The Politics of Dancing

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...

It seems we are set for an Indian summer, the atmosphere muggy and cloying, unusual for September. I open the window just after six to feel the cool breeze, which I experience like American air-conditioning.    Such mornings as these feel heavily pregnant with post-holiday projects, further education classes, DIY, the sounds and smells of return to school or university. Yet against this backdrop of the new, the fresh, there is autumnal decay. The leaves make their slow meandering journey back to the dew soaked earth, rotten fruit lies under the pear and apple trees and, for those over a certain age, the alarming feeling of time draining away. ‘Can it really be September already?' Though this year, for me, and I think many others, something new has been added to the fears and hopes of September. We are now menaced by the prospect of President Trump, the reality of the ongoing Brexit nightmare, and, more parochially, for those on the progressive left, the slow agoni...

2 What Do We Want? No SWP Placards! Saturday and the March for Europe. London can feel like a small place sometimes for I meet my next door neighbour amongst a relatively small group assembled in Park Lane. The mood is subdued and I begin to fear that a degree of despondency and defeatism may have set in. This soon changes as we get underway and as more and more people join in; by the time we approach Trafalgar Square the mood is confident even ebullient, as the mass of people, a snake, stretching far behind and in front of me. Regular readers will know that I am not really a marching sort of person, too self-conscious  to be shouting or singing. However this one feels different, this is not the usual ' Protests R Us '  crowd, these are people who only protest as a last resort. Disproportionately, though not exclusively , white and middle class, the atmosphere is consequently polite and we’ll mannered. After the exchanges I have recently had on Twitter, with both ...

"History is a nightmare from which  I am trying to  awake ." James Joyce   1.  September and yet still more madness. Lying has become so prevalent amongst those either with power and influence or seeking to gain it, that it now often goes unchallenged. In the case of the Leave campaign the whole prospectus was a lie, from money freed for the NHS to immigration, the truth was simply discarded. Corbyn and Trump lie with reckless abandon clear in the knowledge that, as far as their own supporters are concerned, there will be no consequences. Indeed, Corbyn’s supporters actively collude with his rewriting of history, thus Corbyn, a long-time supporter of the IRA's ‘armed struggle,’ now casts himself as the great mediator, a man of peace, bringing all sides together. In the face of all the evidence to the contrary his fan club promotes this great lie. His latest untruth is that he appeared on the Iranian propaganda channel Press TV in order to raise hum...

The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James's, 1932-1943 Edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky Pushkin Press  Stalin’s henchmen, sycophants constantly in fear for their lives, for very obvious reasons tended not to keep diaries or any other documentary evidence of their thoughts and feelings. This makes the discovery of Ivan Maisky’s diaries all the more astonishing. Soviet ambassador to the UK from 1932 to 1943, Maisky was unique in a great number of ways. He not only loved his posting but was extremely fond of the UK, and had many genuine friendships within the British establishment, being particularly close, amongst others, to Sydney and Beatrice Webb, Lloyd George, and George Bernard Shaw. He and Churchill got on well, and there were few in the Foreign Office with whom he did not have an amicable relationship. These years were amongst the most tumultuous in the twentieth century, leading up to the outbreak of a cataclysmic world war which, by 1943 when he was...

I grew up in an age when changing your political allegiance was like changing the football team you supported, unthinkable. The world is more fluid now, though I find I still carry my allegiance to the Labour party as close as any football scarf. So for me, the slow, seemingly unstoppable destruction of the Labour Party feels like a former of torture. It is tempting to blame everything on Corbyn and McDonnell, and both are the primary culprits  and extremely malign, but they could hardly have achieved this destructive exercise on their own. For make no mistake about it all those people, primarily from comfortable middle-class backgrounds, registering to vote Corbyn back in again know that this will destroy the Labour Party as it currently exists. What they imagine will happen if, and it looks likely that he will be, is re-elected is unclear. However, if they imagine that the PLP will simply declare, “the membership has spoken, let’s embrace Corbyn’s world view and jump over ...