The Politics of Dancing

TRAVEL AND TIME  I currently do not have a passport, my British passport is up for renewal, though since I am eligible for an Irish passport should I obtain another it will, because of Brexit, be issued from Dublin. Passports are weighty icons and people invest them with extraordinary symbolism. True, to be denied one is no small thing, as the appalling Windrush affair has so grotesquely illustrated. Still, this iconic investment is strange, as AJP Taylor observes in his history of Britain 1914 to 1945 prior to 1914 British subjects could travel across the continent passport-free. The introduction of passports was the first step in curtailing this freedom. Now significant numbers of the British public it seems are happy to have their freedom of movement again curtailed in the belief, erroneously as it happens, that only this will allow us to change the colour of these little documents. As I say, strange indeed. As it happens I currently have neither the funds or, more...

When Victor Serge was ever presented with the argument that the Russian Revolution held the seeds of Stalinism from the very outset he would concur, although pointing out that there were many other seeds as well, which I also believe to be true. Looking around the world from China, to Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam, it is evident that the Stalin seed has proven to be much more virilant, aggressive and resistant to antibodies that it invariably ends up strangling all the other seeds before they get the chance to thrive. Why should this be? For all its many faults Twitter can be a useful place for examining the mindset of the fanatic of either left or right , though it can be a depressing affair. When reading the tweets of those imagining themselves to be very left wing or progressive defending regimes like those in Cuba or Venezuela one cannot but be struck by the prevalent imperviousness to argument, the aggression and hostility to any narrative other than their own. Any such narrativ...