprise to find Michael Fitzpatrick, a name that at least a few will recall from as far back as the 1980s, writing a piece arguing that Greta Thunberg fits into the millenarian context that E P Thompson covered in the Making of the English Working Class under the words the ‘chiliasm of despair’.

Thompson was discussing early nineteenth century millenarians such as Joanna Southcott who certainly believed that the world would end, very quickly at some mostly unspecified point in the near future.

Millenarianism was a response to the upheaval that the rise of market capitalism caused in the lives of ordinary people and needs to be understood in those terms rather than viewed with what Thompson described as the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’.

Thunberg is not in any case a millenarian in the sense that the argument is that the world is about to end and the only thing we can do is welcome it as a new beginning.

The point of climate change protests is that if we don’t do something about it the world will change for the worse and eventually won’t exist as we currently know it.

While Fitzpatrick takes a swipe at George Monbiot who he promotes to a Cardinal I note and Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrbortty who he berates for believing that climate change campaigners are left-wing the point surely is those who propose to do nothing about the impact capitalism is having on the environment and our daily lives are right-wing.

Fitzpatrick might also care to recall that in the preface to the Making of the English Working Class EP Thompson noted that causes and ideas that were lost and defeated in early nineteenth century England might yet be won in other times and other places.

FInally neither Spiked or Fitzpatrick appear to know that Thompson himself was an environmental campaigner. The second edition of his biography of William Morris carries an introduction by Peter Linebaugh which underlines the link between Morris’s green politics and Thompson’s own.

Linebaugh notes:

Thompson’s own powerful contribution to the discussion of food and land was made in 1972 with his article on the ‘moral economy’. It put food, not profit, as the agrarian priority. It is not a great distance of thought to go from ‘moral realism’ to ‘moral economy’. The concept, like the practice, arose ‘from below’

Greta Thunberg: autistic prophet?

Champions League semi-finals. Revisiting a world we have lost. The Merseybeat & the Tottenham Sound

On Tuesday and Wednesday Liverpool and Tottenham are involved in the second leg of Champions League semi-finals. I wouldn’t bet, even as a lifelong Spurs fan, on either being in the finals.

Even so it is a reminder of a world we have lost, 50 plus years ago when both Liverpool and Tottenham were major industrial areas and home to distinct and competing musical cultures: the Merseybeat and the Tottenham Sound.

I wouldn’t presume to pronounce on 1960s Liverpool but Tottenham I can do, since I was there (my late father was the head librarian at Tottenham Library- now flats of course)

In the 1960s- and this will be impossible to believe for anyone who has moved to the area since Mrs Thatcher appeared- Tottenham and the wider Lea Valley was a major industrial area. A stronghold politically of the Communist Party and culturally home to large numbers of working-class mods.

There was a Tottenham Sound that was a serious rival to the Beatles and Merseyside led by the Tottenham band the Dave Clark Five.

The Dave Clark Five were the most successful 1960s band aside from the Beatles.

Their local home was the Tottenham Royal on Tottenham High Rd

The Royal was demolished in 2004 but it stood over the road from Tottenham police station.

Opened in 1910 as a skating rink by the 1950s it was a major venue for dancing and concerts attended by many thousands of people, more indeed than modern regulations would allow I suspect.

The Dave Clark Five had a residency there in January and February 1964 just as their record Glad All Over hit the top of the charts.

A quick google will find you various memoirs and pictures of the Tottenham Royal and a marvellous Pathe News video of the Dave Clark Five [buttoned down collars, ties, suits and carefully constructed hair-dos] playing at the venue in early 1964.

It as a world we have lost and not all for the worst either. However the working class mods of places like Tottenham were not just about fashion and speed, they were also a potent industrial and political force in the Britain of 50 years ago. Many of them were apprentices learning skilled jobs across industry in a time of economic boom and a rapidly changing society.

Both Liverpool and Tottenham still have lively and widely renowned music cultures (as well as football teams) albeit very different to the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five. The industry and employment situations are rather less happy

Beard Liberation Front press release

Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

6th May

Judd Trump’s World Snooker Championship victory latest in long march of beards through sport

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that Judd Trump’s shaving of John Higgins to win the World Snooker Championship on Monday is the first time ever that a champion has worn a beard on the final day of the Championship.

The campaigners say that Gary Wilson was on course for a place in the final when he suddenly trimmed his beard overnight at the semi-final stage and as a result lost to Trump

The BLF says that a beard at top level snooker can be positioned to promote air currents that help players to pocket balls through aerodynamic influence.

BLF organiser Keith Flett said, Judd Trump’s victory is the latest in the long march of beard power through leading sports. Those that were overwhelming clean shaven until quite recently such as golf have become hirsute, while its quite unusual to see a football player without a beard these days. There is still work to be done though, for example in darts and cycling.

Beard Liberation Front press release

Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

6^th May

Campaigners call for Royal Baby to continue hirsute tradition of Prince Harry

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that it hopes that the baby born to Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, early on Tuesday, will continue the recent hirsute tradition of the male side of the British Royal Family

The father Prince Harry is a consistent beard wearer even declining to shave his beard for his wedding to Meghan despite pressure from Establishment pogonophobes.

While both Prince Philip and Prince Charles wore beards in their youth they have remained resolutely clean shaven in recent decades. Harry has confirmed a distinctive break with the beardless tradition and the campaigners say they hope that the new baby will continue it.

BLF organiser Keith Flett said, while the new Royal baby may not have been born with a beard it is to be hoped that he will be given every encouragement to grow and maintain one at the earliest opportunity.

London Socialist Historians seminars Summer Term 2019

Monday 10th June 6.30pm at Bookmarks, 1 Bloomsbury St*. Marika Sherwood,Kwame Nkrumah and the Dawn of the Cold War *please note venue, 5 minutes walk from the Institute of Historical Research

Monday 17^th June 5.30pm*. Keith Flett. The size of the crowd. How historians have assessed numbers at demonstrations from 1848 onwards.

* this will be a virtual seminar. The paper will be posted on line with discussion from 5.30pm

Venue: tbc