The Politics of Dancing

LOOKING BACK ON THE 'TENS' Looking back over the last decade, and of all decades or perhaps like all decades, it is a clumsy amalgam of discrete periods, which in this case we must ludicrously call ‘the Tens .*’ So, in deference to the human desire to frame time, I must call years between 2010 and 2019 a decade, placing an uneasy cohesion on the chaotic days, months and years, a cohesion that never existed. It was a decade that started with confusion that resulted in the first coalition government in the UK since the 1930s. It also began with the triumph of the London Olympics that seemed to auger a new age Britain finally growing up. What followed was the most catastrophic period for progressive politics in the UK in the modern era, a period that made a mockery of those post-Olympic hopes. Many people commented upon the remarks made by the BBC’s political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg to the effect that ‘history would judge those who opposed Brexit after the ...

"Events dear boy, events." Anyone of a progressive frame of mind who is old enough to remember how they felt on those awful days in May 1979, days after Margaret Thatcher was elected with a sizeable majority, will have recognised the feeling on this Friday the 13 th . It is a feeling like no other, the feeling of having all hope snatched from you. To say that things look grim for any pro European and left of centre citizen is an understatement. We are on the verge of a catastrophic tragedy, feeling all the impotence of a theatre audience watching Othello, or Hamlet. However, although age and the passage of time are no guarantee of anything, certainly not wisdom, experience does provide something in the form of familiarity, - though even this can sometimes prove treacherous,  for history does not repeat itself, either as tragedy or farce ,- but it does sometimes take a direction that contains a similar list of possible scenarios. What it also teaches is that there is...

Caligula: Tell me my young friend. What exactly is a tyrant? Skipio: A blind fool. Caligula: That’s a moot point. I should say the real tyrant is a man who sacrifices a whole nation to his ideal or his ambition. Albert Camus Caligula We may be witnessing something wholly new in modern history, a manufactured catastrophe. The outbreak of World War One and Two were the consequences of miscalculations, stupidity, a failure of imagination and in the case of the latter, cowardice and fear. The Wiemar hyperinflation and Wall Street crash were man made catastrophes but hardly deliberate, hardly intentional. From Suez to the Falklands, from devaluation to the 2008 financial crisis, these might have been avoidable, they might have involved greed, arrogance and mendacity, but unlike Brexit they were not manufactured. Brexit was born in the lab, deliberately created by middle aged white men, a monster designed to manipulate the public and produce a result that would both enric...

I do not know how important familiarity, routine, habit, the predictable, is in our lives, though I suspect it is much more important than most people might like to admit. Our lizard brains certainly prefer solidity. We sit in the same chair, sleep in the same position, take the same route to work each day. When we ascend on the escalator, we know that daylight will greet us as we leave the familiar tube station, supermarket or department store.   To gauge our reliance on familiarity for our mental health it only requires this orderly arrangement of things to be disrupted. We instantly feel uncomfortable, ‘put out.’ The greater the disruption the greater the discomfort. When the reliable and familiar disintegrates on a much larger scale, at the national and cultural level, this sense of disorientation can be even more disturbing. This is best illustrated by the hyperinflation of Wiemar Germany, or the impact of the Wall street crash and the depression of the early nineteen thi...

A WARNING I am speaking directly to you tonight from 10 Downing Street to request the patience and support from you the great British people whom I know now, as so often in the past, will come together in the face of the grave national crisis we now face. For I know that only when we are united can we tackle the problems that beset us.  I know too that many of you are angry about the shortage of some medical supplies and some items of food. I share your anger. For let me be clear, this crisis is not of my making but has come about because of the intransigence of a few foreign powers, sadly assisted by some in our own country, and their refusal to allow us to depart the EU amicably. The attempt to impose heavy burdens upon our industry and commerce by the EU must and will be resisted. However, in the short term this will mean some continuing hardship, but this country did not win two world wars by being afraid of hardship and once again those who wish to defeat us will ...

History, to adapt a phrase, is what happens when you are busy making other plans. As we enter a decisive week in the whole sorry Brexit saga there are two possible scenarios, Parliament folds and we see the beginning of the decline of parliamentary democracy, or Johnson’s crude power bid is seen off and Parliament emerges both victorious and enhanced. For the Conservative party these are the end of days. Certainly, a right of centre, indeed right wing party may emerge, but it will no longer be the party of the Union, of small c conservatism, of constitutional conformity and respect for tradition. Johnson’s gamble has compromised the Queen and placed the Tory party on a collusion course with the Union. Things can never be the same again. This is no longer just about Brexit but whether the UK as currently constituted remains intact and what sort of democracy emerges if Johnson gets his way. For make no mistake, the system, as Carole Cadwalladr has made clear has, and continues to ...

To speak of England and Britain or the UK as if they were one and the same thing, as many in the US and on the European continent are often want to do, always demonstrates a lack of understanding, particularly galling for Scottish citizens, but is now a form of deception, witting or otherwise. In a very real sense as a political unit, the UK and Northern Ireland no longer has any meaning. A chasm now separates England from Scotland. Wales increasingly sees its interests as separate from England. Whilst in Northern Ireland the unionist population is waking up to the reality that its needs, interests and concerns are of no interest to politicians across the water. This process began with the SNP landslides at the beginning of the new century but it has taken Brexit to blow the union wide open. All of this was perfectly foreseeable, indeed I wrote about it in 2013, and I make no claims to special insights, I did not need a crystal ball. Though, in an age when political stupidit...

I There has long been a genre of dystopian fiction speculating what ascendant fascism would look like in Britain or the US. We need to speculate no more, when you hear the message of Trump and Farage this is it, the real McCoy. No marching in uniform, no torchlight parades, no burning of books, [yet] and no militia. Just the lie, the big lie, the swelling lie of victimhood and nationalism. In Britain, the mantras of populist fascism are spoken in public school accents wrapped in the soothing certainties of an imagined past. Though don’t be fooled, the skinhead violence is just behind the curtain.   In the US in the tones of the white corporate bully, the guy with the gun, who is on your side against the spics, the blacks, the yids, chinks and Japs. Dirty Donald with a magnum, selling MAGA snake oil. Both figures are a product of failure, the failure of politics, economics, imagination. They rode out of the murk of 2008, saviours of the white Anglo Saxon world. The sc...

Much will be missing in any post-Brexit Britain,   many jobs will be gone, of course, but the cultural landscape will have changed. The confident cosmopolitanism of London will have gone, replaced by a sort of cultural depression, whilst the rest of the country will retreat into an ever more angry and xenophobic siege mentality, as the consequences of Brexit hit home. This made manifest by the lost jobs, shrinking of the economy and as country after country decline to agree on trading terms not weighted against us. In short, people will have to face a clear absence of unicorns. The Lions, of course,   left long ago, and good riddance, they were trouble makers, and yet when our backs were against the wall they were nowhere to be found. It was left to the people to do the fighting. Some will imagine they see and hear lions still, of course, but this is not difficult as lions do actually exist and under certain circumstances, an angry street cat can sound like a lion. ...

VAN GOGH IN BRITAIN AT THE TATE MODERN*  So many people visited the Van Gogh exhibition that restitution had to be sought from the Arts Council for damage to the gallery flooring. That was in 1947, the last time London hosted a major Van Gogh exhibition.   The famous Dutch painter was, to put it mildly, a crowd puller. And indeed no sooner had the current exhibition at Tate Britain opened than it sold out. Crowds queue to view the pictures then crowd into the galleries, seeking to get a reasonable view of the paintings amidst the milling mass of eager consumers. Until, as a woman stated standing close by to her friend, “these then are the famous sunflowers.   And indeed, they were, in all their glory, so that you could almost smell the pungent aroma coming from their dark hearts. The Van Gogh ‘brand’ encapsulated? There is also, of course, the madness, the odd business with the ear, the melancholy of the self-portraits and more recently the accompanying song... ...

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” ―  Hannah Arendt,  The Origins of Totalitarianism T witter is a place of anarchy, malicious vitriol, ill-will, racial hatred and partisan political venom. It is also an arena for the exercise of free speech and a forum for the exchange of views and, occasionally, enlightenment. Twitter is also a home, either from the left or right, for the opponents of free speech and unfettered discourse. Rarely does a day go by without a demand that someone should be silenced, ‘no-platformed’ or prosecuted. In some instances, the silencing involves less sophisticated methods, by subjecting ‘miscreants’ to a tsunami of vitriol and hate designed to drive them off twitter, women being disproportionately...

Pierre Bonnard at The Tate Modern  Stairs to The Garden 1942 Pierre Bonnard I looked forward to seeing the Bonnard  exhibition at the Tate Modern, however, whilst there is much to enjoy, I left with a strange feeling of claustrophobic melancholy. Something about the exhibition seemed sad and forlorn, more so owing, perhaps, to Bonnet’s reputation.    Pierre Bonnard, painter of domestic harmony, of glorious landscapes and gardens that assault the eye with bursting shells of colour, exploding yellows and reds, crimson and blue; the happy painter who through two world wars and the troubled inter-war years continued to paint pictures that depicted not only visions of intimate domesticity but the contentment of a settled life which had a love of beauty at its heart. The Belle Époque is perhaps the most burnished period in modern history.  This I suspect is a consequence as much of the cultural, scientific and artistic triumphs of the period as the mann...

At the height of the Arab Spring, I remember the dismay as the Muslim Brotherhood took power in Egypt and immediately began an assault on that countries secular institutions and the modern secular tradition in that country.  At the time, I remember writing, possibly rather patronisingly, that the Brotherhood had mistaken majoritarianism for democracy.  That they were not the first to make this mistake and would not be the last. The idea that the winner takes all and ‘losers’ no longer count is just as poisonous to a democracy, pluralism and democratic institutions as any authoritarian demagogue.  The favourite tool of the majoritarian, as we have discovered recently, to our cost, is the plebiscite since this provides the either/or question that enables highly complex issues to be reduced to a simplistic good/bad formula. Moreover, a simple majority is all that is required to cast the ‘losers’ into the outer darkness of the bad. One vote will do. An attitude emerges, b...

A Weimar Monarchy Freud wrote that humans are incapable of fully comprehending their own extinction.   A similar incomprehension I believe can happen on a much larger scale, that is with respect to whole societies, and this denial is particularly pronounced in the Anglosphere democracies.   The denial takes the form of reasoning that, despite Trump and Brexit, the truly bad stuff cannot happen here. This complacent reasoning has first to overcome the obstacle that the bad stuff is already happening, and secondly that simply waiting for Trump’s term of office to expire or for Brexit to be done and dusted will not do. The damage done, not least in the great divisions created, will not disappear any time soon, indeed with respect to Brexit, we have not reached anything like the nadir yet. Already the fascist trope about being stabbed in the back/betrayed by cosmopolitans’narrative is being promoted by hard-line Brexiteers. Whilst the coming economic problems are unlikely to ...

REFLECTIONS ON SURREALISM  It is difficult to believe but we will soon be approaching the hundredth birthday of Surrealism, child of DADA and Freud, the most famous art movement of the 20 th Century. From advertising to comic books and movie posters surrealist images are ubiquitous and ingrained into the culture. What precocious teenager did not have an Athena Salvador Dali poster on their wall? For a taste for surrealism was a short cut to showing that you were ‘deep’ and ‘arty.’ Iconic Dali Image It’s very success was its greatest failure, when images adorn every Tube station platform or magazine advert they cease to be original, let alone shocking. So, it was with mixed feelings that I approached the Dorothea Tanning exhibition at the Tate. Volkswagon Advertisement Given the rampant sexism that even now characterises the art world, it is perhaps understandable, if unforgivable, that I had only ever heard of Tanning as the wife of Max Ernst so that her work wa...