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...