Breaking the Irish Peace
- April 19, 2019
- by
- Matt
Back in the early seventies there used to be a political postcard that depicted Northern Ireland trying to speak to an England that had a cork firmly in one ear. Ulster – and indeed the whole of the island of Ireland – has often had difficulty in making itself heard in England. Time and again English politicians have shown themselves indifferent to and disinterested in what takes place in Ireland until it’s too late, and the English public have not been much better.
Given this history, there is nothing at all surprising about the condescension,...
The Exterminating Brexit
- April 02, 2019
- by
- Matt
In Luis Buñuel’s surrealist masterpiece The Exterminating Angel, a group of bourgeois party-goers go out to dinner only to find out for some mysterious reason that they can’t leave. No one is actually stopping them, it’s just that the guests can’t seem to get out of the house.
Is it a spell? Is it collective hysteria...
A Plague of Bastards
- March 28, 2019
- by
- Matt
If it’s true that people get the kind of politicians they deserve, then the British public must have sinned a great deal. Just take a look at the events of the last few days. On Monday, as readers of this blog may remember, Boris Johnson began the week on the front page of the Daily...
Go Down Brexit
- March 25, 2019
- by
- Matt
‘Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one,’ wrote Charles Mackay in his classic nineteenth century compendium of human folly Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
Despite the two-week postponement of...
Springtime for Fascists
- March 23, 2019
- by
- Matt
It’s become something of a cliché to look back on Nazi Germany and shake our heads and ask how the country of Goethe and Beethoven could have descended into barbarism. There are obviously very specific historical reasons why Germany took the path it did, but there is also a more universal lesson that can be...
Lexit: the Disaster Utopia
- March 21, 2019
- by
- Matt
There is in every society , and at every historical period, a yearning for collapse and calamity – or at least a fascination with these possibilities. Our fascination with things falling apart is sometimes based on a vague awareness that the prospect of disaster is never as far away as we think. But there is...
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