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...