Sunday Posts

The earthquake in British Politics is here and UKIP has indeed become the lion that roared, at least once.  Though the party spokeswoman, Suzanne Evans, tried hard to distance UKIP from the 'extremist' parties, such as National Front of Marine Le Pen in France, their anti-immigration rhetoric did it for them. This may be either be about plain nastiness or calculated cynicism, but UKIP's earthquake is all about shifting the political tectonic plate to an extreme position, or soon will be. This is a point worth pondering about. UKIP isn't the same as the English Defence League, and it has no record of violence. Led by its showman leader, who employs the typical city bluster to make mountains out of everything, it is perhaps even slightly comical, but an usual political party. But its opportunistic rhetoric, shaped by suave thoughts about political positioning, tries to play on people's fears, their aversion of globalisation, their discomfort of breaking of c...

Just as we seem to have agreed that democracy is the panacea to all of our problems, democracy seems to be losing popularity. From the modest claim of Winston Churchill, that democracy is the worst form of government except all others have been tried, we have come a long way with George W Bush's "Jihad for Democracy". And, duly, it seems, it is backfiring. It is not just about the Generals quietly taking over Thailand, where democracy has roundly failed. It is also not about the statistic of how democracy is doing, which seems dire at this time. More sinister perhaps is the death of centrism, the gentle art of debate and dialogue, of flexible views and pragmatic politics that stood for democracy: Rather, we have seen the rise of 'dramacracy', the art of demagogy and damnation, of extreme positions and intolerance, the politics of blaming the others and promising the earth. This, ominously, not confronts but subverts the democracy; the latter's own life-f...