The Politics of Dancing

The following is an attempt to understand the mindset of a Brexit supporting male, though I think some of the attitudes will be shared by female Brexiteers. It is open to the accusation of being a caricature, and perhaps this is not an unfair criticism. Here then is my attempt.  All the wrongs in your life can be summed up in one word, humiliation. The sense of diminishment is all pervasive, at work, at home, watching football, in the supermarket queue or finding a parking space. This feeling of humiliation can be triggered and reach boiling point by any number of instances. Getting a parking ticket, a couple speaking a foreign language and moving the queue forward too slowly, England beaten at Wembley, ‘politically correct’ phraseology, all can make the feeling of being a ‘second-class' citizen in one’s own country be burning and intense.  The one thread that links all these instances is foreigners, the feeling that alien elements are being imposed upon you. Agains...

I left school at 15, in the late autumn of 1971. I remember my last hour at school and have written about this elsewhere. I had no consciousness of inhabiting history, of moving around in that foggy cloud that is the past. Things felt solid, concrete, firm to the touch. Hours lasted 60 long minutes and days took 24hrs to run their course. And yet what seemed so solid, so real then, has now been swallowed by the fog. At fifteen I was still obliged to attend the youth employment service, situated in Belmont, close to the Town Wall of Shrewsbury. On the wall was a poster announcing the death of the 1960s. The Beatles had split, Ali had been defeated, time to move on. Why it had been thought necessary to rub this in bewilders me to this day. However, at the time and even now, it strikes me as somewhat sinister. A statement of the triumph of time over hope and expectation. I cannot remember the interview or any of the subsequent proceedings, but they found me a job. Globe and Simp...

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...