The Tory Party Has Gone Missing
- June 21, 2019
- by
- Matt
Some readers may have heard of the mass hallucinations that took place at the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951. As John Grant Fuller describes it in The Day of Saint Anthony’s Fire, on 15 August that year the entire village of 250 inhabitants woke up and began seeing visions. One man sat down to...
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...
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...
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...
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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