Epstein’s Monsters
- July 15, 2019
- by
- Matt
Many people will be familiar with the observation made by John Stuart Mill in 1867 that ‘Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.’ This is true as far as it goes, but there are also cases when the triumph of evil is not due to the passivity of ‘good men’, but to a wider systemic and societal amorality that enables bad men to get away with pretty much anything they want.
Take the billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who has just been indicted on...
Our Ex-Man in Washington
- July 11, 2019
- by
- Matt
One of the most extraordinary revelations during our ongoing descent into the political vortex has been the supine feebleness and incompetence with which the British ruling classes have responded to a direct threat from the right to their most cherished institutions. Back in the 1970s there were weird rightwing organisations like Moral Rearmament, secret service...
The Resistible Rise of Boris the Clown
- June 26, 2019
- by
- Matt
Yesterday morning I watched Boris Johnson give two absolute car crash interviews on LBC and Talk Radio. It was hard to know which of them was the worst: the one in which he refused to answer Nick Ferrari’s question regarding the date of his ‘Boris and Carrie’ photo, or the one in which he mumbled...
Vultures in Brexitland
- June 05, 2019
- by
- Matt
As everyone knows, Donald Trump lies as he breathes. He lies about big things and small things, and he lies about absurd and ridiculous things. But despite his almost psychopathic dishonesty, Trump is also a stupid man, and so there are times when he doesn’t lie about the things that you would expect more intelligent...
Brexit: Don’t Mention the War
- May 19, 2019
- by
- Matt
Badly-remembered history tends to produce bad politics, and bad politics often results in misremembered or mythologised versions of history. In the case of Brexit, both tendencies have been borne out repeatedly by the obsessive references to World War 2 to which Leavers are prone.
Suggest that a ‘no deal’ Brexit may be a disaster for the...
We the People
- April 26, 2019
- by
- Matt
There was a time when references to ‘the people’ or the ‘will of the people’ were a rarity in British politics, unless you went on leftist solidarity demos in solidarity with Nicaragua or El Salvador and knew enough Spanish to join in the stirring chant ‘El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido’ (the people, united, will...
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