The Politics of Dancing

I grew up in an age when changing your political allegiance was like changing the football team you supported, unthinkable. The world is more fluid now, though I find I still carry my allegiance to the Labour party as close as any football scarf. So for me, the slow, seemingly unstoppable destruction of the Labour Party feels like a former of torture. It is tempting to blame everything on Corbyn and McDonnell, and both are the primary culprits  and extremely malign, but they could hardly have achieved this destructive exercise on their own. For make no mistake about it all those people, primarily from comfortable middle-class backgrounds, registering to vote Corbyn back in again know that this will destroy the Labour Party as it currently exists. What they imagine will happen if, and it looks likely that he will be, is re-elected is unclear. However, if they imagine that the PLP will simply declare, “the membership has spoken, let’s embrace Corbyn’s world view and jump over ...

WELCOME TO WEIMAR Images abound that summon up the current catastrophic crisis that in just 21 days have seen the political ‘establishment,’ (a word that has almost lost any meaning, so abused and misused has it been during the referendum campaign), brought to its knees. For me, the most significant was a picture of Tom Watson Deputy leader of the Labour Party after he gave up on talks with Len McCluskey of the Unite trade union. The talks had been an attempt to deal with the impasse created by Jeremy Corbyn’s refusal to recognise the consequences of his having lost the confidence of the Parliamentary Labour Party, [PLP]. Watson knew the game was up. Days later at an NEC meeting, Corbyn seems, having been asked, to have refused to leave the room. Behaviour that would be disgraceful in a seven-year-old. So this is how a once great party, the party of Atlee and Bevin, dies, dragged into the shit by a petulant old man who has not had a fresh idea since the 1970’s. It is clear th...

Rarely do you find out something horrible has happened directly these days, or at least that is how it has been with me recently.  I log on to twitter and see a tweet mentioning Charlie Hebbdo or Brussels and slowly the truth begins to emerge. So it was that I heard that an MP had been attacked and, amidst the cacophony of tweets, that she had died. Her murder, on the same day that UKIP launched a poster taken straight from the Nazi playbook c1939. I began to experience a range of symptoms, a visceral sense of my own impotence, rage and a sick heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach. Since that afternoon it has not gone away but has grown into a paralysing feeling of nausea, as I have witnessed  so much that I value and cherish about this country being  trashed. So I have not witnessed events unfold on the television screen but on social media, on Twitter. This has made it feel more personal and direct. It has also led to considerable  distortions and amplificatio...