Protz on the radio

This week's edition of Radio 4's Food Programme was an extended interview with beer writer and longtime CAMRA staff member Roger Protz. The programme also included an excerpt from an episode in 1998 in which Roger compared the "Burton snatch" sulphur aroma in Marstons Pedigree and Draught Bass and concluded that it was more pronounced in the latter. Having drunk a fair amount of both as a student in Stoke in the early 90's, I'd have said it was the opposite.

Roger told the interviewer a few things I hadn't heard before - that he got the CAMRA job in 1976 because he'd worked on the Evening Standard as had founder member Michael Hardman, that Fuller's had decided to stop brewing cask beer before CAMRA persuaded them to continue - and made some general observations about British beer that didn't really stand up to scrutiny, such as local hops being fresher than foreign ones (goodbye golden ales with all those American hops!) and a long secondary fermentation in the pub cellar being one of the defining features of cask beer, something that I'm sure we'd all welcome but which probably doesn't happen to the extent we might like to think it does.

He made some other claims which ranged from clearly untrue ("When I was a teenager in the 50's, the legal drinking age in pubs was 21": it was actually 18, as it is now, having been raised from 14 in 1923) to somewhat doubtful: did keg beer really take off in the 60's as an alternative to poor quality cask beer because lots of experienced publicans who knew how to look after a cellar had been killed in the war? He also took the opportunity to take some swipes at big breweries, including A-B InBev for cutting the lagering time for Stella Artois, SAB Miller for computerising the brewing process at one of their Eastern European plants (although at least one of the family-owned regional independents rightly championed by CAMRA has also done this), and Scottish "craft punks" BrewDog for slating him personally and CAMRA as an organisation in its PR. I was amused by the interviewer, in the the true spirit of BBC impartiality, then intoning that all these breweries had been contacted for a response but had declined to comment.

Protz, then a member of the Socialist Labour League, edited the Young Socialists' paper Keep Left in the early 60's, before moving on to the same job on Militant in the mid-60's and Socialist Worker in the late 60's. He left IS, the organisation which later became the SWP, in 1974, and said that when he bumps into former comrades from the far left and they question him about having spent his life writing about and campaigning for cask beer, he tells them that he has had a much bigger impact on British society than they have.

The programme was a handy introduction to the history of CAMRA and cask beer for younger listeners who hadn't heard it all before. Protz also got a plug in for the Revitalisation Project and rightly paid tribute to the pioneering work of Michael Jackson whose travels around Europe opened his eyes, and mine, to the good beer to be had beyond our shores.

Engels in Manchester

The remains of the Albert Club in Chorlton-on-Medlock have been discovered on the building site of a new scientific institute at Manchester University.

Among the club's members in the mid-nineetenth century was Friedrich Engels, the exiled communist theoretician who in between riding with the Cheshire Hunt and running the Ermen and Engels factory in Salford relaxed with his fellow German cotton manufacturers there.  I wonder if they imported German sausages and beer to eat and drink?

Alfred Russel Wallace online

The works of the nineteenth century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace have just gone online.

Wallace is best known for his collecting trip to the Malay Archipelago that led to him producing a theory of evolution by natural selection around the same time, 1858, that Charles Darwin was writing On the Origin of Species. Wallace described how it came about in his autobiography:

"The problem then was not only how and why do species change, but how and why do they change into new and well defined species, distinguished from each other in so many ways; why and how they become so exactly adapted to distinct modes of life; and why do all the intermediate grades die out (as geology shows they have died out) and leave only clearly defined and well marked species, genera, and higher groups of animals? It then occurred to me that these causes or their equivalents are continually acting in the case of animals also; and as animals usually breed much more quickly than does mankind, the destruction every year from these causes must be enormous in order to keep down the numbers of each species, since evidently they do not increase regularly from year to year, as otherwise the world would long ago have been crowded with those that breed most quickly. Vaguely thinking over the enormous and constant destruction which this implied, it occurred to me to ask the question, why do some die and some live? And the answer was clearly, on the whole the best fitted live ... and considering the amount of individual variation that my experience as a collector had shown me to exist, then it followed that all the changes necessary for the adaptation of the species to the changing conditions would be brought about ... In this way every part of an animals organization could be modified exactly as required, and in the very process of this modification the unmodified would die out, and thus the definite characters and the clear isolation of each new species would be explained."

Politically Wallace was an eclectic reformer who described himself as a socialist, a Spiritualist who argued for women's suffrage and the nationalisation of the land as well as speaking out against militarism, eugenics and currency being based on gold or silver. I like the line in his 1890 article Human Selection  where he writes, "Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent."

Close the Coalhouse door

I listened to the Radio 4 play Close the Coalhouse Door by Alan Plater on Saturday afternoon.

Based on the writings of ex-miner Sid Chaplin, Close the Coalhouse Door is about the Durham miners' union from the strikes to achieve recognition in the 1830's through the Depression and post-war nationalisation.  It's also well known for the songs in it by Alex Glasgow which as well as Close the Coalhouse Door include As Soon As This Pub Closes and Socialist ABC.

Alan Plater wrote the play in 1968, before the coalfield battles of 1972, 1974 and 1984-5, so director Sam West brings the play up to the present day with an "alternate history" in which Thatcherism never happened. If only...

Happy Hour Again

One of the first albums I remember buying as a teenager was The Housemartins' London 0 Hull 4.

The Housemartins combined witty, thoughtful lyrics with left-wing politics. They actively supported the Labour Party Young Socialists which I joined in 1987. It's good to see that twenty-five years on lead singer Paul Heaton still retains both his wit and left-wing politics, telling an interviewer that when he was on Question Time "I was asked whether I agreed with the House of Lords being closed, and with the abolition of hereditary peers, so I said, ‘Give them five minutes’ notice and blow the building up’."

Heaton also deserves respect for having bought The King's Arms, a large Victorian pub in Salford, in order to save it from redevelopment.

Here's to you Woody Guthrie

Today is the centenary of the birth of the American folk singer Woody Guthrie.

Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma; he died in 1967 in a New York psychiatric hospital where he had been confined for many years with Huntington's chorea, an inherited degenerative condition.

Guthrie is the epitome of the American rebel, the little guy standing up to the rich and powerful, but in politics, like fellow folk singer Pete Seeger, he stuck closely to the line of the US Communist Party that they both supported. Seeger's song lyrics in World War II changed every time the CP twisted and turned, from C for Conscription ("Well it's C for Conscription/C for Capitol Hill....That passed that goddamn bill....I'd rather be here home/ Even sleeping in a holler log/Than go to the army/And be treated like a dirty dog!") during the Nazi-Soviet Pact to Deliver the Goods ("We're working in the cities, we're working in the woods/We'll all work together to deliver the goods/I got a new job and I'm working overtime/Turning out tanks on the assembly line/Got to crank up the factories like the president said/Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.") after the German invasion of Russia in 1941.

A lot of people know about Guthrie through Billy Bragg's recordings of his unpublished lyrics or Bob Dylan's Song to Woody on his eponymous first album ("Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song/ ’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along/Seems it's sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn/ It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born") but I first heard him on a BBC2 Arena documentary in the late 80's presented by Alan Yentob. Not long after that, a General Studies teacher at school who was into blues and folk played us some more of his songs, as well as one by the Mississippi blues pioneer Charlie Patton.

Guthrie is probably best known in the US for writing This Land is Your Land, in response to Irving Berlin's God Bless America which he hated.

Radio 4 has a programme about Woody tonight, presented by his biographer Joe Klein.

Spies and the left

I've been watching with interest the BBC series Modern Spies, presented by Peter Taylor.

Taylor has a justified reputation for high journalistic standards having extensively covered Northern Ireland over the last forty years and his approach here was similarly thorough and enlightening, The series covered both the Security Service (MI5), responsible for internal security and spycatching, and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) which runs British spies in foreign countries. Unsurprisingly, much of MI5's work is now focussed on stopping Islamist bombers and from Taylor's interviews with anonymised serving MI5 officers it appears many of its current operatives are from a Muslim background.

This led me to wonder how much time MI5 now spends monitoring the left and what threat it thinks it poses to the British state (not much in both cases I would guess). Up until at least the 1980's, MI5 had a whole section spying on the left and labour movement and files on around a million people. As a civil servant, my transfer to the MoD as a civilan pay clerk was blocked on the grounds that I wouldn't pass "security clearance" so I guess that like many other socialists I have one. Unlike Jack Straw when he was Home Secretary though, I doubt I'll be getting to read mine any time soon.

RIP Hitch

The journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens who has died of oesphagal cancer aged 63 moved a long way politically over his lifetime.

Hitchens was a member of the International Socialists from the mid 60's to early 70's when, as he later said, it was "a small but growing post-Trotskyist Luxemburgist sect". I don't know the circumstances in which Hitchens left IS but it coincided with the transformation of the group into a tightly controlled mono-tendency which banned internal factions and dissent. He subsequently moved to the right, but not as far as some of his detractors on the left claim. Hitchens towards the end of his life said he was no longer a socialist but denied he was a conservative. It would probably be accurate to call him a liberal, albeit a more consistent and principled one than the spineless, hand-wringing types who write for The Guardian. He certainly avoided the fate of his younger brother Peter, like him an ex-IS member, who is now a Daily Mail Tory Anglican caricature.

Even though he was wrong on the Iraq war in 2003, it was for the right reasons (wanting to liberate the Iraqi people from Ba'athist dictatorship) as opposed to much of the left who rightly opposed the invasion for the wrong reasons (anti-Americanism, pacifism or, in the case of George Galloway, friendly relations with Saddam and his henchmen). He was also clear in opposing Islamic clerical fascists like al-Qaeda, refusing to let them speak for a Muslims as a whole and standing up for those threatened by them like Salman Rushdie, in sharp contrast to the IS's successor the SWP who downplayed the threat and promoted organisations like the MAB inside the anti-war movement.

Hitchens' other role was as a debunker of religion. That he chose to do so in the United States where religion pollutes public life to a much greater extent than in most of Europe is to his credit and I think he did it more thoughtfully than others like Richard Dawkins. It was certainly always entertaining, as when he spoke about the death of the charlatan Jerry Falwell in 2007.

Shakespeare, snobbery and conspiracy theories

The upcoming film Anonymous starring Vanessa Redgrave as Elizabeth I is based on the hoary theory that someone else, in this case the Earl of Oxford, wrote William Shakespeare's plays.

I'm no expert on Shakespeare but it strikes me that the idea is essentially based on snobbery,  that a grammar school boy from Stratford couldn't possibly have the knowledge of the world the plays demonstrate. This ignores the fact that he had access to books - indeed many of the plays are based on classical sources like Plutarch - and that even those set in Ancient Italy or Greece have settings and characters straight out of the English countryside. Talking of which, there's a story that a Shakesperean actor was walking down a Warwickshire lane one day when he saw two men cutting a hedge. He asked them what they were doing and one of them said, "I rough-hew them and he shapes the ends", an echo of Hamlet's, "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will".

It's commonplace to say that while Vanessa Redgrave has nutty politics, she's a great actress. While I agree with the first assertion, I'm not convinced about the second - she always seems to me to belong to the Imelda Staunton "look at me" school of overacting.

Challenged about the lack of evidence for the Earl of Oxford theory on BBC breakfast TV this morning, Redgrave countered rather lamely that there wasn't much evidence for Shakespeare either. At one level, the argument about who wrote Shakespeare's plays is a harmless literary game. It's certainly a less poisonous conspiracy theory than others Redgrave was associated with when she was a leading member of Gerry Healy's Workers Revolutionary Party in the 70's and 80's.

Gadaffi: death of a tyrant

The circumstances in which Libyan dictator Colonel Gadaffi met his end yesterday may not be entirely clear yet but it seems safe to say that he was shot by rebels after being wounded and then captured.

You might think there would be pretty much universal rejoicing over the death of someone with some of the bloodiest hands in the Arab world, mainly the blood of the Libyan people themselves.

There are four groups who refused to join the jubilation of the Libyan people:

1. those on the left who supported Gadaffi as an anti-imperialist (a relatively small group of ex-Healyites, Maoists and others not of this planet) and for whom the Libyan revolutionaries are merely tools of NATO;

2. pacifists who oppose all wars and killing, often on sincere religious grounds;

3. those for whom anti-Americanism is the guiding light of their politics, from the Stalinists of the Morning Star to the ex-SWP leaders of Stop the War;

4. liberals like Amnesty International who wring their hands about the lack of "due process" in killing Gadaffi but who conversely would have opposed any trial as "victor's justice".

These currents overlap and influence each other but are all equally muddle-headed.  Meanwhile, all socialists, democrats and decent people can celebrate with those on the streets of Tripoli the demise of Gaddafi, just as we did that of Ceaucescu, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.