The Politics of Dancing

There used to be widespread derision in Europe that in the US of the 1930’s Al Capone was only ever convicted of tax fraud. I thought of this this morning when I saw the picture of Swiss police arresting FIFA officials in a Zurich hotel. As Marina Hyde tweeted:  Marina Hyde @MarinaHyde  ·  9h 9 hours ago 'People make fun of US involvement in football but they've already gone further than anyone else in dealing with FIFA.' The scale of corruption in FIFA has been an open secret at least for the last five years, much longer for those in the know. FIFA is now little more than a gigantic money making machine, run for the greed, megalomania and ostentatious lifestyle of those occupying positions of power within the organisation.  One of the Arrested Official Jose Marin from Brazil Marin was caught on camera in 2012 trousering a medal during a youth football tournement. At its heart sits the grotesque and unwholesome figure of Sepp Blatter. Like s...

Weather has just taken a turn for the worse after weeks of warm sunshine, yesterday turned cold and wet. The political news is just as gloomy and my skills at elision and denial are being tested to the full. Denial of course gets a bad press, often justifiably so, though I also believe it can be a necessary protective mechanism, too much bad news in one go being impossible to digest. A gradually diminishing denial making it just about palatable.   Madonna Prato Bellini Yesterday to the National Gallery which always delivers up something new. Struck by how ugly 16 th Century baby Jesus’s are portrayed, like old men. This presumably to suggest worldly wisdom and the man to come. The women are all voluptuous, often displaying ample breasts, Michelangelo’s Leda seems to border on the obese. What is striking is the prominence of both Greek mythology and Christianity being depicted at the same time and often by the same painters. This would be inconceivable in an Islamic cul...

This Essay is Based Upon a Talk Given on 7th May 2015 to CFC Seniors At Chelsea Football Ground 1. George Orwell  George Orwell has entered not only the lexicon of the world in which we live but has influenced the very way in which we think, in a way in which no other writer in the English language, with the possible exception of Shakespeare, has  ever done. Doublespeak, Big brother, Thought Crime, Newspeak, Room 101, have entered everyday use since the publication of 1984 in 1949, along, of course, with the very word 'Orwellian,' used to describe constant surveillance, the loss of personal freedom and the manipulation of history. However this very ubiquity, this constant use of the language introduced by Orwell, sometimes from strangers to Orwell’s writing and who have never read a page of 1984, can produce the effect of making Orwell himself invisible. So who was George Orwell? Well, firstly he was no secular saint as some, on the right of the spectrum have s...

My first reaction to the exit poll was, like so many people on the left, including friends who tweeted me was a numb incredulity, this couldn’t be right. How could all the opinion polls have got it so horribly wrong? (I doubt that I will ever fully trust an opinion poll ever again). The prospect of the sonorous and self-important Paddy Ashdown eating his hat, which he proposed to do if the poll was wrong, briefly cheered me up. Then I saw the face of Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman and I knew that ‘ we’ had lost. Exhausted I retreated to my bed enough already. The day had started very early with an early morning day of poll leaflet drop. Two hours spent blagging my way in when the trades lock refused to open, stuffing leaflets into letterboxes and carrying a heavy rucksack filled with leaflets up the stairs of 6 and 8 storey blocks, and I was soon drenched in sweat. My admiration for postmen and women always increases when I do this sort of thing. Some people seem to h...

I n politics shame it seems is out of fashion, passé, uncool, indeed to invoke the idea that someone should be ashamed of, for example, refusing to tell the electorate precisely who will be affected by £10 billion worth of welfare cuts,  is it seems being ‘childish.’ ALEX TALBOT ‏ @ALEXTALBOT116  APR 30 HTTP://WWW.THEGUARDIAN.COM/POLITICS/2015/APR/29/DANNY-ALEXANDER-TORY-PLANS-WELFARE-CUTS-CHILD-BENEFITS … STILL NO SENSE OF SHAME @DANNYTHEFINK ? BTW I COME FROM FAMILY OF 5. CHILD BENEFIT VITAL £ FOR MY MOTHER. DANIEL FINKELSTEIN ‏ @DANNYTHEFINK @ALEXTALBOT116 YOUR SUGGESTION THAT SHAME IS APPROPRIATE IS CHILDISH. 8:11 AM - 30 APR. Note the absence of argument, the smart derisory response with its implied stifled snigger, from an otherwise intelligent commentator. It seems that shame is now to be treated in the same was as ‘evil.’ Dismissed as an anachronism part of the language of the politically naïve untutored in the ways of realpolitik. Shuan Wright ...