The Politics of Dancing

I have long thought about writing something about the ghastly Mr George Galloway, apologist for Saddam Hussein, suicide murderers and sundry other Islamacist fruitcakes. However where to start or then again why start at all, why spend words time and energy on this miserable little man? No, better direct the reader to the man himself. I particularly recommend the Galloway Hitchens debate on the Iraq war. However the most priceless moment occurs on the Bill Maher show when Hitchens makes a very unpolitically correct joke at the expense of suicide murderers. Galloway's face at this point gives the game away, for it is not the politically incorrect nature of the joke that truly offend him, it is the slight to suicide murderers whom Galloway has only recently been lauding as 'freedom fighters.' It is, to quote Hitchens a glimpse of 'the piggy face of fascism;' it is the face of a demagogue, a man who under no circumstances should ever be given access to anything remotely

Recently involved in a passionate debate on free speech it took about five to seven minutes before race and gender entered the debate, it being explained to me that I as a ‘middle class white male’ could not understand the implications of my argument for those genuinely repressed. Leaving aside the supermarket basketful of assumptions laying beneath this remark it is difficult to envisage race and gender being presented as an argument in its own right in any other context, that is that a black middle class man, or white working class woman could not grasp the implications of one argument or another on the basis of race and gender. When I read his book ‘What’s Left’ by Nick Cohen and his description of a growing disenchantment with those describing themselves as of the left and the related decline of a left wing tradition within which I once located myself, I had finally to recognise the fact that, whether I had changed or not, and my core beliefs have remained the same, I no longer had

One third of British teachers recently polled believe that creationism ought to be taught on an equal basis to natural selection. This poll went unreported; I only caught this information on Teachers TV, a surprisingly interesting cable channel. Now I suspect that if one third of British teachers believe that a religious fundamentalist doctrine, not just unscientific but an anti science position, equivalent to the advocacy of astrology as part of the science curriculum, ought to be taught to our children this should be a cause for some concern. Now there are two possibilities for this state of affairs. Number one is that the overwhelming power of the Creationist, the intellectual rigour of the so called Intelligent Design position has simply converted one third of the teaching profession, or secondly faced by schoolrooms filled with young minds indoctrinated by religious doctrine, particularly from within the Christian fundamentalist and Islamic communities , they have simply, as they

Before he finally leaves office I would like to place on record that I could never bring myself to dislike George Walker Bush. I thought him ineffably stupid, extraordinarily lacking in sensitivity and completely unqualified to hold the office of President of The United States. However I also believe that he was sincere in his beliefs and rather than the centre of a great conspiracy to enforce American hegemony believed that you could export the freedoms enjoyed by the American people by force, to the point of naiveté. A recovered alcoholic he carried into the Oval Office all the solipsistic assumptions of this breed of born again human being, that is he believed sincerely in a personal God to whom he had a hotline. This belief, which is I suspect fairly common, if often less intense than in the ‘saved,’ is responsible for much mischief. Being held by the President of The United States it has bordered on the disastrous.

It would seem from a number of independent reports that the troop surge in Iraq has proved successful and certainly in a a number of formerly unsafe areas there is now a degree of stability only dreamt about even a year ago. Now the acid test, ask someone in the so called 'Stop The War Coalition' the following question, taking it as read that you opposed the original invasion, are you pleased about this? Stand back and wait for the torrent of weasel words and prevarications. Then ask yourself what really motivates these people.

Freedom of speech is uncomfortable; it should make someone somewhere feel uneasy. This includes woolly liberals. Last week a man was arrested at Heathrow airport in transit to the Middle East on a German extradition warrant. His crime representing not what he has done but what he thinks and writes for he is a holocaust denier. Now I know very little about the man, but I know something of 20th Century history. It is still extraordinarily difficult to place the mass murder, the genocide of Europe’s Jewish population into any kind of meaningful perspective. For someone to set out to deny the reality of recorded mass murder, the Nazis were after all extraordinarily thorough statisticians, strikes one as about as odious a position as it is possible to imagine. At best these grubby little people are reduced to quarrelling about numbers. The Nuremberg laws are an established fact, the Einsatzgruppe a historical reality, the existence of Bergen Belson and Auschwitz undisputed. So the quest

From Mondays Guardian 'Publishers of romances may be used to harsh criticism, but few expect to have their homes firebombed like Martin Rynja this weekend. On Saturday his £2.5m London house was attacked after he agreed to publish a novel about the prophet Muhammad and his wife, Aisha.' On the same day from a radio conversation with a Muslim scholar. "Of course I deplore violence but what people need to realise is that in Islam insulting the Prophet is considered even worse than insulting your mother or father. Some people will react strongly even violently." You only need to locate this piece of dialogue within the standard gangster movie, to understand its true intent. The mobster and his heavy converse with the nervous shopkeeper to gently persuade him of the benefits of 'cooperation.' "Of course I'm a man of peace myself, I hate violence, but as for my mate Ron well he gets upset when people show a lack of respect, it's like you've i

If the growing tide of religious fundamentalism is to be countered in the UK I would suggest that what is required is a confident reassertion of secular enlightenment values. As a starting point I would suggest the following. First there needs to be a clear separation between church and state, requiring the disestablishment of the Church of England and the repealing of the Blasphemy Law. This would remove the special privileges afforded to Christianity and create a level playing field between faiths. Secondly the enactment of a Bill of Rights, clearly establishing 1) freedom of speech, 2) the freedom to practise any religion and none, 3) freedom of assembly and clear restriction on the powers of government to restrict such freedoms. The disentangling of religion and education is an essential part of this project, however the Blair infatuation with ‘faith based’ education has greatly complicated the task and it is difficult to see how this might easily be achieved. However the first po

I was fortunate enough to come of age politically in the late 60’s and early 1970’s. Influenced by the likes of Orwell, AJP Taylor, Michael Foot, in short by the tradition of anti Communist Democratic Socialism and I associated with the left of the Labour Party. In those days it was still possible to call yourself a socialist and be active in a branch of the Labour Party that owed a little more to Marx that to Methodism.. To be on the left was to be with the tide of history, was to stand with universal values, equality, freedom of speech, sexual freedom, feminism, freedom of discourse and anti totalitarianism. Solidarity and unity represented the tools of the struggle. Those coming of age a little over a decade later entered a very different world, a world of compartmentalised and competing communities, a strange world of the highly codified and yet constantly shifting language of political correctness. A world dominated by the hideous spectres of the big ‘isms’ and phobias. I ca

It was a typically British August Days filled with boredom and rain. Nothing much was happening On the day the censors came. Under a no smoking poster I wanted a cigarette Thinking of thoughtcrime and shame I didn’t have a light on me On the day the censors came. The struggle against forgetting Like a gnawing rat in the brain I wanted to drown out the sound of the doorbell On the day the censors came It was a day for laughter and pretending Things always stay the same A day for drunken theatrics The day that the censors came. ALEX TALBOT AUGUST 2008

The precipitate and reckless rush to recognise Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence by the US and the majority of EU states was always going to have implications far outside that province. In a world dotted, like a bad case of acne with would be breakaway provinces and embryonic nation states, the precedent did not go unnoticed. The world became a little more unstable. Now the expulsion of Milosevic’s army from Kosovo represented a real progress in the struggle against the bloody processes of ethnic nationalism. Moreover those, usually characterising themselves as being on the left, who opposed the NATO intervention would have left Kosovo to the mercy of Milosevic entailing further ethnic cleansing and a brutal and bloody long term guerrilla war. However the status of Kosovo represented a complex problem with a variety of possible solutions and timetables for those solutions, outright independence at this time probably the least desirable. The Russians with a long history

The news this morning is filled with the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. We are told that it was he who blew the gaff on the horrors of the Soviet System, the camps, the terror, the insanity of an ideology gone mad. Now I am an admirer of Solzhenitsyn’s courage, if not his reactionary politics, he was at the end of his life after all a very narrow Russian nationalist. Though given his life experience and what he suffered I am in truth no position to make a judgement. However the idea that he was the ‘first’ to expose the hideous lie that was Stalinism is itself untrue. There were others. Out of the writing that emerged from the moral abyss of Stalin’s Soviet Union several books stand out, Vasily Grossman’s ‘Life and Fate,’ Anotoli Rybakov’s ‘Children of the Arbat, ’ and an extraordinary insightful book ‘ The Case of Comrade Tulayev,’ by Victor Serge. Serge’s life story almost exactly parallels that of the European Left from 1900 to 1945. (Only perhaps Arthur Koestler shares a re

Two stories from the week ending 26th July 2008: A man is fined £30 for smoking in his van as this is deemed his ‘place of work.’ I speak to a man in his early sixties, mild mannered to the point of being self effacing; he enjoys a beer, however being on benefits he can no longer enjoy drinking in the pub as much as he would like. He goes to a Local park in Haringey to drink a can of beer. However it is now an offence to drink alcohol in any Haringey park. A Police Community Support Officer arrives and not only confiscates the can from him but insists on pouring its contents away in front of him. Both stories are so translucent that further comment seems superfluous however at least one point comes to mind. One wonders if our drinker had instead been two local councillors enjoying a bottle of Champagne in the park our PCSO would have been quite so officious. I feel weary of rehearsing arguments I have already made however again I point out that anyone who is drunk in a park, especially

I write this overlooking the great expanse of the Black Sea, a gentle breeze blowing into my room from the open door as the early morning sunshine, already warm, heats the decking of the balcony where soon I will be eating breakfast. Holidays are a creation of ‘enlightened’ late 19th Century capitalism, allowing the workers some time off so that they might return as refreshed willing slaves. A whole industry has been created out of this segmented leisure culture, time given back in exchange for wage slavery. There has consequently always been an element of torture about this phenomenon, with its annual fortnightly taste of freedom, of life as it should be lived, as it should be experienced. As the annual two week trip to sun and sea draws to a close the reality of daily existence is thrown into sharp relief, back to work on Monday and the colourless routine of the factory floor or office. This was well understood by the Anarchists and Situationists who had a healthy contempt for th

I cannot remember who it was that reflected upon the pleasure provided by good/bad films, those B movie creations which, despite the sometimes wooden acting or cliché ridden scripts can often grip and even move one. Casablanca for example, for all it’s celebrity contains a plot that is barely credible and moments that demand more than is reasonable in efforts of willing suspension of disbelief .Yet it undoubtedly contains within it a fable of considerable power that speaks to something very deep in the human psyche. A similar pleasure can be had from good/bad poetry, A.E. Housman’s Epitaph on an army of mercenaries for example. 'These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth's foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling And took their wages and are dead. Their shoulders held the sky suspended; They stood, and earth's foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay.' The poems sentiments see

In Europe the widespread disappearance of religious belief as traditionally understood, that is in God, Heaven, the central role of the Church, the belief in an afterlife has had consequences that I believe have not been sufficiently understood. (I leave aside here the resurgence of Islam which is an imported phenomenon and itself requires greater analysis). It is I believe Umberto Eco who reflected that “when men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.” When faced with the daily stream of ‘New Age’ drivel in the broadcast and written media, the obsession with horoscopes, with the varieties of ‘alternative’ medicine, Tarot readings, and all other manner of quackery voodoo and other sundry nonsense one is inclined to sympathise with the sentiment. Of course the flight from science, from rationality and reason has complex roots and ever since the Thalidomide disaster the claims of the pharmaceutical industry have been greeted wit

Recently there has been a peculiarly pernicious development in public discourse, the capacity to receive offence, particularly offence respecting religious beliefs. During a debate on the cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed a spokesman, inevitably of course self appointed, for the Muslim community declared that free speech did not include the right to inflict insult! This remark, astonishingly, went unchallenged. Of course divorced from its capacity to wound strongly held beliefs the concept of freedom of speech is rendered meaningless. More alarmingly an added dimension to the capacity to receive offence is the growing tendency to legitimise violence as a response to real or imagined offence. In the early 21st century we are living in the age of the Fatwa. I fear that we may have already lost more ground in this respect than we realise; self censorship already a significant feature of the press and broadcasting media. Moreover what London theatre would now stage a satire on the ab

Since the collapse of Communism, indeed since its very inception, Bulgaria has struggled to develop a legitimate functioning civil society. Plagued by organised crime and institutional corruption it is still a young democracy. However in one respect it is considerably more advanced than our own, for Bulgaria unlike the UK is a republic. Often when travelling overseas and having identified myself as English, (interestingly no longer British, or indeed Irish to which I can make a valid claim), people invariably bring up the monarchy, questions about which are always framed by a certain amount of wry amusement. The Queen and her considerable entourage reflecting something rather infantile about England in particular and the UK in general. And at such moments I know that I live in a country not fully grown up, not politically or institutionally mature. The very presence of hereditary monarchy stunting our political growth, a masturbatory fantasy harking back to a medieval past. I fear

Between 1919 and 1921, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War Freud outlined his theory of the Death Instinct; written in the shadow of the great slaughter of trench warfare. In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ Freud, who had been struggling to understand the tenacity to which some patients had clung to their illness, posited another force at work both destructive and antithetical to life, working to counter the narcissistic pleasures of being alive. As theory this always rung true for me, chiming with my own professional experience and sometimes the internal rhythms of my own heart. Recently I have had conversations with several intelligent and thoughtful people respecting global warming, in which we talked about the Gaia hypothesis, an understanding of the world as a living organism, albeit one now heavily infected by a parasite, the species homo sapien. If it is to survive it will need to develop a way to respond to this infestation, in short to either get rid of us al

Children are no longer taught to commit poems to memory, to learn, as we used to say, by heart. Indeed I am not sure how much poetry, if any, is taught anymore. I cannot remember being taught any at secondary level and that was in the 1960’s. The art of memorizing poems or lines of poems came to me late. It was not until I was in my late teens that I learnt the pleasure to be gained by lodging evocative lines in my memory, really an extension of a love of song lyrics, particularly Bob Dylan. The first poem I remember committing to memory was Dowson’s ‘Cynara’, a poem that George Orwell, rather snootily, described as having the charm of a pink geranium or soft centred chocolate. “I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind; But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, Yea, all the time, because the dance was long: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.” Ernest Dowson is al

Three items of news this week, a meeting was being convened to identify and honour the names in an old photograph, Labour members of parliament imprisoned as conscientious objectors in the First World War The Conservative MP and Shadow Spokesman David Davis has resigned his seat on a point of principle and intends to fight a by-election in protest and the extension of pre-charge detention to 42 days allied as it is to the steady erosion of our basic freedoms and civil liberties. Thirdly we have witnessed the disgusting spectacle of ‘pork barrel’ concessions being extended to the Ulster Unionists and other sundry MP’s in exchange for the erosion of fundamental civil liberties; and all for what, to gain some populist votes by wrong footing the Tories to make them look weak on security, with the added bonus of favourable editorials in the Sun newspaper. When told of Mr Davis’s stand Mr ‘rent a quote,’ Denis MacShane described it as a ‘stunt,’ a description now taken up by the Prime Min

In 1972 I was 16 years of age and working alongside my brother as a Shoe Repairer for William Timpson Ltd. At around five thirty one evening Mr Timpson himself descended unannounced upon the shop. My brother and I were washing our hands prior to going home. This Mr Timpson was incidentally the father of the winner of the recent Crewe and Nantwich by-election, and he enquired “are these boys are on a tea break?” My brother incidentally was then in his early twenties. In 1972 I clearly identified myself as a Socialist. This position was not so much an ideological standpoint as the stuff of life itself. Given my life experience at the time no other position was possible. However if there was one single influence outside of my life experience that influenced my politics that influence was George Orwell. The moral force and clarity of vision of Orwell’s writing represented a touchstone against which it was possible to test one’s developing political thought. In particular he laid bare th

Whilst serving in the Imperial police in Burma George Orwell witnessed a hanging. His account of the event represents one of the best arguments against the death penalty I have ever read and whenever the subjected is mooted I think of this short essay.* I see that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a major figure in al-Qaida and one of the men behind the 9/11 attacks in New York, has stated that he would welcome being martyred and wants to be sentenced to death. Should his wish be granted? Like all good liberals I have always been opposed to the death penalty. The purposeful judicial extinction of a human life has always struck me as being inherently disgusting, an act that degrades all associated with it and which demeans the society that sanctions it. However I have long been aware of possessing certain ambivalence when it comes to the perpetrators of war crimes. When looking at the Nuremberg trials for I can find no equivalent feelings of disgust. When faced with the sheer enormity of the hol

One of the current mantras of those who would tend to characterise themselves as progressive or left is the ‘fact’ that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the cause for the radicalisation of Muslim youth and the resultant acts of mass murder committed in London and Madrid. This particular ‘truth’ has become so embedded that anyone who casts doubt upon it becomes immediately open to ridicule and open contempt. However if you point out that the 9/11 attacks occurred prior to either of these military campaigns the rules suddenly change and you are informed that Israel’s repression of the Palestinians and the situating of American troops on Saudi soil are the catalyst. No mention is made of the liberation of Kosovo or, somewhat the belated efforts by the Americans to halt Serb aggression against the predominantly Muslim Bosnian state. To understand the growth of radical Islam and its related offshoot Islamic terrorism one needs to go back way beyond 9/11 to the late 1960’s and the failur

As from the 1st of June, it will be illegal to consume alcohol on the London Underground, buses trams and the Docklands Light Railway. I suppose that most peoples reaction will be either of indifference, 'it doesn't affect me,' or relief that public drunkenness on the transport system is being tackled. However, legislation to deal with the nuisance caused by anti-social behaviour already exists. Public drunkenness has always been an offence whether in the form of ’drunk and incapable' or 'drunk and disorderly,' all other forms of nuisance can be accommodated under the general umbrella of breach of the peace. Rather than place the resources required to deal with the minority who make a drunken nuisance of themselves the new London Mayor switches to the now current default position of a blanket ban. As I say this may seem like a small sacrifice, I can only remember drinking on the tube once, some time ago. I had been with a group of people helping a friend move

Travelling to work yesterday on an extremely crowded Hammersmith and City line train I found myself being literally bulldozed aside by a man who having nearly pushed me off my feet planted himself in front of a young woman, dislodging a newspaper from her hands and pushing her against the end of carriage exit door. All I could manage was a feeble “do you mind!” which of course he did not in the least. On attempting to leave the train I found my way blocked by a man attempting to force his way onto the train, I had to struggle to get past him. On the same day a young man stepped to one side insisting I get on the Piccadilly Line train first. A few days earlier I witnessed another young man go out of his way to offer his seat to an elderly lady. Now in the first two cases both the men concerned were white businessmen in their thirties. In the latter two incidences both were young black men. Now these incidences of themselves illustrate nothing, except perhaps that stereotypes around b

Three items on the mornings radio news. A senior policeman is advocating a compulsory national DNA database. A new camera is being tested which can identify how many occupants are travelling in a car, this to assist in the policing of car sharing lanes. The Law Society wants to see a new legal framework for the bugging of telephone conversations. Other stories percolating just under headline level, the admission that the Americans had used British bases during the kidnap of foreign nationals, the government is still struggling to push through legislation extending the length of time persons can be held without charge. The list could be longer. A former government advisor described the creation of a national DNA database as inevitable, that is ‘unable to be avoided, evaded, or escaped; certain; necessary.’ I thought that it is this very notion of an unstoppable juggernaut that has characterised the more general response to the erosion of civil liberties. Of course such developments are

Amidst all the furore surrounding the rather silly remarks about Sharia Law made by Dr Williams I think the central issue is in danger of being obscured. Perhaps this is not so surprising since we are constantly informed that his remarks were so finely nuanced, representing a degree of sophistication of intellect that the rest of us mere mortals are likely to have missed, it seems possible that the only person who may have fully understood Dr Williams’s argument may have been the Archbishop himself. Obscurantism presented as a virtue. However I believe the real intent of his remarks was an assault on the growing separation of religion and the state, between religious and secular law. For the last hundred years the Church has faced a loosing battle against the growing secularisation of society, a process, with which, it can be fair to say, the church has never been wholly reconciled. The archbishop seems to have felt that an attack on secularist principles might prove more successful cl

I fear the battle to retain a range of civil liberties may have already been lost. Faced by an ongoing terrorist threat, one that looks likely to last decades, we are bullied into accepting more and more draconian limits upon our liberties, including such basic freedoms as free speech, the right of habeas corpus and peaceful assembly. That most insidious of all Orwellian concepts, thought crime, has now become a chilling reality as people are arrested and locked up not for what they have done but for what they might do, for the things that they have downloaded and read. Britain has never experienced a period of totalitarian rule; most people view the growing surveillance of every aspect of their lives from government and commercial organisations with benign acquiescence or indifference. For anyone living in any large city now whole swathes of their lives will be lived under the watchful eye of the video camera and for the most part think nothing of it. Soon we will, if the present gov

Dear Mark Steel, I read your recent piece on the Pope. 'If you think Islam is medieval, look at Catholicism.' At a time when real clerical bullying and medieval thinking has astonishingly again become a serious threat to freedom of speech and an open society, oddly you choose only to attack the sillier doctrines of the Catholic Church. (And for the record who wouldn't feel queasy about the outpourings of Mr Ratzinger). However I could not help but ponder why you chose this target at a time when woman are being stoned in Bazra for being inappropriately dressed, or a teacher is sentenced to death in Afghanistan for downloading an article critical of Islam, and protesters think it legitimate criticism to carry placards stating 'behead those who insult Islam!' If your purpose was to attack medieval thinking, there were surely far more obvious targets? Well,  it occurred to me, for one thing you can certainly be sure there will not be any 'fatwa's' emana