Tag Archives: Davy Steele

Boris Brexits Brits! Brueghel’s Brussels Brunches. Sturgeon Smokes Scotland, Swamping Salmond. Angle Anglers Angry; World Watches Wall-Eyed

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THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT./
THE FOLK SONG ARMY DIV.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/27/the-guardian-view-on-britain-out-of-the-eu-a-treasure-island-for-rentiers

First an excellent editorial from the Guardian on why the Brexit bait-and-switch is, for the nation as a whole, disastrously unsound. It explains the effects of economic rent (whence the term rentier) and the difference between a productive or producers’ economy and a rentier economy (whence the game Monopoly). The working and middle classes aren’t nodding for Brexit — their heads are just jerking and bouncing at the ends of taut nooses, slipped around their necks by 250 years of Tories. Since Thatcher, their flailing feet don’t even touch the ground.

“Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in 1852 that “the Tories in England long fancied that they were in raptures about royalty, the church and the beauties of the ancient constitution, until a time of trial tore from them the confession that they were only in raptures about rent”. His assessment of early 19th-century Tories applies with unerring accuracy to today’s Conservatives.”

— Thus Spake The Guardian, December 27, 2020. Mirabile dictu, the Guardian is quoting Karl Marx!

Yes, BoJo did cut a deal on fish give-backs, and EU fishers will only have to give back 25% of the fish they’ve caught in British waters. (One assumes — hopes? — that is means a digital credit/debit arrangement, not a schlepp-the-fish-back -and-forth from one port to another arrangement.) That leaves them 75% of their catch. British fishwives are out already, hands flared around their mouths, calling salty oaths around BoJo’s cave-in. In a surprise rip-current, Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon hails the deal and downplays Caledonian grousing. Seems she’s much more slippery on Scottish independence than her retired mentor, Mr. Salmond, was; but she’s in power, and he isn’t. But in England, the fisherfolk are throwing harpoons at Bojo:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/dec/26/fishing-industry-brexit-deal-eu-fisheries

I knew “The Shoals of Herring” as beautifully covered by the Corries; but here is the Songwriter Himself, Ewan MacColl, hypnotically chanting a distillation of the lives of thousands of men who lived on the sea. The Victorian herring fleet out of Great Yarmouth was one of the industrial wonders of the world. It makes a fascinating counterpart to “The Song o the Fishgutters” from the previous blog: they were, of course, the girls in the packing plants on shore in “Yermouth toun.” Hairk:

The Bard of Prestonpans, Davy Steele, sings his great Fareweel tae the Fishin’.
Hear the delightfully incomprehensible ’10 Dreg Song.” I couldn’t find the lyrics, but I did find a whole website about “Dreg Songs!” In the nineteenth century, Scotsmen fished for oysters in the Firth of Forth by dragging dredges over the oyster ‘scalps’. To maintain a steady speed they sang as they rowed. Overfishing brought the industry to a close near the turn of the twentieth century and with it, the use of the dreg songs. For years the songs were hidden away – lost.… Read more below!!

https://bobwalser.com/category/dreg-songs/