The Politics of Dancing

Well the novelty has certainly worn off. I like increasing numbers of people live alone, the lack of physical face to face contact can start to tell on the psyche. This can be particularly hard in a big city like London in which, paradoxically you are surrounded by people, sometimes only separated by thin walls. For myself I am better equipped for solitude than most, not only used to my own company and remaining alone in the flat* all day. I have a wide range of interests, a love of reading, cooking and music. With modern technology I need never feel at a loss for intellectual stimulation. So, if I am beginning to flag a little, I can only imagine what it must be like for those with less interests or a lack of access to technology. Though I make no special pleading for the solitary. For those unhappily married cooped up all day in a tiny inner city flat with small children and someone they are increasingly beginning to hate the idea of solitude must sound like bliss. The weather, which...

LOOKING BACK ON THE 'TENS' Looking back over the last decade, and of all decades or perhaps like all decades, it is a clumsy amalgam of discrete periods, which in this case we must ludicrously call ‘the Tens .*’ So, in deference to the human desire to frame time, I must call years between 2010 and 2019 a decade, placing an uneasy cohesion on the chaotic days, months and years, a cohesion that never existed. It was a decade that started with confusion that resulted in the first coalition government in the UK since the 1930s. It also began with the triumph of the London Olympics that seemed to auger a new age Britain finally growing up. What followed was the most catastrophic period for progressive politics in the UK in the modern era, a period that made a mockery of those post-Olympic hopes. Many people commented upon the remarks made by the BBC’s political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg to the effect that ‘history would judge those who opposed Brexit after the ...

History, to adapt a phrase, is what happens when you are busy making other plans. As we enter a decisive week in the whole sorry Brexit saga there are two possible scenarios, Parliament folds and we see the beginning of the decline of parliamentary democracy, or Johnson’s crude power bid is seen off and Parliament emerges both victorious and enhanced. For the Conservative party these are the end of days. Certainly, a right of centre, indeed right wing party may emerge, but it will no longer be the party of the Union, of small c conservatism, of constitutional conformity and respect for tradition. Johnson’s gamble has compromised the Queen and placed the Tory party on a collusion course with the Union. Things can never be the same again. This is no longer just about Brexit but whether the UK as currently constituted remains intact and what sort of democracy emerges if Johnson gets his way. For make no mistake, the system, as Carole Cadwalladr has made clear has, and continues to ...

On New Year’s Eve, in his last diary entry for 1917, Wilfred Owen speaks of midnight as being the ‘intolerable instant of the change.’ It resonated with me when I first read it, over forty years ago, and it resonates with me even more today. Of course,  the ‘new’ in 'new year' is confection. In a reversal of the fairy story narrative, the pumpkin doesn’t suddenly become a gold carriage at midnight. Nature is oblivious to this man-made moment,- the change from 31/12 to 1/1. Yet we seem to need this sense of a new start, of fresh beginnings, resolutions to change behaviour, even the dream of wiping the slate clean. Sadly New Years Day is just another day in our life, yet we impress New Year's day with a significance that, given the usual grey light of morning, it finds impossible to bare. So what made the change intolerable to Owen? I think it was a sense of this fraud, that, of course, nothing will change at all. Still we pretend that the we have broken with yesterda...

CRUDE AND TASTELESS IS THE NEW COOL Many illusions have been stripped away during, what must now be called the populist Trump/Brexit era, [1] however the greatest of these must surely be that expressing yourself crudely in political debate is a voter turn-off. Misogyny, blatant antisemitism racism and bigotry, are the new cool. Words like Yid, slut, and worse have all found a way back into the political discourse along with expressions of the crudest xenophobic sentiments. Anti-Irish slurs and stereotypes seem to be making a comeback, all without any political cost. Jeremy Corbyn can make sneering remarks about Jews still not assimilated enough to get British irony, Donald Trump can talk about grabbing pussy, Boris Johnson can talk about walking pillboxes, the voters couldn’t care less, in fact in for the most part they lap it up. Every remark, every opinion, no matter how gross or repulsive will find a host of defenders. [2] The idea that political discourse must abide by cer...

TRAVEL AND TIME  I currently do not have a passport, my British passport is up for renewal, though since I am eligible for an Irish passport should I obtain another it will, because of Brexit, be issued from Dublin. Passports are weighty icons and people invest them with extraordinary symbolism. True, to be denied one is no small thing, as the appalling Windrush affair has so grotesquely illustrated. Still, this iconic investment is strange, as AJP Taylor observes in his history of Britain 1914 to 1945 prior to 1914 British subjects could travel across the continent passport-free. The introduction of passports was the first step in curtailing this freedom. Now significant numbers of the British public it seems are happy to have their freedom of movement again curtailed in the belief, erroneously as it happens, that only this will allow us to change the colour of these little documents. As I say, strange indeed. As it happens I currently have neither the funds or, more...

There is a scene in Robert Bolt’s play ‘A Man for all Seasons,’ when Thomas More is engaged in a dialogue with William Roper who insists he would cut down every law in England to get at the Devil; More responds, - “Thomas More: ...And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you--where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast--man's laws, not God's--and if you cut them down...d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.” I have thought a great deal about the scene recently when witnessing what can only be described as the blind fanaticism of Brexiteers such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, Liam Fox or Michael Gove. They would cut down any obstacle, legal, constitutional, ethical, that stood in the way of their imagined holy grail of severing all connections with the European Union. The...

A Family Affair: Reading v's Listening: In The Aftermath of Grenfell 1. Orwell once famously compared this country to a family with all the wrong members in charge. Putting to one side one’s feelings about the accuracy of the analogy it seems a particularly bitter comparison now. For if we stay with the analogy we are a family at war with itself. The corrupt uncles and dodgy aunts have conspired to gamble away the family’s future. Making promises they knew they couldn’t keep and promising lottery sized bonanza’s they persuaded a small majority of the family to invest in a pyramid scheme called Brexit. As the promises begin to turn sour and the bank statements start to arrive there is a growing sense that the family has been betrayed and the dodgy uncles mumble barely comprehensible excuses. All the while an ageing hippy, a great uncle whom everyone had forgotten about, has suddenly become a star for the younger family members, making wild promises of his own and encouragin...

Turning right outside my front door and within a minute you see it, as space clears between the trees, a dark presence on the western skyline. If you move closer you see a grotesque black and grey Skelton, the accusing wreckage of a block people called home as recently as Tuesday evening. It’s a monster now, twisted and horribly deformed, no, not black, black has a dignity and grace, but a dirty  sullen grey, the colour of ash, of lives turned to dust. I have seen this colour before, in Mostar after the fratricidal attack on the city in the early 90s. It is an image belonging to a war zone. And in some respects, it is, though hyperbole of this kind feels best avoided today. “ About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; how well, they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;” W H Auden ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ Auden, as he so often does, gets it right. The mother mourn...

Trump Brexit And The Politics of Illusion  ‘[Nazism] involved, perhaps first and foremost, a love of self, not the reality of the self but the self that is reflected in the mirror. This narcissism was projected into a political movement and eventually came to encompass an entire nation. The reflection in the mirror the Nazis had of themselves – blond, blue eyed, strong as Krupp steel, eternally youthful, with a Nietzschean will to power - that was the myth… Nazism was an attempt to lie beautifully to the German nation and to the world. The beautiful lie is, however, also the essence of Kitsch. Kitsch is a form of make-believe, a form of deception. It is the alternative to a daily reality that would otherwise be a spiritual vacuum…” ‘ Rites of Spring, The Great War and The Birth of The Modern Age.’ Modris Eksteins I The past is perhaps just as much an imagined country as it is another one. As Pessoa reflected, the greatest of all nostalgia's is the nostalgia for ...

“For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning." TS Eliot The Four Quartets I To look back on a year like 2016 feels like looking back upon a devastated landscape, already decaying after the storm, already a wasteland. A year, to mix my metaphors, strangled by the forces of bitter reaction, with the recently impoverished and dispossessed, fed on the lies of opportunists, cynics and demagogues, providing the coup de grâce on the prostrate body. It is a world in which, at least in the UK, those who feel cheated, have been led by those who have cheated them, rose in rebellion and rejected the post war pan European social democratic settlement. In the US even darker forces have prevailed, a Mussolini style rabble rouser has attained power in the world’s most powerful democracy.  Even before he has taken the oath of office terrible portents cloud an ever-darkening sky. Th...

Inheriting A Corpse A few words, like a flare shot out to expose enemy positions, can in an instant reveal the nature of a political mind-set, the contours of a particular world view. So it was the other week when a member of the audience witnessing a debate between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith was asked by the moderator why she kept booing the latter. In a barely coherent harrumph of anger and fetid spleen she spoke four words that stayed in my mind. "Everybody," she shouted, “hates Tony Blair!” It’s the ‘everybody’ that gives the game away. For in her world everybody did indeed hate Tony Blair, who is a ‘war criminal.’ *    This, one of a whole set of givens, self-evident ‘truths,’ occupying   the unchallengeable reality of the circles in which she moved. She lives in a world in which the notion that Tony Blair is anything other than the personification of evil is as much a given as the fact that Atlee is dead. Consequently, when confronted by a...

DUSK IN SINEMORITZ The days in Sinemoritz are long. It is now a little after nine thirty and already an age has passed since the first stirrings of five o clock. Morning is the most wonderful time here. The sunrise can match anything the Aegean has to offer. If sufficiently awake it is well worth a visit to the beach. When the sun catches the sea on fire, when a mellow wind brushes against your cheeks, you know both that you are alive and that life holds the possibility of a certain kind of happiness.* The Sinemoritz I knew then has gone. The Bobby [Boris] I knew there is dead. I will not go back, it would be too difficult, emptied of its chaos it has become soulless, anaemic, just another tourist resort. That strange ephemeral place, a Brigadoon appearing momentarily in time on the windswept stretch of land on the Black Sea coast of Thrace. There are periods in life, provided we step outside the narrow circle of our comfort zone, which, particularly when associated wit...