The Politics of Dancing

From next year Saudi Arabia will be a member of the UN Human Rights Council. This week saw the sentencing of Saudi human rights activist Umar al-Saed to four years in prison and 300 lashes for peacefully campaigning for the independent human rights organisation the Saudi Political and Civil Rights Association, (ACPRA). Umar al-Saed Mr al-Saed, 24 was arrested on April 28 th this year after refusing interrogation without a lawyer. Currently seven other members of ACPRA are in prison. In March a judge decided to ‘dissolve’ ACPRA and sentenced two of its founders, Mohammad al-Qahtani and Abdullah al-Hamid to 10 and 11 years in prison respectively. The sentencing of ACPRA members is part of a sustained campaign currently being waged by the Saudi government on human rights activists. [1]   The citizens of the Arab kingdom are denied free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship, the freedom to be openly agnostic, atheist or gay, equality of the sexes, a free p...

Recently I wrote about the events at the LSE’s Fresher’s Fair, which saw two members of the student atheist society being escorted from the premises for wearing mildly satirical T shirts. http://alextalbot.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/london-letter-october-2013.html The figure at the heart of these events is the General Secretary of the Student Union at the LSE, a Mr Jay Stoll. [1] He is now at it again, condemning the outrage over advice given by Universities UK, that the segregation of audiences along gender lines should be permissible should religious speakers, ( read Islamic), [2] demand it. [3] This time the Islamacist appeasers of the left had gone too far and met with the appropriate response. Mr Stoll is not happy and immediately denounced the campaign gainst such segregation as…you guessed correctly, ‘Islamaphobic.’ Jay Stoll General secretary LSE Student Union Mr Stoll has already been denounced as a “sanctimonious prig” by Richard Dawkins. I fear Mr Dawkins was being...

British Politics and the Race to The Gutter One of the funnier Monty Python sketches, Four Yorkshire Men, consisted of a group of four affluent middle aged men sitting in sunny climes smoking fat cigars each trying to outdo the other in tales of childhood poverty and squalor. [1] First Man: “Four of us used to live in one room, no furniture, with holes in the roof.” Second Man: “Roof, roof, we used to dream of having a roof! Whole family lived in sceptic tank at bottom of garden!” You get the drift. I thought of this sketch the other day whilst watching two MP’s one Labour the other Conservative trying to outdo one another on who was the tougher on welfare and immigration. [2] This disgusting spectacle, a race to the gutter in a grubby bid for the votes of the misinformed, [3] the bigoted and the malign, was characterised by an increasingly unpleasant tone and the touting of ever more vindictive, discriminatory, repressive and downright nasty proposals. The tone is eas...

The Eskimo’s (Inuit) are famously held to have a great number of words for snow. [1]  I have always felt the same should also be true in the English language respecting the concept of ‘reading.' A few years back I was asked whether I read the Metro on my way to work. I shot back that you didn't read the Metro you looked at it. Leaving aside that such a remark was way too smart arsed, there was a deep truth to what I was saying. We say that we are reading when looking at a advertising hoarding, thumbing through a tabloid newspaper, trying to understand an instruction manual, or absorbing War and Peace or Schopenhauer. All involve deciphering symbols on a page but they represent profoundly different phenomenon. Real reading, if I can call it that, is an intense experience, also it is a two way process, good books read you as much as you read them. By this I mean that the process of reading great writing challenges you to examine your own thinking, you...

You need a strong stomach these days if you are to hear all the hypocritical self serving guff being spouted by right wing politicians, ‘celebrities’ and the terminally sanctimonious. To listen to David Cameron outside 10 Downing Street lauding Mandela, “a hero for all ages,” you could be forgiven for forgetting that here was a man who had once visited South Africa , all expenses paid, as part of a lobbying firm that had been contracted to undermine sanctions. [1] Mandela and I fighters for justice Of course in undermining sanctions he was knocking at an open door, the Tories had always bent over backwards in decrying sanctions and providing moral support for the Apartheid regime. I was there, a bit player its true, fifth protester from right on back row, but still I remember the hostility and venom of the right wing of the Tory party and newspapers like the Telegraph and writers such as Peregrine Worsthorne. For the young who are now being given the impressi...

Words have meanings. That they do so is important, that what we say should accurately reflect what we think lies at the heart of effective verbal communication. So if I make a statement such as, we are all in this together, you will understand that I am saying something rather splendid about human solidarity. It speaks of ‘ all for one and one for all ,’ of ‘ I am Spartacus’ and ‘you pick on him, you pick on me.’ Not so for our chancellor George Osborne, for when he uses the phrase he means something different. For him it means, it has been raining heavily, maintaining the roof is expensive, so I'm reducing the size of the roof. It means that those outside are going to have to get used to getting a lot wetter. It means I am going to pick on the young, the poor and marginalised, since the electoral maths allow me to get away with it. It means I am going to do all I can to defend the wealthy and insulate them from the impact of austerity. Finally it means that th...

A spectre is haunting ruling elites across the world, from the Kremlin and the upper echelon’s of the Chinese Communist Party, to The White House and  Downing Street and the office of the French President. It is the spectre of the Arab Spring, of street protest fuelled by the internet, Twitter and Facebook. At the core of this fear in the west is the knowledge that neoliberal austerity has torn up the post war contract between governments and governed. This contract involved an exchange, for executive power and the right to rule, governments delivered ever rising levels of prosperity and embourgeoisement, coupled with increasing leisure time and early and prosperous retirement. This breach of contract has left governments and ruling elites exposed as naked monarchs, unable to offer anything other than vague promises of jam tomorrow. For the young this scenario represents a bitter pill that, across the western world, they are increasingly refusing to swallow. ...