Gavin Moss will turn ‘Queen’s Evidence’ on Philip Moss.
One way or another last orders are approaching for Philip and Gavin Moss. As his father prepares to bow out of his modern slavery business and moves to Wales, Gavin has twigged that he will be left to carry the can, as it were. His current strategy appears to be to become more friendly with the ‘horses’ i.e. modern slaves perhaps on the basis that they can be persuaded to say they were working of their own free will. That might be ok for Sergeant ‘Knacker’ Burns but the police force does employ people with some reasonable investigative sense….
Eddie Grundy still being victimised by the Archer Dynasty over Xmas Show
Time is running short for the Xmas Show but Freddie Pargetter is still refusing to let Eddie Grundy take part. There has however been a split in the Archer Dynasty with David Archer opining that Grundy has ‘lucked out’ in being victimised by Pargetter.
Eddie Grundy’s Detectorists: in the best tradition of Joe Grundy
Under the guise of protecting David Archer, Eddie Grundy has infiltrated a group of treasure hunters who plan to search Brookfield for Roman coins. This may protect Archer’s farm but the bottom line is of course to reserve any actual treasure that is there for Eddie. It is truly a scheme in the best traditions of Joe Grundy but updated for the technologies of 2020.
Tumble Tussock apple now ‘discovered’ in Wiltshire
Who said Tumble Tussock’s don’t exist. The BBC has the story. Joe Grundy was right
Upper Class Struggle at Lords as Priti Patel pays £45K to become a life MCC member
In October it was reported that Home Secretary Priti Patel had paid £45K to become a life member of the Marylebone Cricket Club(MCC). Which cricket team Ms Patel actually supports is unknown but officially she will no claim to pass the Tebbit Test.
Like many sporting bodies at the moment, without spectators Lords and the MCC are suffering a shortfall of funds. Unlike many however they have very well heeled supporters who think nothing of paying up to £45K to help out and at the same time by-pass the lengthy wait to become a member. There are 18,000 members and 500 vacancies arose in the last year mainly because existing members had died (of old age).
The Financial Times (28.11) has a fascinating article on what is clearly an upper class struggle at Lords. It is firewalled but key points are summarised below if you don’t subscribe.
According to the FT MCC members divide between ‘the merely affluent and the super-rich. Those of the City versus those from the shires’.
There has been a petition to demand a vote of no confidence in Chair Gerald Corbett, who is also chair of the logistics group Sergo. One signatory describes the current MCC Committee as a ‘geriatric chumocracy’.
It was felt unfair that the 12,000 on the current waiting list for MCC membership have been bypassed by those with £45K to spare who have leapfrogged them. One MCC member who is banker told the FT ‘if you’re lucky enough to have some money then you have more choices than the poor people who don’t’. A critical member however commented that ‘Ive tried to count the amount of men who wear red trousers and there’s quite a few’
The MCC has 781 female members now including Ms Patel and it is ‘developing’ an action plan in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. The FT reports that the MCC has ‘temporarily’ removed a portrait and bust of Benjamin Aislabie the club’s first honorary secretary and a slave plantation owner.
The report is by Murad Ahmed the FT’s Sports Editor.
Friedrich Engels was born on 28th November 1820 and died in North London (where else)on 5th August 1895.
After taking early retirement from the family firm in Manchester he moved to London and lived in Regents Park Rd until his death.
Writing to Karl Kautsky on 27th December 1891 Engels reported on the activities of his cat Tidlums:
Tidlums has grown into a large, majestic tomcat, the sultan of all the female cats in Regent’s Park Road and the terror of all competitors and rivals.
Tidlums sounds like a rather worrying cat though not quite as bad as Rosa Luxemburg’s cat Mimi who she reported had ‘whacked Lenin with her paw’ on one occasion:
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 2020 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…
Engels at 200: beard wearer, Pilsner drinker, activist, theoretician, revolutionary
28th November marks the 200th 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. . . .
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”.
Pub Closures: The Beerage falls out with the Tory Government
The ‘Beerage’ has fallen out with the Government over its decision to make many pubs close for the foreseeable future around COVID-19 restrictions without any evidence as to why this should happen.
The ‘Beerage’ are historically brewers who support and donate money to the Tory Party. Signatories to the letter to the Government including breweries and pub companies such as Fullers, Greene King and Marstons that have done just that at recent Elections.
The letter (extracts below) argues that there is no logic to the Government’s decision, given the continued failure to provide evidence for it (the science if you like). There is of course, the logic of temperance. The fewer pubs that are open then (in theory)the less drinking goes on and that is a good thing full stop (for some people it might well be btw, I wouldn’t simply dismiss the point entirely).
However temperance historically is a cause of the Liberal Party and (in part) Labour. It seems like an odd thing for a Tory Government to pursue unless of course you grasp that under Johnson these are Tories with little concern for their historic roots or base.
The letter says: “The pub is clearly being singled out for exceptionally harsh and unjustified treatment and unless your government changes course, and soon, huge portions of this most British of institutions will simply not be there come the spring….
How can it be that people mixing in unregulated private homes is deemed safer than gathering in limited numbers in larger, regulated and ultimately Covid-secure venues like pubs? There is no logic to this decision.
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
It’s the 200th anniversary of the birth of Engels I28th November 1820).
I’ll be writing more on this over the next few days.
However to start 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 21st 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
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.
