Freaky Friday
- June 25, 2016
- by
- Matt
In the Jamie Lee Curtis comedy Freaky Friday, a mother and teenage daughter wake up to find themselves trapped in each other’s bodies as a result of a magic spell. Yesterday I underwent a similar but even more disturbing transformation. On Thursday night I dreamt that Remain had won the referendum. Early on Friday morning I woke up to find Nigel Farage crowing about ‘Independence Day’ and celebrating a victory for the ‘real, decent people.’
Over the next twenty-four hours, along with millions of my unreal and indecent fellow-citizens, I found myself trapped in...
Interview for In These Times
- June 16, 2016
- by
- Matt
The Left Must Put Refugees and Migration at the Heart of Its Politics
Mathew Carr rebukes Europe”s inhumane and fear-fueled response to the refugee crisis.
Tom Ladendorf
The current refugee crisis is the worst that Europe has seen since World War II, and in many countries, it remains in the political center stage. As Syrian and other refugees...
In the gutter with Boris and Nigel
- June 12, 2016
- by
- Matt
I don’t know if you’re enjoying the referendum readers, but I can tell you that I’m not. I can’t think of any national political process that has taken place in my lifetime that I’ve found so constantly dispiriting and depressing on an almost daily level. It now looks at least possible that Brexit...
Between Europe and a Hard Place
- April 24, 2016
- by
- Matt
In June the United Kingdom will decide whether or not to remain part of the European Union. This is obviously a historic decision for the country, and it may have far wider historic implications and consequences for the whole of Europe, even if the gaggle of reactionary Little Englander or rather Great Britainer nationalists,...
Trapped in the Gray Zone
- March 23, 2016
- by
- Matt
It would be good to imagine that our descendants may look back on our savage world as a bygone tragedy that has been superseded by a more enlightened era. Perhaps historians will draw lessons from our collective descent into the abyss, the way we now look back at the 1930s and the rise of fascism,...
Europe’s ‘Migration Crisis’ : Repression with a human face
- March 08, 2016
- by
- Matt
Many years ago Franco Solinas, the scriptwriter for Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece The Battle of Algiers, was asked by an interviewer why the French colonel Mathieu – a pragmatic exponent of torture – was portrayed as ‘ too much of a gentleman in fatigues, excessively noble. He is elegant, cultured….’ Solinas replied that...
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