The Politics of Dancing

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...