The Politics of Dancing

  Covid and Liberty Anyone who does not have any concerns about the curtailment of liberty created under the draconian, albeit necessary, response to Covid is not fully awake. Once accrued governments rarely roll back powers. Once having acclimatised the population to restrictions governments are apt to become trigger happy in imposing them. That stated, the threat from Covid is all too real and no right wing (UK), or left wing (US), conspiracy theory can alter this reality. These two competing challenges create serious problems with respect to safeguarding against abuse of power, not helped by the legions of fruitcakes taking to social media and or the streets selling their own specially concocted brand of crazy. The threat these people create to public health has proved disastrous in the US and to a lesser extent here in the UK Most pernicious are the so called ‘anti-vaxxers’ who have contributed immensely to the failure to stem the tide of infection in the US. Even here, howev

    Tucker Carlson/Corbyn and the new Fifth Column When British citizens were murdered on British soil by Putin’s hit squads it was the far left, from Corbyn and the Stop the War[sic] crowd usual suspects, that came out to exonerate and/or offer apologia for Putin. In the US it has been the far right, from Tucker Carlson and the Trump supporters who have functioned as Putin’s fifth column. Not since the Molotov Ribbentrop pact has the right and far left embraced each other so tightly. At the heart of this love in has been the hideous 19 th century/Cold War concept of ‘spheres of influence,’ which with respect to Putin’s Russia the far left have embraced with a passion that would make Bismarck blush. Of course, this is a doctrine very much at home in the right, from the Monroe doctrine to the present small states forced to bend to the will of their larger neighbours. The interests of these citizens of these states must be ignored and sublimated in the interests of, e.g. Chile i

 Reflections 2nd December 2021 I see the laws allowing for forced sterilisation of men responsible for children for whom they do not intend to take responsibility, or neglect by being absent from, are passing into law in State after state in the US. These ‘Right to Fulfilled Life,’ laws are being passed by overwhelmingly female legislators, thus marginalising men whom the law will affect. Most controversial is the bounty rewards awarded to those reporting men engaged in sexual promiscuity. In defence of this legislation religious groups cite biblical authority and the human rights of the unborn who would be denied the right to a Fulfilled Life. [Note: Some details in this account may not be wholly accurate.] I see the execrable Julie Hartley-Brewer is parroting the line that she is 'done with Covid.' She is voicing a widespread reaction reflecting a childish response to reality, if I stick my fingers in my ears and chant incessantly, reality will go away.   If the Covid pa

  The Prime minister of the United Kingdom, heir to a post that boasted such eloquent orators as Churchill, Gladstone, Disraeli, like a drunken best man at a wedding reception, blunders, and splutters, loses his notes, goes off on a tangent about Peppa the Pig, a cartoon children’s TV star. This before the ranks of the Confederation of British Industry. In Johnson’s case however, he does not need drink, he can accomplish this level of meandering incompetent drivel stone cold sober, doing so with a complete nonchalant and self-regard. It takes a titanium strength sense of entitlement to believe that you can get away with behaving like this. He is right to feel so confident, for he has got away with behaving like this all his life. Welcome to British politics 2021. Meanwhile in the US a teenager buys an automatic weapon, - normally used by armies across the globe, -   is then driven by his ‘ mother’ some distance to where Black Lives protesters have assembled, shoots and kills

  Having been away from the blog since March  I can no longer ignore the noise, the cacophony of catastrophe, mixed with the pungent smell of decay. Representative democracy, with all its faults and inadequacies, still the healthiest of human accomplishments, now exposed for the fragile creature that it always has been. Of course, people outside the anglosphere, from Argentina to Zimbabwe have known this for a long time, whilst Europe needs no lessons on the dangers that are ever ready to pounce from left or right. However, here in the UK and across the Atlantic, cocooned in complacency and cultural hubris, - such frailties only threatened ‘lesser breeds’ – we have felt inoculated to such threats. After January 6 th and the attack on the Capital you might think people could no longer remain blind. You would be wrong. The recent success of Republicans in Philadelphia demonstrates either an indifference to these threats or more worrying an indifference to the survival of representati

  Democracy is fragile, and more important perhaps, democracy has turned out to be much more fragile in the older anglophone democracies, especially the UK and the US. This casual statement really needs emphasising, since it conflicts with long held assumptions it can prove incredibly resistant to being absorbed. George Orwell set 1984 in a country clearly identified as England precisely because he sought to shatter the complacency that was conviction that the UK was somehow inoculated again totalitarianism and totalitarian modes of government and, more importantly for Orwell, totalitarian modes of thinking. It is consequently difficult to downplay the significance of the events of the last half-decade both here and in the United States. From Brexit and the election of Donald Trump a highly toxic populist wave, hostile to liberal democracy, swept across Europe but also, for once, across both the channel and the Atlantic. Now, of course, both American and British democracy hardly repr