The Politics of Dancing

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...

A POOR QUALITY SAINT  Jeremy Corbyn is unique among the figures that have dominated British politics for the last half-century in that his supporters both venerate and seek to protect him. He has been elevated to Christ-like status whom, in a memorable turn of phrase coined by Helen Lewis of the New Statesman, is treated by these same disciples as if he were ‘a bird with a broken wing.’  This explains the strange mixture of whining victimhood and aggressive bile that descends upon anyone of substance who dares to criticise ‘the great leader.’ They seem themselves as a loyal praetorian guard defending a saint who is unable to fully defend himself. That such a man, whose sordid past is littered with friendships with cold-blooded killers, Islamist misogynist and homophobic fanatics, an apologist for every anti-democratic regime from Gaddafi’s Libya to Putin’s Russia, be venerated in such a way is both grotesque and pure Monty Python.  His life is littered with ut...

Where Far Left and Far Right Meet Quiz question, what do the following people and organisations have in common: Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn, Donald Trump, George Galloway, Viktor Orban, Pat Buchanan, Seamus Milne, Leave EU, Stop the War Coalition, Christian Evangelicals and The Morning Star newspaper.* Answer: They all, at one time or another, have praised or acted as apologists for Vladimir Putin. Now any list that brackets Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn, The Christian right in the US, and Stop the War in the UK is an unusual list. Or perhaps, I should add, since it is more accurate, would once have seemed an unusual list. However, since we live in strange times the once inconceivable is becoming the norm.  We are witnessing hands stretching across the political divide, from the fascist far right of Britain First and Marine Le Pen to the Trotskyite West haters of Stop the War, all either pay direct homage to Putin or continue to offer an apologia for his violenc...

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...

2 What Do We Want? No SWP Placards! Saturday and the March for Europe. London can feel like a small place sometimes for I meet my next door neighbour amongst a relatively small group assembled in Park Lane. The mood is subdued and I begin to fear that a degree of despondency and defeatism may have set in. This soon changes as we get underway and as more and more people join in; by the time we approach Trafalgar Square the mood is confident even ebullient, as the mass of people, a snake, stretching far behind and in front of me. Regular readers will know that I am not really a marching sort of person, too self-conscious  to be shouting or singing. However this one feels different, this is not the usual ' Protests R Us '  crowd, these are people who only protest as a last resort. Disproportionately, though not exclusively , white and middle class, the atmosphere is consequently polite and we’ll mannered. After the exchanges I have recently had on Twitter, with both ...

I grew up in an age when changing your political allegiance was like changing the football team you supported, unthinkable. The world is more fluid now, though I find I still carry my allegiance to the Labour party as close as any football scarf. So for me, the slow, seemingly unstoppable destruction of the Labour Party feels like a former of torture. It is tempting to blame everything on Corbyn and McDonnell, and both are the primary culprits  and extremely malign, but they could hardly have achieved this destructive exercise on their own. For make no mistake about it all those people, primarily from comfortable middle-class backgrounds, registering to vote Corbyn back in again know that this will destroy the Labour Party as it currently exists. What they imagine will happen if, and it looks likely that he will be, is re-elected is unclear. However, if they imagine that the PLP will simply declare, “the membership has spoken, let’s embrace Corbyn’s world view and jump over ...

WELCOME TO WEIMAR Images abound that summon up the current catastrophic crisis that in just 21 days have seen the political ‘establishment,’ (a word that has almost lost any meaning, so abused and misused has it been during the referendum campaign), brought to its knees. For me, the most significant was a picture of Tom Watson Deputy leader of the Labour Party after he gave up on talks with Len McCluskey of the Unite trade union. The talks had been an attempt to deal with the impasse created by Jeremy Corbyn’s refusal to recognise the consequences of his having lost the confidence of the Parliamentary Labour Party, [PLP]. Watson knew the game was up. Days later at an NEC meeting, Corbyn seems, having been asked, to have refused to leave the room. Behaviour that would be disgraceful in a seven-year-old. So this is how a once great party, the party of Atlee and Bevin, dies, dragged into the shit by a petulant old man who has not had a fresh idea since the 1970’s. It is clear th...

The Regressive Left and the Death of Satire Did you hear the one about.....   The motion before a ‘left wing’ conference proposing that Daesh be recognised as a legitimate anti-imperialist resistance movement? What about George Galloway, the Bernard Manning of the far left, attending an ‘anti-war’[sic] protest at the same time as tweeting support for the indiscriminate bombing being conducted by Putin in Syria? No, that one past you by, then what about ‘anti-war’ website that compared Daesh Jihadi fighters to members of the International Brigades, or the one about the Paris massacres being about France reaping the fruits of its imperialism? Admittedly the last was a particularly sick joke, though when it came to the slaughter of Charlie Hebdo staff no comment was too cruel or brutal for the ranks of the regressive left, indeed the sickest joke of all was the voice of self styled ‘progressive liberals’ providing apologia for the murder of cartoonists and the literal slaughter ...

Britain is not Twitter,” I don’t know if it was David Cameron’s best line, but it certainly hit home, in just four words highlighting the flawed world-view of the delusional left. Cameron’s whole speech was a master-class in how to appeal beyond your core vote, he was less interested in how the speech went down in the hall than how it played with Labour and Lib Dem voters. Nothing could have contrasted more starkly with Corbyn’s speech to the Labour Delegates on the coast in Brighton. That Cameron’s speech was often profoundly dishonest will be missed, what people will remember is the tone and those oh so telling jabs at Corbyn and the current state of the Labour Party. The response of the Corbynites to Cameron’s misrepresentation of Corbyn’s remarks about Bin Laden was truly hilarious. The added irony is that Cameron could have quoted Corbyn verbatim and, pointing out precisely where Corbyn made them, made his point even more strongly. Cameron was pr...

For the Russian revolutionaries of 1917 there was a moment that rigorously interrogated their moral conscience, it took place in February 1921 at the Kronstadt naval base. Here the demands from delegates, amongst other things, were :-   ‘Immediate new elections to the Soviets; the present Soviets no longer express the wishes of the workers and peasants. The new elections should be held by secret ballot, and should be preceded by free electoral propaganda for all workers and peasants before the elections. Freedom of speech and of the press for workers and peasants, for the Anarchists, and for the Left Socialist parties. The right of assembly, and freedom for trade union and peasant associations.’ In response Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolshevik leadership crushed the uprising with great brutality, ‘ historians estimate that from 1,200–2,168 were executed after the revolt and a like number were jailed.’ [1] It was a turning point and many supporters of the revolution began ...

‘Some party hack decreed that the people had lost the government's confidence and could only regain it with redoubled effort. If that is the case, would it not be simpler, If the government simply dissolved the people And elected another?’ Berthold Brecht Man is a social animal and consequently the human condition, for anyone who does not fall into the category of sociopath or psychopath, involves a life of negotiation, making compromises that are sometimes, and sometimes often, uncomfortable. This can be frustrating, on occasions even humiliating. Of course there are some things you should not compromise, basic principles you must establish for yourself. Still you rarely get all that you want. In politics negotiation and compromise are the very heart of the matter and when people get tired of compromise the door is opened for fanaticism. Thus after having lost an election, one it desperately needed to win, great numbers of Labour supporters [1] have lost confiden...

PROGRESSIVE POLITICS IN THE AFTERMATH OF MAY 2015 Two excellent bits of analysis on the general election, one by Nick Cohen and the other by Andrew Rawnsley , though coming from very different perspectives they both provide telling truths about Labour’s defeat and Cameron’s victory. Cohen names the central poison that has gradually eroded the left in England, [1] disconnecting it from the great mass of the electorate, namely the fact that it despises the white working class, thinks loyalty to the UK or any kind of patriotism is reactionary and whose default position on any foreign policy issue is anti-British and anti-West. In Short, as Cohen states:- ‘The universities, left press, and the arts characterise the English middle class as Mail-reading misers, who are sexist, racist and homophobic to boot. Meanwhile, they characterise the white working class as lardy Sun-reading slobs, who are, since you asked, also sexist, racist and homophobic. The national history is reduce...