The Politics of Dancing

I watched the recent riots from hospital, through the medium of the BBC. Thus events occurring just a few miles away from me might just as well have been occurring in Tripoli, Tehran or Tunis. Even if I had not been in hospital it is likely that this would have been the case, though I am told that there were disturbances in my own street, unreported by the BBC. This it is how it is now, you live in Cairo, Damascus or Bahrain, momentous events occur a matter of kilometres away and yet you watch these events mediated by the BBC, CNN or Aljazeera. One of the more erroneous features of the reporting, particularly from abroad is the idea that the riot is somehow un-British, this ignoring the recent protests against the cuts, the student revolts last year, the Poll Tax riots, Orgreave, which was in effect a police riot in the tradition of Peterloo, the battle of Grosvenor Square during the Vietnam war, The battle of Cable Street, the tradition goes back generations through the nineteenth and...

Last month saw explosions in Mumbai, one of the most vibrant and cosmopolitan cities in India. As reported in the Guardian, ‘The coordinated rush-hour explosions, which killed at least 21 and wounded more than 100, were smaller and less sophisticated than the meticulously planned strike on Mumbai in November 2008. During that three-day rampage by the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group, ten gunmen targeted westerners and Jews, killed 166 people and left India and Pakistan on the brink of war. Testimony at a recent trial in Chicago revealed that officers of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) helped Lashkar fund and plan that maritime assault on Mumbai. Commando-style raids are Lashkar's signature.’* Pakistan is a country where journalists are routinely murdered, either by agents of the state, like Syed Saleem Shahzad almost certainly killed by the same Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), or by the Pakistani Taliban or other Islamacist groups. In which university...

The other morning I watched Mr White goes to Westminster, a channel Four film featuring Ben Patterson from 1997, it is available to view on the Channel Four website. As a satirical expose of the Tabloid press it is incredibly prescient and I recommend it. I watched it after reading of the apology given by Mrs Mensch to Piers Morgan following her accusations about him made under the cloak of parliamentary privilege, (see below). Mrs Mensch’s apology followed on from an attempt to blackmail her by a tabloid journalist, a disgusting man hiding under the cloak of anonymity.* To her eternal credit Mrs Mensch owned up to the accusations and replied that she was not going to be cowed in her campaign against phone hacking, publish and be damned! Well she may be a rampant self publicist, though not on the scale of Mr Morgan, but she turns out to be a ballsy one. She has redeemed herself with some considerable credit. As for the execrable Mr Morgan who has re-launched himself in the US as ...

Inside the bus station, a large muddy outdoor car park damp with anticipation, framed by ticket booths run by the variety of competing bus companies and a number of small café’s, I sat drinking coffee waiting for the Body Valley bus for Tsarevo in the warm dark shadows breathing in the petrol fumes, warm coffee and the anticipation of a journey to the coast. The Bus eases its way into the humid bus station, Царево, ‘Tsaravo’ in printed Cyrillic stuck to the screen, this is my bus. I grip ticket and wheel my luggage toward the driver. I feel damp in the sultry heat of the Sofia evening, exited too by the smells and the prospect of the journey. I find my seat and sink into the prospect feeling for my bottled water and MP3 player, Soon the bus weaves its way through a busy night time Sofia, groups of people joked and talked outside a restaurant, splashed by the street lights, as the bus was held by the traffic lights. A babushka begged for money, her sad face a passing comment, as the...

I have a particular interest in the 1950’s since it was the decade in which I was born, at the very tip end of 1955, ten years and seven months after the end of World War 2. It is a cliché now that the past is another country moreover as Alan Bennett observed no era is quite as remote as the recent past, the stereotype view of the fifties being a grey interregnum between the vivid black and white newsreel violence of the forties and the Technicolor explosion of the 1960’s, long ago and far away. Here however it is presented as a period with a strong electric undercurrent, a strangely dark, though somehow exotically glamorous place, caught in a time warp, unable to escape from the oppressive weight of a hierarchical past where everyone knows their place. Enter the angry young man, all cigarettes and the intense typewriter clacking, if not literally, then in his head, determined to wrench the oppressively dull and reverential world of the BBC into a reality of a world that contains the b...

In the current political climate you would think that it would be nigh on impossible for a tabloid journalist to seize the moral high ground, but no, this amazing feat was achieved by British MP Louise Mensch, a writer of 'chick lit' fiction,who lied about the former Daily Mirror and News of the World editor Piers Morgan. Under the cloak of parliamentary privilege, she made up a quote from a book he wrote some years back which is now widely acknowledged to be fictitious. She has subsequently refused to repeat her accusations outside of the protection of parliamentary privilege. Parliamentary privilege is an extremely valuable and powerful tool and carries with it extremely high levels of responsibility, for someone to use it so cavalierly with no respect for the facts represent an extreme abuse. Mrs Mensch chose the moment of her greatest celebrity, as an MP interrogating the Murdoch’s with a world wide audience to conduct this abuse, it is the cowardly behaviour of a self publ...

This morning I watched the terrible scenes from Norway and felt that awful sense of dis-ease when witnessing the execrable depths to which human beings can sink. There was something particularly grotesque about a murderous assault on young idealistic social democrats, part of the great European socialist tradition, the best and brightest attending a camp to share ideas, sing and dance and presumably enjoy teenage romances and the summer sunshine. So many dead children, their bodies hastily covered, lives un-lived, promise unfulfilled, my human rage that the man who slaughtered them was still alive, the pain he has brought beyond his comprehension. In the reporting and media speculation of this event there has been some rather unpleasant undercurrents. The right have never been comfortable with the success of Scandinavian social democracy and there has been an extremely nasty whiff of Schadenfreude, as put in the words of ex MP Edwina Currie ‘well we always knew there was a dark side t...