The Politics of Dancing

The Retreat of Western Liberalism’  By Edward Luce, ‘ How Democracies Die’  By Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky  2012 is often cited as the high point of a confident, multicultural, outward-looking UK. The faces of that Olympic year, Mo Farah, Nicola Adams, Jessica Ennis, Bradley Wiggins testimony to a grown-up society at ease with itself. Or so we thought. With hindsight, it looks like that year represented the swan song of liberal Britain, or put more harshly we were fooling ourselves. That in fact Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony represented a thin, possibly London manufactured, veneer covering a society seething with bitterness, hatred and division. Their first signs of this came in the referendum on Scottish independence, the tone of which, particularly on Twitter was exceptionally unpleasant. Much worse was to come. Brexit opened the floodgates to a torrent of xenophobic hatred, poisonous abuse and split society wide open, creating two hostile camps, Remainers...

Paddington Printshop produced posters for the burgeoning squatters rights movement, for community resources, and for acts of social and political activism in the centre of London in the mid-1970’s for over a decade…. The posters are visually striking examples of silkscreen and stencil printing at its most vibrant.’ Boo-Hooray, NY Art Book Fair, 2017 edition. I n the age of social media and the Internet we face a daily barrage of urgent and demanding communication, sign this petition, support this cause, retweet, follow us, adopt this hashtag. Politicians and political campaigns seek to grab our attention either by softly imploring or shouting in our face. All this in less than twenty years. Before this, there was only the leaflet, direct mail, and, of course, the poster. This exhibition at the London print studio allows you to travel back in time and enter the age of community activism in North West London, the age of the poster . The idea that the sixties ceased at mi...

Everybody tells lies, even the saintly tell lies of omission. Lying maybe in innate in people, a former of survival mechanism.  However, most people feel that telling lies is not good and carry a hierarchy of lies in their head from the acceptable ‘white lie’ to the unacceptably dishonest. Historically politicians caught lying were expected to resign, or, when out of office,  to demonstrate an appropriate level of contrition. No longer. Most historians will see 2016 as the point at which political lying without consequences became the norm. Trump, of course, is the chief exemplar of the new breed of lying politicians, but Brexit and the performance of Boris Johnson and the other Brexiteers in deliberately misleading the public also touched new heights of duplicity, deceit and calculated untruth. On the left, we have Corbyn, a man who tells lies about his past on a  daily basis, from Northern Ireland to Iran and Russia. Corbyn rewrites his role as cheerleader f...

As the whole Brexit fiasco descends into chaos those responsible are shedding responsibility like sandbags thrown from a balloon cradle, as they desperately try to find enough height to carry them into the stratosphere, where, like Olympian God’s they can stare down at the folly of mere mortals. On the ground, the ‘stabbed in the back’ narrative is competing heavily with the ‘evil machinations of the EU’ storyline. As the Brexit crazed fanatics, like drunks who have broken into the wine cellar sought to throw the Good Friday Agreement out of a high window all patience and politeness and observing the niceties of discourse feel ludicrous. And, of course, the niceties of discourse have long since disappeared from the public sphere, this is what Brexit has ‘accomplished.’ To witness this phenomenon in all its gory horror one needs to go on Twitter. Though this is not just a characteristic of Brexit but a worldwide phenomenon born of popularism, for when the President of The Uni...