The Politics of Dancing

"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...

Much will be missing in any post-Brexit Britain,   many jobs will be gone, of course, but the cultural landscape will have changed. The confident cosmopolitanism of London will have gone, replaced by a sort of cultural depression, whilst the rest of the country will retreat into an ever more angry and xenophobic siege mentality, as the consequences of Brexit hit home. This made manifest by the lost jobs, shrinking of the economy and as country after country decline to agree on trading terms not weighted against us. In short, people will have to face a clear absence of unicorns. The Lions, of course,   left long ago, and good riddance, they were trouble makers, and yet when our backs were against the wall they were nowhere to be found. It was left to the people to do the fighting. Some will imagine they see and hear lions still, of course, but this is not difficult as lions do actually exist and under certain circumstances, an angry street cat can sound like a lion. ...

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” ―  Hannah Arendt,  The Origins of Totalitarianism T witter is a place of anarchy, malicious vitriol, ill-will, racial hatred and partisan political venom. It is also an arena for the exercise of free speech and a forum for the exchange of views and, occasionally, enlightenment. Twitter is also a home, either from the left or right, for the opponents of free speech and unfettered discourse. Rarely does a day go by without a demand that someone should be silenced, ‘no-platformed’ or prosecuted. In some instances, the silencing involves less sophisticated methods, by subjecting ‘miscreants’ to a tsunami of vitriol and hate designed to drive them off twitter, women being disproportionately...

At the height of the Arab Spring, I remember the dismay as the Muslim Brotherhood took power in Egypt and immediately began an assault on that countries secular institutions and the modern secular tradition in that country.  At the time, I remember writing, possibly rather patronisingly, that the Brotherhood had mistaken majoritarianism for democracy.  That they were not the first to make this mistake and would not be the last. The idea that the winner takes all and ‘losers’ no longer count is just as poisonous to a democracy, pluralism and democratic institutions as any authoritarian demagogue.  The favourite tool of the majoritarian, as we have discovered recently, to our cost, is the plebiscite since this provides the either/or question that enables highly complex issues to be reduced to a simplistic good/bad formula. Moreover, a simple majority is all that is required to cast the ‘losers’ into the outer darkness of the bad. One vote will do. An attitude emerges, b...

A Weimar Monarchy Freud wrote that humans are incapable of fully comprehending their own extinction.   A similar incomprehension I believe can happen on a much larger scale, that is with respect to whole societies, and this denial is particularly pronounced in the Anglosphere democracies.   The denial takes the form of reasoning that, despite Trump and Brexit, the truly bad stuff cannot happen here. This complacent reasoning has first to overcome the obstacle that the bad stuff is already happening, and secondly that simply waiting for Trump’s term of office to expire or for Brexit to be done and dusted will not do. The damage done, not least in the great divisions created, will not disappear any time soon, indeed with respect to Brexit, we have not reached anything like the nadir yet. Already the fascist trope about being stabbed in the back/betrayed by cosmopolitans’narrative is being promoted by hard-line Brexiteers. Whilst the coming economic problems are unlikely to ...

For the first time ever I have had doubts about the wisdom of stopping Brexit. This is not because I have suddenly been converted to a Brexiteer, quite the opposite, for I believe Brexit will be a disaster, far worse than some imagine. No, the reason being is precisely that I am a passionate European, and fiercely believe in the EU project. So these thoughts clarified only after reading a Der Spiegel editorial , which pointed out how damaging a divided and fractious UK would be inside the EU. NOT A GROWN-UP COUNTRY Suppose Remain win, even by a sizable majority, we would still be lumbered with Farage, and the whole neo-fascist Vote Leave movement, now crying foul. The mischief this crowd could cause within the EU after a failed Leave attempt can only be imagined. Whatever else these last few years have shown is that we are a country not grown up enough to be a member of a complex multi-national project like the EU. We need to go away and either grow up enough to re-engage se...

Students at Cardiff University protest to try and prevent Germaine Greer from giving a lecture I don’t think it would be accurate to call me a ‘socialist’ anymore, though it is a term I have used to describe myself for more than five decades. It is not that my fundamental worldview has altered greatly, I still believe in equality, economic and social justice and a political system that eschews privilege and preferment based on class. I also still believe in free speech, civil liberties and free assembly.  These latter two principles used to be associated with the left, no longer. When I was growing up the prohibiters and censors all came from the right, these days they are more likely to come from the left. Would a contemporary Oz trail now have the left supporting the publishers of the Schoolkids edition? I doubt it. We have moved from a culture of freedom and diversity of opinion to one of offence. Rather as a backbench MP can stop a private members bill by shouting ‘objec...

Taking Back Control To watch the collapse of your country’s democratic political infrastructure can be interesting, occasionally entertaining, but ultimately appalling. Brexit has wreaked havoc, in no order, on cabinet government, parliamentary sovereignty, the Conservative party, the Labour party, -though this is primarily Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘achievement,’ – the union with Scotland and Northern Ireland, including the peace process, the temper of political debate, our standing in the world, and last, but by no means least, our relationship with our closest neighbours in the EU.  Quite a list. And this all because of a small group of Conservative Europhobic malcontents.  Having wrecked the Major government in the 1990s they have now succeeded in doing to the country what they once did to him. History turning Marx’s famous dictum on its head, moving from farce to tragedy. Now on the cusp of their greatest achievement where are they to be found?  Well nowhere near t...

Politics feels like a refuse dump, full of waste matter, foul smelling and with the distinct odour of decay. The excessive hyperbole of years which, in hindsight, trivial problems were hyped up into life and death issues on which civilised life hung have robbed us of the language to respond to our current crisis and its all too real existential threats. The venality, dishonesty and incompetence of politicians can and have been, a lazy response and a means of shedding responsibility. I know, in the years I canvassed for the Labour Party it was an argument, -they’re all in it for themselves,’ – that I had regularly to rebut. And in those days it was largely untrue. Most politicians were idealistic, with sound motives, basically decent people trying to do the right thing. Of course, there have always been charlatans, from Horatio Bottomley to Boris Johnson, cynical careerists, barefaced liars and the criminally corrupt. But these were the exception. Now we have world turned upside dow...

The Retreat of Western Liberalism’  By Edward Luce, ‘ How Democracies Die’  By Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky  2012 is often cited as the high point of a confident, multicultural, outward-looking UK. The faces of that Olympic year, Mo Farah, Nicola Adams, Jessica Ennis, Bradley Wiggins testimony to a grown-up society at ease with itself. Or so we thought. With hindsight, it looks like that year represented the swan song of liberal Britain, or put more harshly we were fooling ourselves. That in fact Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony represented a thin, possibly London manufactured, veneer covering a society seething with bitterness, hatred and division. Their first signs of this came in the referendum on Scottish independence, the tone of which, particularly on Twitter was exceptionally unpleasant. Much worse was to come. Brexit opened the floodgates to a torrent of xenophobic hatred, poisonous abuse and split society wide open, creating two hostile camps, Remainers...

Everybody tells lies, even the saintly tell lies of omission. Lying maybe in innate in people, a former of survival mechanism.  However, most people feel that telling lies is not good and carry a hierarchy of lies in their head from the acceptable ‘white lie’ to the unacceptably dishonest. Historically politicians caught lying were expected to resign, or, when out of office,  to demonstrate an appropriate level of contrition. No longer. Most historians will see 2016 as the point at which political lying without consequences became the norm. Trump, of course, is the chief exemplar of the new breed of lying politicians, but Brexit and the performance of Boris Johnson and the other Brexiteers in deliberately misleading the public also touched new heights of duplicity, deceit and calculated untruth. On the left, we have Corbyn, a man who tells lies about his past on a  daily basis, from Northern Ireland to Iran and Russia. Corbyn rewrites his role as cheerleader f...

As the whole Brexit fiasco descends into chaos those responsible are shedding responsibility like sandbags thrown from a balloon cradle, as they desperately try to find enough height to carry them into the stratosphere, where, like Olympian God’s they can stare down at the folly of mere mortals. On the ground, the ‘stabbed in the back’ narrative is competing heavily with the ‘evil machinations of the EU’ storyline. As the Brexit crazed fanatics, like drunks who have broken into the wine cellar sought to throw the Good Friday Agreement out of a high window all patience and politeness and observing the niceties of discourse feel ludicrous. And, of course, the niceties of discourse have long since disappeared from the public sphere, this is what Brexit has ‘accomplished.’ To witness this phenomenon in all its gory horror one needs to go on Twitter. Though this is not just a characteristic of Brexit but a worldwide phenomenon born of popularism, for when the President of The Uni...

The following is an attempt to understand the mindset of a Brexit supporting male, though I think some of the attitudes will be shared by female Brexiteers. It is open to the accusation of being a caricature, and perhaps this is not an unfair criticism. Here then is my attempt.  All the wrongs in your life can be summed up in one word, humiliation. The sense of diminishment is all pervasive, at work, at home, watching football, in the supermarket queue or finding a parking space. This feeling of humiliation can be triggered and reach boiling point by any number of instances. Getting a parking ticket, a couple speaking a foreign language and moving the queue forward too slowly, England beaten at Wembley, ‘politically correct’ phraseology, all can make the feeling of being a ‘second-class' citizen in one’s own country be burning and intense.  The one thread that links all these instances is foreigners, the feeling that alien elements are being imposed upon you. Agains...

When Conservatives Become Revolutionaries  Politicians, political pundits, and obsessive Westminster watchers, it is often said live in a ‘bubble.’ They exist in a world in which politics exists as great clumsy giant overshadowing everything and everyone, - from the newsagent in the corner shop to the crew of a nuclear submarine out at sea.  This view is however accurate, or more accurate than the way most people view politics. For most members of the public see the world very differently. For them politics is peripheral. Other concerns dominate their private lives and clever politicians have always recognised this. Indeed, the whole ideology of conservatism has hitherto been built on the assumption that people just wanted to be left alone and have as little to do with politics as possible. Hitherto this has been broadly true, and again clever politicians on the right encouraged the illusion that this was possible. [1]   Conservative politicians in the English...

 Brexit and The Corrosion of Civil Society Democracy is dead without conflict, without the dialectic of competing ideas. If you want peace, harmony and unanimity go visit a graveyard. Compromise, the prerequisite of democracy is a form of creative tension, - never fully settled, always threatening fracture and division. This is the framework in which debate and political discourse take place. However, there are limits to the degree of division compatible with a healthy democracy.  When the division becomes too wide civility, the agreed rules and formula begin to break down, compromise becomes impossible and conflict threatens to become violent; civil war begins to emerge as a possibility. Examples abound, Spain from 1933 to 1936, Ireland after the creation of the free state. France in late 1930s and Weimar Germany. As can be seen from the above examples, not all such discord ends in civil war, merely that it is threatened and civil unrest becomes more likely. I w...