The Politics of Dancing

When Conservatives Become Revolutionaries  Politicians, political pundits, and obsessive Westminster watchers, it is often said live in a ‘bubble.’ They exist in a world in which politics exists as great clumsy giant overshadowing everything and everyone, - from the newsagent in the corner shop to the crew of a nuclear submarine out at sea.  This view is however accurate, or more accurate than the way most people view politics. For most members of the public see the world very differently. For them politics is peripheral. Other concerns dominate their private lives and clever politicians have always recognised this. Indeed, the whole ideology of conservatism has hitherto been built on the assumption that people just wanted to be left alone and have as little to do with politics as possible. Hitherto this has been broadly true, and again clever politicians on the right encouraged the illusion that this was possible. [1]   Conservative politicians in the English...

 Brexit and The Corrosion of Civil Society Democracy is dead without conflict, without the dialectic of competing ideas. If you want peace, harmony and unanimity go visit a graveyard. Compromise, the prerequisite of democracy is a form of creative tension, - never fully settled, always threatening fracture and division. This is the framework in which debate and political discourse take place. However, there are limits to the degree of division compatible with a healthy democracy.  When the division becomes too wide civility, the agreed rules and formula begin to break down, compromise becomes impossible and conflict threatens to become violent; civil war begins to emerge as a possibility. Examples abound, Spain from 1933 to 1936, Ireland after the creation of the free state. France in late 1930s and Weimar Germany. As can be seen from the above examples, not all such discord ends in civil war, merely that it is threatened and civil unrest becomes more likely. I w...

Like all tragedy, the current state of English* politics contains more than its fair share of the comic and grotesque, the imbecility of the Brexit negotiating team, and the doublethink of Corbyn supporters over his hard Brexit standpoint, providing just two examples of both. Now, just as you thought things could not possibly get worse we have the possibility of the Prime Minister, a member of the party of Churchill, Macmillan and yes Edward Heath, being Boris Johnson, David Davis or the cringe inducing Jacob Rees-Mogg! Like a circus act enter the clowns, a liar, crook - the greatest political Chancer since Horatio Bottomley, - an imbecile and a caricature upper-class idiot.  In a close contest, it is difficult to see which would make the country a laughing stock than it already is. Of the three Rees-Mogg has emerged largely without a trace, coming into the limelight following the Brexit referendum. He has sought, with some success to establish himself as the backbench exp...

DUNKIRK  1 Perhaps I should start by saying that I have not yet seen recently released film Dunkirk, though the 1958 film on the same subject, starring John Mills, will take some beating. Whilst a BBC drama/documentary shown a few years back seemed a definitive enough exploration for me. I have also just begun reading the book by Hugh Seabag- Montefiore, also called Dunkirk. Indeed, it seems the mere mention of the small seaside town on the northern French coast is enough for British, I suspect especially English, readers to know what the film/book/dramatization is about. [1] Dieppe, for example, the scene of another British wartime disaster simply hasn't the same name recognition. So given the plethora of, often jingoistic, commentary about the evacuation let’s be clear from the outset, - the evacuation of British troops from mainland Europe was a disaster. It was a disaster for this country, a disaster, of course, for France, but a disaster for the whole of Europe. No...

A Family Affair: Reading v's Listening: In The Aftermath of Grenfell 1. Orwell once famously compared this country to a family with all the wrong members in charge. Putting to one side one’s feelings about the accuracy of the analogy it seems a particularly bitter comparison now. For if we stay with the analogy we are a family at war with itself. The corrupt uncles and dodgy aunts have conspired to gamble away the family’s future. Making promises they knew they couldn’t keep and promising lottery sized bonanza’s they persuaded a small majority of the family to invest in a pyramid scheme called Brexit. As the promises begin to turn sour and the bank statements start to arrive there is a growing sense that the family has been betrayed and the dodgy uncles mumble barely comprehensible excuses. All the while an ageing hippy, a great uncle whom everyone had forgotten about, has suddenly become a star for the younger family members, making wild promises of his own and encouragin...

Turning right outside my front door and within a minute you see it, as space clears between the trees, a dark presence on the western skyline. If you move closer you see a grotesque black and grey Skelton, the accusing wreckage of a block people called home as recently as Tuesday evening. It’s a monster now, twisted and horribly deformed, no, not black, black has a dignity and grace, but a dirty  sullen grey, the colour of ash, of lives turned to dust. I have seen this colour before, in Mostar after the fratricidal attack on the city in the early 90s. It is an image belonging to a war zone. And in some respects, it is, though hyperbole of this kind feels best avoided today. “ About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; how well, they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;” W H Auden ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ Auden, as he so often does, gets it right. The mother mourn...

‘What Is Populism?’  by  Jan-Werner Muller If ever there was need to stop and pause, to stop and consider how we, on both sides of the Atlantic, got into the terrible mess we now find ourselves in, that moment is now. Just two years ago the world was a very different place. Obama was US president, whilst in the UK Cameron looked unlikely to obtain an overall majority and, though not well led, the Labour Party was still a significant electoral force. However, as the band played and children slept, the ship was gliding steadily toward the iceberg. If we should wish to name that iceberg it would surely be populism. Few words have been bandied about with such little regard to whether there exists a shared understanding of what the term means. This makes ‘What Is Populism?’ by Jan-Werner Muller [1] a timely [2] contribution to a developing debate. As so often the case with ambiguous terminology it proves easier to designate what populism is, than what it is not, an...