It’s not just about us

Europe endures a sporadic but constant stream of terrorist attacks in its cities. These are carried out by individuals or small groups. Larger attacks in London, Madrid and Paris involve bombings and mass shootings. Smaller attacks by individuals involve assaults and the running down of civilians. It is extremely easy to exaggerate these events, to […]

Endgame politics

This is a bad time to indulge in futurology. The presence of ‘shock’ political events encourages all kinds of hyperbolae. The historiography of predictive political analysis is an embarrassment of errors. Looking at a recent set of changes and announcing a ‘new’ something or other distracts from deeper continuities or similarities with times passed. Nevertheless. […]

Populism is the new panic

Populism is the new panic-word for the broad centre of liberal-democratic politics. This is in large part because of its association with the Right and even fascism. The populism of UKIP or Trump aims to create a homogenised constituency of ‘the people’, racialised and hostile to those outside their categorical borders. This is not to […]

#TotalEvent

A change? We entering an age of the Total Event, an age in which, occasionally but irregularly, we are sucked into political conjunctures that, for a time, envelop political discourse in a fashion that is novel and carries with it new or newish questions and issues.

Meeting Corbyn

A new politics? On the 19th August I attended a Corbyn for leader rally in Sheffield city centre. It was unusual to attend such a large rally of the Left and with such a positive atmosphere. Usually it takes something awful to get left-leaning people on the streets en masse: an anti-racism event, stop the […]

Corbyn!

I take the title of this blog from the repeated line expressed by Colonel Cathcart in regards to Yossarian in Catch-22. It is a scream of exasperation at Yossarian’s refusal to conform to his plans for order and self-promotion in a situation of insane chaos. He writes on a board ‘Yossarian!’ and then ‘Yossarian?’, neither […]

Middle class revolt*

It has been an interesting couple of weeks. The fall-out from the ‘No’ vote has been unpredictably turbulent and complex because no-one really expected a ‘No’ vote. One of the fairly predictable facets of ‘No’ is that it would enable an increase in openly-expressed racial hatred; this because a large part of the Leave campaign […]