The Politics of Dancing

Two articles in the Guardian this week, the first a very long, windy and tedious piece by Glen Greenwald, you can read it here, (though you will require forbearance and a high tolerance for repetition and the non sequitur  :- http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/03/sam-harris-muslim-animus The second short sharp and to the point:- http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/05/femen-topless-protest-gloriously-crude . [1] Greenwald’s piece is part of a wider movement seeking to present hostility toward Islamism in particular and Islam in general as a) racist and b) part of an imperialist plot aimed at world domination by the west. Sam Harris  I do not intend here to go over Greenwald’s article, dissecting his all too oft repeated arguments, I fear to do so would induce in me a draining away of the will to live. So I am grateful for one  Charles Kingsley who sums up the piece perfectly in the comments section. ‘It makes the ...

Shameless  adjective 1. lacking any sense of shame: immodest; audacious. 2. insensible to disgrace. Origin: before 900; Middle English; Old English sceamlēas. Synonyms 1. brazen, indecent, impudent, bold, unabashed, unashamed. 2. unprincipled, hardened, corrupt. I watched George Osborne yesterday on the BBC:- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22024061 After managing to contain my anger and revulsion I paused to reflect on the moral character of the man who had just made these statements. We are constantly faced in life with moral choices, sometimes pivotal ones and we are often given excruciatingly short periods of time to make a judgement call. It is in just such moments that our moral character is truly tested. Imagine then you are Chancellor of the Exchequer, finance minister for my overseas readers, and you are responsible for just providing major tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals in the land whilst cutting benefits for the poorest and most vulnerable...

THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE THE UNLIKELY RISE OF VLADIMIR PUTIN MASHA GLEESON  There is currently a trial taking place in Russia , though the defendant in the case is unlikely to testify in his defence, he has been dead since February 2009, murdered by the very people who now seek to put him on trial. I suppose the nearest equivalent case would be the trial in Britain in the late 18 th Century of a monkey accused of being a French spy. I believe the monkey was found guilty. The ‘accused’  in the Russian case is one Sergey Magnitsky who exposed, I would say a complex fraud, though in reality is was not that complex, not much more than a five fingered discount at Tesco, though in this case it involved £800 million.  Magnitsky was arrested in 2008, he had investigated the tax refund fraud for his boss William Browder, who headed the company The Hermitage Fund, one of the victims of the crime. The Russian state  turned the tables, accusing Magnitsky himself of t...

I am an infrequent protester and, as I have written before, am a poor demonstrator, a lousy marcher and even worse shouter of political slogans, no matter how good. Still I believe it important to demonstrate physically, politicians can handle e-mails, letters and opinion polls galore, what unnerves them is a physical presence on the streets. So on Saturday I stirred my self from the very definite comfort of my apartment and travelled to Trafalgar Square and joined the assembled crowd to protest the ‘Bedroom Tax.’ [1] I have been following politics since the late 1960’s but have never come across a crueller or more grotesque measure, even the poll tax trails a poor second to this vile legislation. Underlying it is a deep contempt for the tenants of Social Housing, an attempt to de-legitimise the right to call rented social housing, home. [2] People are being asked to leave areas where they have set down roots, have friends and support networks, are being forced to aband...

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I dislike hyperbole, I particularly dislike the puerile habit by many on the left, acquired in the 1960’s and never dropped, of calling anyone with whom they disagree a ‘fascist.’ Photoshop pictures of Iain Duncan Smith [1] dressed as Himmler are not only in incredible bad taste, they also, and this for me is far more important, damage the argument. Put another way when people see the argument framed in this way they think it over the top, they switch off, and they stop listening. So it was with some caution that I began to think about writing this article, though it in fact follows on from the piece I wrote early in March on the Tories War against the Poor and Voiceless, (see Politics Of Dancing 8/03/13). Language, particularly in the case of English, is an evolving and dynamic element, new words constantly springing up to describe new phenomenon. I thought of this as I tried to think of a term to describe the developments currently taking place with respect to state welfare...

This certainly feels like one of the longest winters I can remember in a very long time; it seems to stretch behind me like an icy wasteland from which I can barely perceive the balmy days of last September. [1] It is beginning to test everyone’s patience, and is certainly testing mine. A year or so back Boris Johnson, our calculating buffoon of a mayor warned that changes to the welfare system threatened inner London with ‘economic cleansing Kosovo style.’ Leaving aside the rather tasteless reference to the Balkan wars this was not hyperbole, the Benefit cap which hits those forced to pay the astronomically high rents in London , the Bedroom Tax and other changes in the welfare system are driving the poor and the low paid out of central London . I have just received a copy of the so called Discretionary Housing Payment Claim form. This is a new system of dealing with poverty and hardship, a finite pot of money to be allocated purely on a discretionary basis, i.e. it is no l...