The Politics of Dancing

The fate of this government was largely decided on a particular day in July 2012. It was the day that saw the debate on a Lib Dem sponsored move reform the House of Lords. It was a terrible bill that sought to replace the current unelected chamber with a glorified quango. It deserved to be defeated and so it was by the united ranks of Conservative backbenchers. However it was less the fact of its defeat than the manner that proved significant. As Tory backbencher after backbencher rose to their feet to pour buckets of warm spittle over the head of Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrat colleagues. The Tories burst free of the shackles of coalition and took enormous pleasure out of letting their true feelings about Clegg and the Lib Dems pour out onto the pages of Hansard. All good House of Commons knockabout fun , here is Sir Malcolm Rifkind doing a particularly good job from [1.20 minutes in]. Only problem was that Lords reform was part of an agreed package of reforms...

Just back from the 100 th birthday party of a remarkable man, Stanley Mathews, to whom I am distantly related. Still fully active and a lot more sprightly than some 70yr olds. He speaks several languages including Russian and has just read War and Peace in the language of Tolstoy. Family gatherings of this kind are occasions to mix with people not of your choosing. You choose your friends, you choose which of your work colleagues to socialize with, if any. You do not choose your relations. Outside of your immediate family circle, these are people  with whom your only connection are those invisible chains, links connecting you to your parents and outward to an ever expanding array of individuals, alive and, the greater the circle becomes, mostly dead; and it is often the dead whose presence is most strongly felt at such events. It is the closest we come in this culture to ancestor worship. The dead stare out at us from the pages of photograph albums especially brought ...

The spring burst onto the streets of London so suddenly that it caught me off balance, that and the glorious weather we have been having. The sun shines brightly on Portobello Road and environs and there is a whiff of dangerous optimism in the air. I watch out for bear traps. The sun shines too on the politicians and their posters. For we are of course in the midst of an election campaign. And what a dismal dishonest affair it’s been thus far. The only bright spot has been the fact that Ed Miliband has confounded his critics and performed well both in the TV debate and the hustings. For sheer bile both Dacre’s Daily Mail and the Murdoch press has surpassed itself, managing to be both cruder and more vitriolic against Miliband than it even was against Neil Kinnock, -some achievement. Of course the wounds of Leveson remain fresh. Moreover Ed has threatened to take the fight to the Murdoch empire should he be elected.  For his part David Cameron looks like a smaller and more...

A FAREWELL TO ARMS - AND LEGS This is an abridged version of a much longer memoir  on which I am currently working I. Sunrise on Parliament Hill The first green space in London I encountered, and arguably the best, is Hampstead Heath. Situated in the north of the city, and only slightly smaller than Central Park in New York, it encompasses Parliament Hill. From here you can survey Central London arrayed below you. Wandering around the Heath can provide the illusion of being in the countryside, whilst actually walking in central London. It was the first place in which I began to develop the distinct feeling that London belonged to me. When I was writing a dystopian novel, 2024, I felt compelled to draw a scene on Hampstead Heath. ‘The new breed of camera was even smaller, all had infra-red and speech recognition capability and were incredibly difficult to detect. Don was acutely aware of this when he suggested Hampstead Heath as the meeting point. Dusk was alw...

I am currently tidying up my various blogs, adding a number of posts, originally posted on The Politics of Dancing. Memoir and ore personal pieces to The Blue Room. Short fiction and poetry to Dancing on Thin Ice.  Whilst the Novel 2024 is still available at:-   http://alextalbot2024.blogspot.co.uk/ http://alextalbottheblueroom.blogspot.co.uk/ http://alextalbotdancingonthinice.blogspot.co.uk/ I am also doing some pruning of Politics to make the site more manageable. So once again thanks to everyone who has been visiting the site over the years. I hope you keep coming back. Stan Moorcroft aka Alex Talbot 

Tapton Secondary Modern school Writing a highly impressionistic portrait of my overwrought childhood and early adolescence came about as the result of an argument I had toward the end of last year about grammar schools. Grammar schools have always held an attraction for a particular brand of right wing meritocrat, [1] and others nostalgic for the days when a few working class kids could rise up the social ladder by passing their 11+ and going on to excel. Meritocrats are apt to adopt charming analogies to describe this form of social Darwinism, such as separating the wheat from the chaff, or recently by the Mayor of London, who used the eloquent analogy of a box of cornflakes. This might be fine for the wheat, or superior cornflake, though I’m not so sure how much fun, but a pretty dismal affair for the chaff. Whilst not advocating a puerile all must have prizes culture,- though a system that constantly reinforces the idea of winners and losers is surely just as pueril...