The Politics of Dancing

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 ...