The Politics of Dancing

I have lived in London for over twenty five years and obviously seen many changes during that time. However one of the most un-remarked phenomenons has been the disappearance of the public toilet, the white tiled public conveniences’ with onsite attendant. When I first moved to this area there were four between Notting Hill Gate and the upper sections of Portobello Road, one of which was conveniently placed inside Notting Hill Gate Tube Station. Now there is just one, where public loos have been replaced they have been replaced by these hideous Tardis machines, the bane of the claustrophobic, I am never completely reassured until the doors finally open again to release me, relieved in more ways than one. On Portobello they have, Saturday’s only, replaced large public toilets on the junction with Talbot Road with two single portable toilets, this for the thousands who visit the market! There are whole other areas of London that are a desert as far as public toilets are concerned. I reme...

I have long thought about writing something about the ghastly Mr George Galloway, apologist for Saddam Hussein, suicide murderers and sundry other Islamacist fruitcakes. However where to start or then again why start at all, why spend words time and energy on this miserable little man? No, better direct the reader to the man himself. I particularly recommend the Galloway Hitchens debate on the Iraq war. However the most priceless moment occurs on the Bill Maher show when Hitchens makes a very unpolitically correct joke at the expense of suicide murderers. Galloway's face at this point gives the game away, for it is not the politically incorrect nature of the joke that truly offend him, it is the slight to suicide murderers whom Galloway has only recently been lauding as 'freedom fighters.' It is, to quote Hitchens a glimpse of 'the piggy face of fascism;' it is the face of a demagogue, a man who under no circumstances should ever be given access to anything remotely...

Recently involved in a passionate debate on free speech it took about five to seven minutes before race and gender entered the debate, it being explained to me that I as a ‘middle class white male’ could not understand the implications of my argument for those genuinely repressed. Leaving aside the supermarket basketful of assumptions laying beneath this remark it is difficult to envisage race and gender being presented as an argument in its own right in any other context, that is that a black middle class man, or white working class woman could not grasp the implications of one argument or another on the basis of race and gender. When I read his book ‘What’s Left’ by Nick Cohen and his description of a growing disenchantment with those describing themselves as of the left and the related decline of a left wing tradition within which I once located myself, I had finally to recognise the fact that, whether I had changed or not, and my core beliefs have remained the same, I no longer had...

One third of British teachers recently polled believe that creationism ought to be taught on an equal basis to natural selection. This poll went unreported; I only caught this information on Teachers TV, a surprisingly interesting cable channel. Now I suspect that if one third of British teachers believe that a religious fundamentalist doctrine, not just unscientific but an anti science position, equivalent to the advocacy of astrology as part of the science curriculum, ought to be taught to our children this should be a cause for some concern. Now there are two possibilities for this state of affairs. Number one is that the overwhelming power of the Creationist, the intellectual rigour of the so called Intelligent Design position has simply converted one third of the teaching profession, or secondly faced by schoolrooms filled with young minds indoctrinated by religious doctrine, particularly from within the Christian fundamentalist and Islamic communities , they have simply, as they ...

Before he finally leaves office I would like to place on record that I could never bring myself to dislike George Walker Bush. I thought him ineffably stupid, extraordinarily lacking in sensitivity and completely unqualified to hold the office of President of The United States. However I also believe that he was sincere in his beliefs and rather than the centre of a great conspiracy to enforce American hegemony believed that you could export the freedoms enjoyed by the American people by force, to the point of naiveté. A recovered alcoholic he carried into the Oval Office all the solipsistic assumptions of this breed of born again human being, that is he believed sincerely in a personal God to whom he had a hotline. This belief, which is I suspect fairly common, if often less intense than in the ‘saved,’ is responsible for much mischief. Being held by the President of The United States it has bordered on the disastrous.

It would seem from a number of independent reports that the troop surge in Iraq has proved successful and certainly in a a number of formerly unsafe areas there is now a degree of stability only dreamt about even a year ago. Now the acid test, ask someone in the so called 'Stop The War Coalition' the following question, taking it as read that you opposed the original invasion, are you pleased about this? Stand back and wait for the torrent of weasel words and prevarications. Then ask yourself what really motivates these people.

Freedom of speech is uncomfortable; it should make someone somewhere feel uneasy. This includes woolly liberals. Last week a man was arrested at Heathrow airport in transit to the Middle East on a German extradition warrant. His crime representing not what he has done but what he thinks and writes for he is a holocaust denier. Now I know very little about the man, but I know something of 20th Century history. It is still extraordinarily difficult to place the mass murder, the genocide of Europe’s Jewish population into any kind of meaningful perspective. For someone to set out to deny the reality of recorded mass murder, the Nazis were after all extraordinarily thorough statisticians, strikes one as about as odious a position as it is possible to imagine. At best these grubby little people are reduced to quarrelling about numbers. The Nuremberg laws are an established fact, the Einsatzgruppe a historical reality, the existence of Bergen Belson and Auschwitz undisputed. So the quest...