The Politics of Dancing

  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 ...

  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 rep...