The Politics of Dancing

SYRIA AND THE APPEASERS: A CASE TO ANSWER The Labour Party chooses not to remember George Lansbury who was the leader of the Labour Party from 1932 to 1935. Lansbury’s history in the early Labour Party was a noble one, however he was a fervent pacifist, stridently opposing any programme of re-armament in spite of the growth of Fascism and Nazism on the European continent; even opposing sanctions against Italy in response to the Invasion of Abyssinia. He met with both Hitler and Mussolini and seems to have developed a relatively benign view of both men. In 1938 he welcomed the Munich agreement.   Those on left have a tendency to present appeasement as a purely right wing affair, it was not. There is also a tendency to think of appeasement as a purely historical phenomenon, something belonging to the years 1937 -1939. It is not. Douglas Hurd the former Foreign Secretary was speaking the other night on the BBC programme The World Tonight, busy re-writing history. Douglas Hurd was

AGGRESSIVE HOMOSEXUALS?  With Apologies to G K Chesterton  ‘Former Conservative defence minister Sir Gerald Howarth has warned of the dangers of the "aggressive homosexual community".’  Are they arming as you speak, Are they Howarth? With freshly sprayed ‘Mystique ‘ Dressing oh  so very sheik, Are they Howarth? Are there gangs of rabid queers Confirming your worst fears Assembling on the common land of England? Do the sound of pulses race As the bill proceeds apace; And When the bill is finally through Will they start to fancy you, Will they Howarth? Will the country cease to be Muscular and free In Durham, Cleethorpes, Harrage, Now that we have gay marriage, Will it it Howarth? Parliament that once heard The gilded spoken word Now hears nonsense, though it’s loud From a homophobic crowd Led by Howarth. So leave your daydreams on the pillow Of a land of ball and willow All in white and very gay, Thoug

No sooner has the blood dried on the Woolwich pavement than the apologists creep out into the May sunshine. You can read their pronouncements, wrapped in woolly words, in the Guardian and other vehicles of the liberal media. I also see that CND along with the Stop The War Coalition have put out a statement. I quote:- ‘There can be no justification for a murderous attack on an individual soldier in the streets of London ………’ Predictably the ‘statement then goes on to do just that:-         [The attack]’ ……represent a phenomenon that was pointed out nearly a decade ago by the security services in Britain : that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would lead to a growing threat of terrorism in Britain . Many of us have long predicted that these sorts of attacks would happen because of the war on terror.’ [1] The squalid exploitation of the death of Lee Rigby by the apologists and Islamacist fellow travellers of the so called Stop the War Coalition was to be predicted, the g

“I would have been a judge,” said the distinctly plebeian sounding Peter Cook to Dudley Moore, “only I never had the Latin.” Never having the Latin my self this also ruled out a life on the bench.   These days of course our ruling elite no longer require Latin to communicate in the obscurantist language of the Patrician.   Having asked for an explanation as to why he was deemed suitable for work here is the contents of the letter sent to an ESA claimant. ‘On 21/12/13 [sic] Mr X was examined by a Health Care Professional of The Medical Services in connection with the Work capability Assessment (WCA). Having considered the available evidence the decision maker has decided that Mr X has scored 15 points from the appropriate descriptors and has limited capability for work. Mr X continues to continues to be accepted as having Limited Capability for Work and is entitled to Employment and Support Allowance   Cont [sic] and Income related. The Decision Maker has also co

I don’t know whether the presence of a full moon increases a predilection toward madness, I do know that the weather has a deep and significant impact on mood. Yesterday was full of the threat of thunder that never materialized. The sky remained dark and oppressive, the air pregnant with a dense electric energy; at one time humid, at another surprisingly cold. Walking back from Notting Hill Gate I was reminded of the descent of fog in Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea, strange things suddenly seemed possible. ‘Melancholy thoughts,’ Nineteenth Century writers would have said of the drift of my thinking, and they would have been right. I have written elsewhere of my fondness for melancholy, a rich soupy state of mind in which thinking becomes poetry. I have been engaged in writing, fiction and a response to an article in an addiction magazine written by Russell Brand. Not really blog material since you need to see the original article to make sense of my response. However I do not h

After the fall of France in 1940 Petain blamed the disaster on the French people’s love of luxury and the soft life. As George Orwell remarked at the time one only had to compare Petain’s lifestyle to that of an ordinary French worker or peasant to understand what disgusting piffle this was; this being a classic example of blaming the victims, a practice that has a long and dishonourable history. Now we have clownish Bullingdon Boris, stating that the causes of our current malaise are “…sloth…a culture of easy gratification."* Think on it, all those lazy sods, pretending to work amongst the longest hours in Europe , working for the minimum wage enjoying a ‘culture of easy gratification.’ There seems to be no end to the bare faced cheek of the bloated champagne Charlie’s and boardroom bullies with their bloated salaries, perks and bonus packages. Such remarks can be characterised as tumbrel statements of the ‘let them eat cake,’ variety; unfortunately what is missing

What is it with Gatsby? He haunts the modern Anglo American psyche. A novel [1] soaked in the money and the glamour of the Jazz age, replete with snobbery and the conflict between old and new money, a story about self invention, or more precisely the nature of identity. To read this rest of this piece please go to:- http://alextalbottheblueroom.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/gatsby-and-nostalgia-for-things-that_17.html

There is a spectre stalking the British political scene, though as far as I can tell few, if any, of our political class, are acute enough to have sensed its presence. As the Tories implode, yet again, over Europe and a European referendum, Scotland gears itself up for a vote on whether to secede from the UK . Consequently, we could be debating two game-changing constitutional matters over the next year or so as more and more Tory little Englanders emerge to back leaving the EU. Leaving the EU as it is currently presented in the British Press could certainly prove popular in England . Moreover, the EU could not have done more to repel ordinary citizens from the European project if it actively tried.  Still, the case has not yet been made for our continued membership of the European club. Still, it could be possible to win an Out vote in a referendum in England ; the same I suspect may not be true of Scotland , Wales , or Northern Ireland . For different reasons, EU membershi

History I discovered in my teens is everything: ‘He who controls the past controls the future,’ George Orwell wrote in 1984, something ruling elites have always known. Control of the narrative being the first requisite for power; “We rule” the elite declare, “because we are destined to rule.” Should any citizen question this they need only be directed to the history books. The government is currently undertaking a concerted drive to take control over the way the historical narrative is currently being taught in our schools. [1] History is already the worst taught subject in the public education system. On a recent edition of the popular BBC quiz show ‘Pointless’ a contestant, who claimed to be a PhD student, was unable to answer any multiple choice questions about The English Civil War. She finally ventured that the struggle was between the Royalists and the Redcoats! Ignorance on this scale is not only alarming but speaks of a populace who literally do not know who they are or w

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This week the Queen’s Speech, i.e. The Coalition’s legislative programme, was drowned out by the resignation of a football manager, Alex Ferguson. The increasingly tabloid BBC chose to lead with this item, not once but three times. The Government should be grateful; it turned out to be a good day to bury a tawdry, superficial, mean spirited and largely irrelevant legislative package. It should be labelled the scapegoat programme. This time immigrant labour being the government’s primary target. Just when you thought the government could sink no lower, like a demented limbo dancer they manage ever greater feats of athleticism in dipping below the bar of the morally defensible.   When I think of the young Bulgarians I have met, intelligent, hard working, eager to get on, full of generosity of spirit and with a great deal of enthusiasm for British music and popular culture, being characterised as all a bunch of potential welfare scroungers or NHS leeches I feel a deep combination of

Seamus Milne There is currently an article in the Comment section of the Guardian by Seamus Milne. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/07/west-cynically-bleed-syria-weaken-iran This piece is intended to expose the wicked machinations of western governments, particularly the UK and US. Forget Assad’s torture factories, the shelling and bombing of his own citizens, (long before any external intervention), and the continuing supply of sophisticated weaponry from Russia; the real villains are, you guessed it, David Cameron and Barack Obama. I quote:- ‘ The Assad regime bears responsibility for that, of course, [ acts of violence against its own citizens ] But so do those who have funded and fuelled the war, bleeding Syria and weakening the Arab world in the process. The demand by Cameron and other western politicians to increase the flow of arms is reckless and cynical.’ From reading this you would not guess that

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The British, despite decades of self deception and self serving propaganda to the contrary, have never been widely trusted in the world. The British will promise one thing to your face, whilst conspiring against you behind your back. A smile more often than not is designed to conceal a well hidden stiletto; the carefully constructed lie presented as fact. Theft committed as often with a fountain pen as a sword. This double dealing and back stabbing have long been the experience of dealing with the British for the inhabitants of foreign lands. From Sykes–Picot, to Munich , from Suez to Cyprus from Diego Garcia [1] to Kenya ,[2] British treachery has been experienced the world over. The honourable British Gentleman a self serving fiction, the true experience of the British being encapsulated by Flashman not Tom Brown. I thought of this when watching The Prime Minister trying to slip out of the moral obligation we owe those who supported us in Afghanistan from settling here

The untold story from last Thursday’s election was not the ‘rise’ of UKIP, but the incredibly low turnout, an average of around 31%. This was 10% down on the last time these elections were held. Disenchantment with democratic politics is now widespread across Europe . Here it manifests as citizens simply refusing to engage with the political process. Motivated by rage at one end of the spectrum and by indifference at the other people simply do not bother to vote. This raises the question of how low turnout has to go before it calls the whole validity of the process into question? Now representative government across Europe and the US as a form of political control and accountability has always been something of a sham; real power is retained by tiny elites and large multi-national corporations. Any serious attempt at challenging this power through the ballot box is always resisted using the immense armoury at the disposal of corporate capitalism; political parties are bought, t