The Politics of Dancing

February is the month in which you finally have had enough of winter and start to pine for the coming spring. It has been a bitterly cold February here in London , though weather conditions have not of course remotely approached those experienced in the Mid West and East Coast of the United States . The cold brings out the hermit in me; not that that particular aspect of my psyche needs much encouragement. Still I stirred my self and ventured out to see the Kurt Schwitters exhibition at the Tate, on a bitterly cold Monday morning. I had only know Schwitters work through his connection with Dada and was certainly unaware that he had spent so much of his life in Britain . He died on the same day as his British citizenship was granted. Like a great many anti Nazi refugees from Germany he was interned on the Isle of Man after the outbreak of war. This stupid and undiscriminating policy had the unforeseen effect of placing some of the most creative minds in Europe together in one...

The Labour Party’s attachment to civil liberties and free speech has historically been tenuous, often taking second place to short term electoral advantage or sheer political opportunism; concerns about free speech and civil liberties being in the words of David Blunkett solely the preserve of the ‘liberati,’ [1] Guardian reading bleeding hearts. This contempt has always represented a strain of Labour party thinking, suspicious of free speech as something of a capitalist weapon to hypnotize the masses; the commissar always lurking in the shadows. [2] Now as described by Nick Cohen [3] and John Kampfner [4] the Labour party are using the unelected House of Lords to effectively sabotage libel law reform. This reform seeks to truly advance the cause of free speech, whilst removing the stain that hangs over London as the litigation capital of the world, the London libel courts being the chosen weapon for every thuggish oligarch, creepy religious cult, quack snake oil salesman an...

I pay tax. When I was employed full time I paid a considerable amount in tax. Even if you do not pay income tax you are liable to pay VAT on certain goods. To a greater or lesser extent we are all taxpayers. So what could make more sense than a group of concerned citizens banding together to keep watch, applying pressure to ensure that our taxes are not frittered away. Seeking to ensure for example that cash set aside for the health service goes on patient care not self serving bureaucracies or that our elected representatives do not indulge in extravagant living at our expense. You might think that The Taxpayers Alliance is just such a group. You would be wrong. The TPA has now become the default mouthpiece used by the BBC whenever issues of tax and spending are under discussion. However it is not all as it seems. ‘The same group that speaks out against government waste on Newsnight and in the pages of newspapers also runs a campaign against radicalising schoolbooks pu...

It is now nearly 5 years since I started writing this blog and it has grown somewhat unwieldy in terms of the scope of its subject matter. I therefore created separate sub blogs for my novel 2024 and Dancing On Thin Ice, for poetry and shorter fictional pieces. I now want to create a further space for more reflective and philosophical pieces such as Reading Against the Clock, posted below. These will now appear on The Blue Room: This will allow me to focus The Politics of Dancing on political themes and social comment. I will continue to produce my London Letters on this blog. All Sub  Blogs:-   http://alextalbotdancingonthinice.blogspot.co.uk/ This contains poetry and short fiction. http://alextalbottheblueroom.blogspot.co.uk/ Wider reflections on art, memoir, discursive reflections.  As always thanks to everyone who visits this site, I am grateful to all and it particularly gratifying to have so many readers outside the UK.

Oh you have had your chance, It said; Left it alone and it was one. Who said a watched clock never moves? Look at it now. Your chance was I.    He turned and saw the accusing clock    Race like a torrent round a rock.’                                         Slow Starter Louis McNeice I have a couch, set beside the window, on this I lay and I read, sometimes listening to music, sometimes in silence. I am though a slow reader, constantly cogitating, pausing for thought as ideas in the text mingle with my own; sometimes just pausing to allow my mind to catch up with the words on the page.  I am also a passionate reader, though not in truth a voracious one. I am too restless, too engaged with the world and of course my own writing. This depr...

Work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith has stated that shelf-stacking is as important as a degree. "The next time these smart people who say there's something wrong with this go into their supermarket, ask themselves this simple question: when they can't find the food on the shelves, who is more important: them, the geologist or the person who's stacked the shelves?" [1] When university geology graduate Cait Reilly, 24, from Birmingham, challenged having to work for free at a local Poundland discount store or face loosing her benefits, the airways and comment columns were all suddenly filled with cries of ‘job snob’ and paeans to the virtues of shelf stacking and the nobility of the humble shelf stacker. Indeed it seemed that everyone from the local radio shock jock and right wing newspaper columnists to government ministers had all spent some time during the course of their lives stacking shelves. So before I make any further comment I had bette...

Dear George, I read in this mornings Guardian that you are seeking to identify a further £10bn in cuts to government spending and finding this difficult. Well being a public spirited sort of chap and willing to do whatever I can to help a fellow in trouble I decided to see what I could do to help. George I have to say I don’t think you can have been trying, in ten minutes I found the follow areas where you could save well in excess of £10bn.   1) The estimated total annual cost of the monarchy to taxpayers is £202.4m. [1] Now as you keep saying, things are tight, that ‘we are all in this together.’ Surely even you can see that this is, now how can I put this delicately, a trifle excessive. Cut this allowance in half not only to you prove you democratic credentials but you’ve just found £101.2 million behind the metaphorical sofa. [2] 2) The total acquisition cost of the Trident programme £9.8 billion, this does not include the cost of upgrading. Now you, and any...

  Sometimes when I read or see something I am moved to investigate further, motivated by curiosity, concern, or sometimes outrage. The following article by Nick Cohen however I merely intend to signpost. Further comment by me feels superfluous. http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/nick-cohen/2013/02/lone-voice-against-terror/ Appropriately enough I read this article whilst listening to the debate in the British Parliament on violence against women. Having visited this page I would be grateful for your feedback, either tick one of the boxes below or make a comment via the comments button.

I George Orwell Early in 1938 George Orwell travelled back to London from Spain , where he had been fighting for the Republican cause. As he travelled back to the capital he made the following observations:- ‘And then England --southern England , probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage under your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan , famines in China , revolutions in Mexico ? Don't worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth's surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and med...

Over the Christmas period, BBC television carried a documentary about the background to and making of the film The Sound of Music. This told its audience, something that I did in fact already know, that the film has always been disliked in Austria, particularly in fact where it is set, in Salzburg. The documentary affected to be perplexed by this hostility, some ventured that it was due to considerable inaccuracies in the detail of a film, what was after all based upon a ‘true’ story. [1] There was not so much ‘an elephant in the room,’ as a pantomime villain strutting across the stage begging you to scream at the screen ‘he’s behind you!’ The reality, of course, is that the film exposes the lie that kept the Austrians warm in the cold years after the Second World War, the narrative that sought to portray Austria as Hitler’s first victim; buried were the cheering crowds greeting the fait accompli of the Anschluss, the flowers strewn across the path of the advancing German army, ...