The Politics of Dancing

The following was posted on my Facebook page.  POPPY BURNERS IN COURT 23RD FEB LIKE THIS PAGE TO LOCK THEM UP. Below this headline is a picture of what I presume to be one of the defendants. [1] It boasts over 92,000 Likes and I see no reason to question the figure. This is an extremely depressing statement of our lack of passion for freedom of expression, though sadly it does not surprise me. We have been living in a country culturally hostile to dissent for some time. A major player in this respect has been the popular press; particularly the Daily Mail and the Murdoch owned Sun newspaper, which have done so much to create a vigilante climate against unpopular opinion. I visited the Facebook page from which the post had come. Amongst the myriad of often semi literate outpourings of rage was the following,  ‘….NOOO whats [sic] funny is your dissin [sic] our hero's thats [sic] give there lives over 100 years of hero's that gave there lives for the freedom of...

 WHEN SATURDAY COMES If you want a perfect picture of the consequences of unfettered free market capitalism, what the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has called “market fundamentalism,” you need only observe British football’s [1] Premier League. And what a truly grotesque creature emerges. When Bill Shankley took on the job of managing Liverpool football club over half a century ago he took over the second side in the city, Everton were the largest side on Merseyside. [2] Shankley turned this around by sheer managerial skill, a combination of brilliant man management, a magisterial grasp of tactics and an eye for a great player in the making. Liverpool FC went on to become one of the major forces of club football in Europe. * When the current owners took over at Manchester City they inherited a similar scenario, however this time to solve the gap between themselves and their dominant neighbour at Manchester United they simply poured millions of pounds...

WHY POLITICS MATTER PART II i) George Osborne is a man largely lacking in compassion and wholly lacking in empathy. [1] He tries to make up for what he lacks in more human qualities by what he imagines to be his acutely Machiavellian political skills. Thus we saw him carefully contrive a trap for the Labour party, using the poorest and most disadvantaged as bait. He would restrict benefit rises and by insisting on a vote would place Labour in the position of either supporting the move, and alienating the party faithful, or better still opposing the move and be portrayed as the party of ‘shirkers.’ There in a nutshell you have the moral character of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He does appear to have misjudged the public mood somewhat as the Labour party identified that the majority of people hit by his real terms cut were the working poor. As it happens my own MP Malcolm Rifkind was on last week’s radio panel show Any Questions. I had written to Rifkind, -who has been...

A J P TAYLOR THE HISTORY MAN My favourite subject in secondary school was history. Almost all the subjects I was taught at Secondary Modern School in the 1960’s were badly taught, this included history, taught by an open racist and supporter of the South African and Rhodesian regimes. Such were the times in which we lived. Still history being such a fascinating subject it was possible to clamber over the clumsy teaching to want to know more. This fascination was first ignited by the BBC documentary series The Great War, narrated by Ralph Richardson. It is worth remembering that this documentary was made just 50 yrs after the outbreak of the war, more recent than Suez is to us today. Both my grandparents had fought in the war which was still very much part of living memory. Watching the black and white images on the screen was to view a recent past that was both strange and savage. It was the first understanding for me that all our lives are lived in context, and that cont...

Nick Cohen draws attention to the fact that Putin’s gangster elite are increasingly using London courts to silence their critics;- http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/06/england-helps-silence-kremlin-critic At the same time as strenuous efforts are being made to draw the worlds attention to the murder of Russian Lawyer Sergei Magnitsky for the crime of voicing inconvenient truths, Putin finds a new friend in the grotesque figure of Gérard Depardieu, for whom the Russian President cut through all the red tape to offer a Russian passport. Depardieu however needs to mind his manners with his new found friends; if he goes around making disparaging remarks about the Russian government the way he has about the French he could find himself being fitted up for a pair of concrete boots.         *      *      *      *      * ...