The Politics of Dancing

 2020  LOOKING BACK   2021 LOOKING FORWARD AJP Taylor once said that either a policy of appeasement or one of standing up to German aggression, could have worked if the former had been taken to its logical conclusion and allowed Germany a free hand in Central and Eastern Europe to dominate that region, whilst the latter could, indeed would have succeeded had Chamberlain acted firmly and blocked German revanchism from the outset. What was most calculated to fail was a policy of dithering between both approaches. I thought of this the other night when Boris Johnson completed yet another U-turn and placed London and the South East in a lockdown, despite previous statements insisting that Christmas would be exempted. Indeed, as recently as previous Prime Minister’s Questions he had taunted Kier Starmer with wanting to “cancel Christmas.” Such inept dithering, from allowing pubs to stay open and racing festivals to go ahead, long after it was clear that this would lead ...

 A REVIEW OF LUKE HARDING'S SHADOW STATE   The perfect storm that is Putin, Trump, Johnson did not develop overnight, political disasters never do. It has taken decades to arrive where we are. Luke Harding in Shadow State describes with great clarity the variety of actors and actions, always devious and dishonest, often, very often, illegal, that helped get us here.   Thus, even as Blair entered downing street or much later, we watched Bradley Wiggins or Mo Farah triumph at the London Olympics, the iceberg that was Brexit was already close to being fully formed and heading towards us. Though the story begins much earlier with the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union. I was in Russia and travelling around a number of its constituent republics from Estonia to Georgia at the time. My memories of Estonia and Ukraine in particular are of a sense of exuberance and excitement as statues were torn down and newly created news sheets proclaimed independenc...

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...

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...