The Politics of Dancing

  The Prime minister of the United Kingdom, heir to a post that boasted such eloquent orators as Churchill, Gladstone, Disraeli, like a drunken best man at a wedding reception, blunders, and splutters, loses his notes, goes off on a tangent about Peppa the Pig, a cartoon children’s TV star. This before the ranks of the Confederation of British Industry. In Johnson’s case however, he does not need drink, he can accomplish this level of meandering incompetent drivel stone cold sober, doing so with a complete nonchalant and self-regard. It takes a titanium strength sense of entitlement to believe that you can get away with behaving like this. He is right to feel so confident, for he has got away with behaving like this all his life. Welcome to British politics 2021. Meanwhile in the US a teenager buys an automatic weapon, - normally used by armies across the globe, -   is then driven by his ‘ mother’ some distance to where Black Lives protesters have assembled, shoots ...

  Having been away from the blog since March  I can no longer ignore the noise, the cacophony of catastrophe, mixed with the pungent smell of decay. Representative democracy, with all its faults and inadequacies, still the healthiest of human accomplishments, now exposed for the fragile creature that it always has been. Of course, people outside the anglosphere, from Argentina to Zimbabwe have known this for a long time, whilst Europe needs no lessons on the dangers that are ever ready to pounce from left or right. However, here in the UK and across the Atlantic, cocooned in complacency and cultural hubris, - such frailties only threatened ‘lesser breeds’ – we have felt inoculated to such threats. After January 6 th and the attack on the Capital you might think people could no longer remain blind. You would be wrong. The recent success of Republicans in Philadelphia demonstrates either an indifference to these threats or more worrying an indifference to the survival of rep...

  Democracy is fragile, and more important perhaps, democracy has turned out to be much more fragile in the older anglophone democracies, especially the UK and the US. This casual statement really needs emphasising, since it conflicts with long held assumptions it can prove incredibly resistant to being absorbed. George Orwell set 1984 in a country clearly identified as England precisely because he sought to shatter the complacency that was conviction that the UK was somehow inoculated again totalitarianism and totalitarian modes of government and, more importantly for Orwell, totalitarian modes of thinking. It is consequently difficult to downplay the significance of the events of the last half-decade both here and in the United States. From Brexit and the election of Donald Trump a highly toxic populist wave, hostile to liberal democracy, swept across Europe but also, for once, across both the channel and the Atlantic. Now, of course, both American and British democracy hardly ...

 2020  LOOKING BACK   2021 LOOKING FORWARD AJP Taylor once said that either a policy of appeasement or one of standing up to German aggression, could have worked if the former had been taken to its logical conclusion and allowed Germany a free hand in Central and Eastern Europe to dominate that region, whilst the latter could, indeed would have succeeded had Chamberlain acted firmly and blocked German revanchism from the outset. What was most calculated to fail was a policy of dithering between both approaches. I thought of this the other night when Boris Johnson completed yet another U-turn and placed London and the South East in a lockdown, despite previous statements insisting that Christmas would be exempted. Indeed, as recently as previous Prime Minister’s Questions he had taunted Kier Starmer with wanting to “cancel Christmas.” Such inept dithering, from allowing pubs to stay open and racing festivals to go ahead, long after it was clear that this would lead ...

  There was Christmas before Dickens, of course, but not much of one. Christmas was an important day, but not, - if you read Pepys, - as important as 12th night, or as Hogmanay north of the border. Then came Dickens and the modern Christmas was born, a healthy baby it grew as strong as a Trafalgar Square Christmas tree and as fat as a stuffed Turkey. And at the heart of this newly created drama was the figure of Ebenezer Scrooge. Like Hamlet, Lear or Churchill playing Scrooge is a role offered only to the truly gifted. For it is that most difficult of all parts a journey to conversion. Scrooge is truly vile, rarely has mean spirited, miserly misanthropic squalor been better portrayed. This is what makes the part so difficult to play. The greater the emphasis on moral squalor the harder it is to make the conversion convincing, the weaker the depiction of moral squalor the less spectacular the conversion. In my, admittedly old school, opinion, only Alistair Sim has ever pulled this...

 BORIS JOHNSON, BONFIRE NIGHT AND  THE PERILS OF THE  PARDON  November is the most heavily pregnant of months, with Christmas and the new year ready to emerge from under multicoloured lights and tinsel. Already the shops are full of Christmas cards, decorations, and multiple varieties of chocolate. This year through Christmas is already overshadowed by the dark clouds of COVID-19 and economic hardship. Portobello has an unfamiliar grey feeling to it. It looks tired. The US elections have of course, overshadowed both Halloween and, that most British of institutions, Bonfire night. Although in recent years the latter has been increasingly overshadowed by a highly Americanised version of Halloween. Fireworks, for understandable reasons, are out of fashion whilst the idea of burning an effigy strikes, again for understandable reasons, a discordant and unappealing note these days. That said this saddens me as Bonfire night was always the big one in my childhood, with ...

 Trump, Putin and the Looming Threat For the first time in my life my political gaze has been primarily across the Atlantic, rather on domestic politics here in the UK. For the stakes involved in the forthcoming Presidential election could not be greater. Trump’s election, coming so soon after the Brexit vote represented the highpoint of populist neo fascism and the Putin project.   Putin knows that the collapse of the Trump presidency and the election of Joe Biden will represent an ominous turn for Russia on the world stage. For Trump and those enablers around him the consequences will be more concrete and personal, some will surely go to jail. Trump should go to jail, there is a positive embarrassment of riches with regard to the list of offences for which he can be charged, obstruction of justice, fraud, electoral violations, non payment of taxes...the list goes on. The primary crime to which he should be charged is, of course, treason. Stakes this high bring with them th...