The Politics of Dancing

To speak of England and Britain or the UK as if they were one and the same thing, as many in the US and on the European continent are often want to do, always demonstrates a lack of understanding, particularly galling for Scottish citizens, but is now a form of deception, witting or otherwise. In a very real sense as a political unit, the UK and Northern Ireland no longer has any meaning. A chasm now separates England from Scotland. Wales increasingly sees its interests as separate from England. Whilst in Northern Ireland the unionist population is waking up to the reality that its needs, interests and concerns are of no interest to politicians across the water. This process began with the SNP landslides at the beginning of the new century but it has taken Brexit to blow the union wide open. All of this was perfectly foreseeable, indeed I wrote about it in 2013, and I make no claims to special insights, I did not need a crystal ball. Though, in an age when political stupidit...

I There has long been a genre of dystopian fiction speculating what ascendant fascism would look like in Britain or the US. We need to speculate no more, when you hear the message of Trump and Farage this is it, the real McCoy. No marching in uniform, no torchlight parades, no burning of books, [yet] and no militia. Just the lie, the big lie, the swelling lie of victimhood and nationalism. In Britain, the mantras of populist fascism are spoken in public school accents wrapped in the soothing certainties of an imagined past. Though don’t be fooled, the skinhead violence is just behind the curtain.   In the US in the tones of the white corporate bully, the guy with the gun, who is on your side against the spics, the blacks, the yids, chinks and Japs. Dirty Donald with a magnum, selling MAGA snake oil. Both figures are a product of failure, the failure of politics, economics, imagination. They rode out of the murk of 2008, saviours of the white Anglo Saxon world. The sc...

Much will be missing in any post-Brexit Britain,   many jobs will be gone, of course, but the cultural landscape will have changed. The confident cosmopolitanism of London will have gone, replaced by a sort of cultural depression, whilst the rest of the country will retreat into an ever more angry and xenophobic siege mentality, as the consequences of Brexit hit home. This made manifest by the lost jobs, shrinking of the economy and as country after country decline to agree on trading terms not weighted against us. In short, people will have to face a clear absence of unicorns. The Lions, of course,   left long ago, and good riddance, they were trouble makers, and yet when our backs were against the wall they were nowhere to be found. It was left to the people to do the fighting. Some will imagine they see and hear lions still, of course, but this is not difficult as lions do actually exist and under certain circumstances, an angry street cat can sound like a lion. ...

VAN GOGH IN BRITAIN AT THE TATE MODERN*  So many people visited the Van Gogh exhibition that restitution had to be sought from the Arts Council for damage to the gallery flooring. That was in 1947, the last time London hosted a major Van Gogh exhibition.   The famous Dutch painter was, to put it mildly, a crowd puller. And indeed no sooner had the current exhibition at Tate Britain opened than it sold out. Crowds queue to view the pictures then crowd into the galleries, seeking to get a reasonable view of the paintings amidst the milling mass of eager consumers. Until, as a woman stated standing close by to her friend, “these then are the famous sunflowers.   And indeed, they were, in all their glory, so that you could almost smell the pungent aroma coming from their dark hearts. The Van Gogh ‘brand’ encapsulated? There is also, of course, the madness, the odd business with the ear, the melancholy of the self-portraits and more recently the accompanying song... ...

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” ―  Hannah Arendt,  The Origins of Totalitarianism T witter is a place of anarchy, malicious vitriol, ill-will, racial hatred and partisan political venom. It is also an arena for the exercise of free speech and a forum for the exchange of views and, occasionally, enlightenment. Twitter is also a home, either from the left or right, for the opponents of free speech and unfettered discourse. Rarely does a day go by without a demand that someone should be silenced, ‘no-platformed’ or prosecuted. In some instances, the silencing involves less sophisticated methods, by subjecting ‘miscreants’ to a tsunami of vitriol and hate designed to drive them off twitter, women being disproportionately...

Pierre Bonnard at The Tate Modern  Stairs to The Garden 1942 Pierre Bonnard I looked forward to seeing the Bonnard  exhibition at the Tate Modern, however, whilst there is much to enjoy, I left with a strange feeling of claustrophobic melancholy. Something about the exhibition seemed sad and forlorn, more so owing, perhaps, to Bonnet’s reputation.    Pierre Bonnard, painter of domestic harmony, of glorious landscapes and gardens that assault the eye with bursting shells of colour, exploding yellows and reds, crimson and blue; the happy painter who through two world wars and the troubled inter-war years continued to paint pictures that depicted not only visions of intimate domesticity but the contentment of a settled life which had a love of beauty at its heart. The Belle Époque is perhaps the most burnished period in modern history.  This I suspect is a consequence as much of the cultural, scientific and artistic triumphs of the period as the mann...

At the height of the Arab Spring, I remember the dismay as the Muslim Brotherhood took power in Egypt and immediately began an assault on that countries secular institutions and the modern secular tradition in that country.  At the time, I remember writing, possibly rather patronisingly, that the Brotherhood had mistaken majoritarianism for democracy.  That they were not the first to make this mistake and would not be the last. The idea that the winner takes all and ‘losers’ no longer count is just as poisonous to a democracy, pluralism and democratic institutions as any authoritarian demagogue.  The favourite tool of the majoritarian, as we have discovered recently, to our cost, is the plebiscite since this provides the either/or question that enables highly complex issues to be reduced to a simplistic good/bad formula. Moreover, a simple majority is all that is required to cast the ‘losers’ into the outer darkness of the bad. One vote will do. An attitude emerges, b...