Here's a guest post from @CatherineBuca talking about Hillary Clinton's health. Like Cat, I'm no Clinton supporter, though she's definitely the lesser evil to the disaster Donald Trump would visit on America and the world. Here, Cat punctures the bullshit-filled balloons bobbing about Clinton's well-publicised funny turn and pneumonia diagnosis by pointing out its utter banality. You'd think nobody had ever had their blood pressure drop and faint before. It happens to otherwise perfectly healthy people when certain stress factors are introduced, and certainly can happen to people who are already under the weather for one reason or another. Let's take him indoors. Several years ago he pushed himself very hard to finish his masters dissertation. He finished it. He felt fine, if a bit tired. He came to pick me up from work (which is a story in itself), and as he was stood there as I was getting ready to leave he keeled over. No indication it was going to happen in the lead up to it other than he started to feel 'wrong' and then just went. A few years later we've both got the flu, but we can't rest because my aunt's just died and I'm next of kin and we've got to sort everything out. We make it through the funeral, and we're on the train two days later to go and bury the ashes and we're sat there, doing nothing, as the train's going along, and over he goes again, in his seat. Exhaustion and dehydration from the flu and from not being able to rest. (The people telling me "he's probably had a stroke, love" didn't help. He hadn't.) Cue a couple of weeks ago, he's in perfectly good health, but gets woke up in the dead of night by the cat scratching him. It's not too bad a scratch, a bit of blood but he's not scared of blood. I get him into the bathroom to clean it up, and he's fine at first, but then he can feel it coming on. He has to sit down. He goes wobbly. Eventually over he goes, toppling off the toilet seat and ending up curled in a ball out cold on the floor. He comes round, has a drink of orange juice, feels much better, goes to bed, is fine, is back to swimming and doing all the other things he does within a day. It was the shock of being woken up so suddenly that made his blood pressure drop. When I was 18 I went out to a bar with my cousin. I started feeling quite hot, not quite right, and I wanted to leave (I'd not been drinking). My cousin was an arsehole and didn't want to leave. So we stayed. I was getting really warm, and felt worse and worse. Eventually, over I went. As soon as everyone got me up, over I went again. They got me outside, and then I was fine. It's never happened since. Here then we have someone whose schedule must be hellish, who looks like she's probably suffering from a cold (now we know is pneumonia, apparently), but who hasn't let up on their schedule, who had to stand still for an hour or more which, as soldiers who pass out during passing out will tell you isn't the most fun thing, who it seems was dehydrated and overheated which was either brought on by the pneumonia or exacerbated by it, and so felt faint. It's not an unusual thing. Don't get me wrong, I don't like Clinton and her politics. But if I'm going to critique her it's going to be on the things that matter and not based on some dodgy conspiraloon shit.
It's been a while, so it's time to talk again about our friends in the North. Who else am I speaking of other than the esteemed comrades of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea? Lurid stories have done the rounds about the Dear Respected Comrade's execution of two officials by anti-aircraft gun for the crime of snoozing in a meeting. Alas, this is but churnalism, but as ever, there is a deadlier side to Kim's clownish, murderous japes: the North's second nuclear test this year. This is a big deal. Since exploding its first bomb a decade ago, Kim's regime have tested devices of ever increasing magnitude. What makes this "special" isn't just the bomb's yield, but the claim they were testing a warhead. After showing one off (allegedly) back in March, the regime wants the world to know it won't be long before they can mount warheads on their long-range missiles. A few of quick notes to remember when we're thinking about North Korea. First things first, despite the Bond villain methods Kim reportedly employs to dispose of those incurring his displeasure, the obsession with WMD and maintenance of a grotesquely over-large military, the grinding repression of the monstrous dictatorship, its synchronised mass parades and other trappings of royal pomp, and the inimitable blood curdling warnings against the "US imperialists" and the South Korean "fascist puppet regime", what Kim and his criminal cohort isn't is mad. Despite appearances, actions undertaken by individuals, organisations, and totalitarian dictatorships are simultaneously meaningful and, within their own terms, rational. This is true of the Kim regime. Without excusing its awfulness, from the standpoint of the regime's preservation its long-standing military-first policy aids its longevity in two ways. Across the 38th Parallel sits a not insubstantial South Korean army backed by a major US military deployment replete with nuclear weapons. Effectively being on its own since the mid-70s without serious Soviet or Chinese backing, the North attended to its own Cold War frontier at the expense of a more rounded economic development. And so North Korean economics are locked in a death spiral. Perceived military necessity consumes the country's meagre resources, which holds back economic development, and therefore undermines the capacity to sustain the military. This is where the missile and nuclear programmes come in. They seem perverse, but it holds out the possibility of rescuing the regime from utter collapse. With nuclear weapons and the capacity to reach not just targets in the South and Japan, but also US bases further afield and the American west coast, not only does the North have a serious bargaining chip in its long-term aim of a non-aggression treaty with the US, much of the military capacity becomes redundant and resources can be expended on making the transition away from autarchy to a managed market system, as per China. As this transition is affected, new berths have to be found for bureaucrats who've crawled up the military's ladder - and the odd periodic purge works to get rid of those who might prove to be too awkward. Second, for the majority of the South's residents, particularly those born after the Korean War, and for whom the US-backed post-war dictatorships are hazy memories, the North's threats, drills, and nuclear tests are more or less part of the mundane everyday. Like most advanced democracies, the right are adept at stoking fears - this time about the North and therefore the need to take a tough line with Pyongyang, And this fear of the other is most effective among older voters who, like everywhere else, are more likely to turn out for elections. Third, instead of laughing about Kim's grotesqueries, shouldn't we also ask about the responsibility we, as the West, have for this situation? This isn't to suggest Kim is blameless and it should be piled up at Washington's door. But this is international relations, and relations tend to have reciprocal effects. The question never asked about Korea's Cold War frontier is the dialectical interplay between either side. The North, for instance, were not the first to deploy nuclear weapons in the peninsular. The Kims are playing catch up. It's not the North that carries out massive annual military exercises designed to intimidate and punish. And it's not the North obstructing a lasting peace settlement - being left alone to repress his people is something the Brilliant Comrade (and all Stalinoid despots) desire most of all.
Seven years in the making and the Chilcot Report confirms virtually everything said by the anti-war movement in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. The conclusion was pre-determined, the intelligence was full of holes, the British military were ill-equipped for an adventure in the desert, it was known beforehand that chaos and terror would be the invasion's children, and last of all it was pointless and unnecessary. As we know, our soon-to-be-ex-Prime Minister acquired a gambling habit that will cost us all dear. But in a way, Dave's deliberate positioning as the heir to Blair, perhaps unbeknownst to him, led him to ape "The Master" when it came to brinkmanship. Blair's desire to "sort out" Iraq came off a roll of foreign policy "triumphs". In 1997 part of Labour's success in weaning swing voters off the Tories was the party's business-as-usual pitch. There were to be no nationalisations, no splurging of the public finances. Just careful, competent management of the economy, a commitment to "what works" (i.e. privatisation and marketisation of services), and investment in crumbling infrastructure. Furthermore, as per the celebrated deal Blair had struck with Gordon Brown, the chancellor looked after domestic issues, particularly where matters economic were concerned, while Blair had a free hand elsewhere. One of these was the determination of New Labour's "ethical" foreign policy. The West's view of the world in the late 1990s basked in the afterglow of the collapse of the USSR and its client regimes. Dictatorships in the East and Global South were giving way to nascent liberal democracies and a new world order of globalised capitalism. The West had won and now was the moment to impose a new settlement. Liberal internationalism, or "humanitarian" imperialism - depending on where you stand - was the foreign policy doctrine of choice in Washington and London, and was informed by two suppositions. The first was the "lesson" that military competition with the West destroyed the Soviet bloc and ushered in market and democracy-friendly governments in Eastern Europe - so standing up to tyranny pays. The second was the trauma of the Rwandan genocide. The so-called international community stood aside as about a million people were butchered in a state-sponsored blood rage. Victory in the Cold War showed what good interventionist policies can bring. What happened in Rwanda stood-in for the consequences of doing nothing. Therefore it had ready ideological cover to range where it pleased and was always already predisposed to meddling and intervention. Blair was fully signed up to an interventionist foreign policy to try and solve the world's problems and make it safe for freedom and, whisper it, business. To his credit New Labour were committed to the peace process in Northern Ireland, which began under John Major, and Blair and his team deserve full credit for delivering the Good Friday Agreement. One intractable problem, solved. Contemporaneously, the conflict in the former Yugoslavia boiled over into the Kosovo crisis. Previous "humanitarian" intervention had seen the bombing of Bosnian Serbs - the "baddies" in media constructions of the conflict - and had the assisted ethnic cleansing of Serbian Krajina by Croatia in 1995. When the oppression of the Albanians of the Serb provoked resistance, a low-level conflict simmered up until the late 90s, when Milosevic set in what remained of the Yugoslav army to stamp out the Kosovan Liberation Army. Under the attempt by the Western powers to bomb Belgrade to the negotiating table, Serb forces managed to expel about a million Kosovars. Blair was an enthusiastic participant in the bombing campaign, and it appeared to work. The Serbs were no match for NATO air power, they withdrew, Kosovo became a Mafia-riddled UN protectorate, key figures - including the loathsome Milosevic - ended up in The Hague, and everyone could pretend it was a triumph for muscular liberalism. Then came Afghanistan. After September 11th "something" had to be done about the Taliban. Cashing in the capital earned from the appalling attacks, the US pulled together a NATO coalition and started bombing Afghanistan barely a month after the fall of the towers. Providing air and special forces support for the Northern Alliance, the US and Britain helped drive the Taliban from Kabul in November. In early 2002 an interim government was formed out of exiles and anti-Taliban militias, backed up by American military power. A new liberal democratic constitution was ratified in 2004 and the first nationwide election since 1973 was held in 2005 on the basis of universal adult suffrage. Again, as a full participant in this war the ease with which the country appeared to be taken must have reinforced Blair's preference for interventionism. Remember, in the build up to Iraq the running sore of Afghanistan was not then apparent. The lesser known 2002 British intervention in Sierra Leone makes a more convincing argument for liberal militarism than the Kosovan conflict. After 11 years of civil war, British forces were sent in to rescue foreign nationals as a hard won peace accord collapsed. But with scarcely any debate or media coverage, the British abandoned its mandate and defeated the rebel Revolutionary United Front, a peasant-based nationalist outfit noted for its thuggish cruelty and penchant for amputating limbs. It ended the civil war, restored peace and started rebuilding the country's shattered infrastructure. Blair was then, and is still regarded fondly by large numbers of Sierra Leoneans for the "services" rendered, and helps explain why Britain did much of the leg work during the Ebola crisis. And one shouldn't forget the first Gulf War between the West and Iraq, which set the tone for the hegemonic foreign policy to come. The invasion of Kuwait by the million-strong Iraqi army, then considered the fourth largest in the world, and the subsequent coalition building and assault under US leadership had absolutely nothing to do with humanitarian concerns, but was dressed up and sold that way. Saddam Hussein wasn't removed from power, but it was a victory for democracy as the ruling Al-Sabah family scuttled back to Kuwait under Western protection. It was also in the name of humanitarian intervention that sanctions were applied and destroyed Iraq's economy, plunged its people into misery, and were occasionally bombarded under some pretext or another. This, obviously, was not Blair's doing but he inherited a set of foreign policy priorities that list Iraq and its grotesque regime the number one bogey. His toadying to Bush was as much continuity John Major as the Good Friday Agreement. Of the four, Northern Ireland and Sierra Leone have been the most enduring of Blair's accomplishments. Kosovo is still an impoverished proto-state going nowhere fast, but at least the spectre of ethnic cleansing - of Kosovan Albanians at least - has gone. And Afghanistan? Well. But for someone at the time sold on liberal interventionism, each in their way could have been read as mission accomplished. If you wanted to believe and were prepared to suspend your critical faculties, there was ample grounds for those beliefs. I don't think Blair should go to The Hague. I've never been convinced about the legalistic and procedural arguments around the invasion of Iraq, especially when the grounds for opposing it were ample. But what Blair is guilty of is criminal negligence and recklessness, and there is a 2.6 million word judgement to back that up.
A guest post by Caroyln Morell Despite the date having been written the wrong way round, the Stephen King televised serial, 11.22.63 was enjoyable bingeworthy TV (and is available on NOW TV for those, like me, who signed up for Game of Thrones and now has found fewer and fewer reasons for engaging in a real social life ever since). For the uninitiated, it follows the character of Jake Epping (played by James Franco) who travels back in time to 1960 in an attempt to (eventually) thwart the assassination of JFK on the famous day America lost its innocence. Much has been written about the long shadow the assassination cast over American history; President Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline were young, handsome and vibrant, they mixed with celebrities and enjoyed a 60% approval rating among the general public - even when the country was increasingly divided over race. In fact, it�s amazing what a sprinkling of youthful, distracting stardust will do for any institution. Haven�t Kate, William and Harry done that for a monarchy that looked to be limping towards an inevitable demise as the century dawned? Equally, much has been written about what would have happened if the murder had not taken place. Would the wholesale, innocent slaughter of young Americans and Vietnamese alike still have occurred? Would Martin Luther King have been dispatched in much the same way as Kennedy himself? Of course, these questions are impossible to answer. Kennedy was an ardent Cold War warrior who sent "advisors" to Vietnam but who showed considerable political grit in helping bring America back from the brink of disaster during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In most areas, he was a moderate who understood the power of public support for his policies - it�s hard to imagine him sending nearly sixty thousand young American men to their deaths. With regard to MLK, who knows? Courageous political leaders have always been bullet magnets but JFK�s assassination turned a confident, forward thinking country in to a pessimistic one, negative and unsure of its place in the world. In such an environment, murder always becomes a more established method of removal than the democratic process. The TV show and the book on which it was based gives us a brief glimpse into a world where the fatal bullet(s) had not made their connection and Kennedy had survived. Perhaps as we would expect from the foremost popular horror writer of the twentieth century, it does not look good. After Jake saves the president in a dramatic confrontation which also sees the death of Lee Harvey Oswald (and his fianc�e), Jake returns to 2015 and finds a nuclear wasteland. Scant details are given about how the disaster occurred but we discover that Kennedy was re-elected in 1964, to be followed by the crazed segregationist and persistent presidential nominee, George Wallace, who famously announced he would rather stand in the school house door than allow the integration of Alabama�s schools. We discover little more but Jake realises (perhaps like a far more famous literary character, Jay Gatsby), that trying to change the past will always have more serious unforeseen consequences that we can imagine. It�s often said that history repeats itself and its here that we can easily make comparisons between Wallace�s unsuccessful, real campaign for President in 1968 and the current, (yes, it isn�t just a horrible dream) campaign by Donald Trump. Like Trump, Wallace excited the political interest of the white working class in a way that politicians rarely do. Like Trump he put forward policies that could never realistically be implemented (Bring on the wall!) and his campaign fundraisers were often accompanied by violent scenes. Wallace tirelessly described himself as the champion of the working man and woman despite never having lived amongst them and all the time serving the needs of the elite business circles he mixed in. What will happen if Donald Trump (unlike George Wallace) actually gets elected? Very sadly, the events in San Bernardino and Orlando have made that more likely, with a frightened electorate unsure about when the next �lone wolf� terrorist attack will occur. Maybe next time, the victims won�t be the members of a subculture offensive to some Muslims and some Republicans alike but �normal� NRA members, or families visiting Disneyworld? Maybe a politician who will ban Muslims from entering the country is the one to plump for? Of course the problem that he has not addressed is that the Orlando shooter was born in the US, whilst others were radicalised via the Internet long after their arrival in the States as children. Will Trump begin by attempting to limit internet access for Muslim people "until we can be sure what's going on?" How long will it be before President Trump, unable to stop every ISIS dedicated terrorist attack establishes Islamic internment camps for both first and second generation immigrants, just as occurred with the Japanese after Pearl Harbour? It�s entirely possible that such a divisive, polarising President as Trump could be assassinated but this time the trial would likely feature the possibility of a third, fourth, or fifth shooter alongside the one in the book depository - especially when it becomes evident that he is fundamentally unsuitable to run the world�s most influential country (for good or ill). But if this happens, I doubt that anyone in the future would want to slip through a wormhole to prevent it from happening. Whatever the future holds for American politics, it has to be better without Donald J Trump than one with him in it.
Some sketchy thoughts about the murder of 50 clubbers at Pulse in Orlando. 1. It does not matter how tragic or bloody the event, there will always be people sick enough to try and score points off it. On this occasion, fast out of the gate was Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who thought it appropriate to gloat over the bullet riddled bodies of the victims. Remember, this man is supposed to be a Christian. Joining him in callous indifference and cynicism comes ex-diplomat Michael Oren. On Israel's Channel 10 this afternoon he suggested Donald Trump would be wise to exploit the murder on account of the gunman being Muslim. Lastly, it's not above the utter bams to make their own play. Each case involves total dehumanisation. Social media simultaneously bridges and enforces social distance. An appalling crime is just another item on the feed/news cycle and is to be annexed for crass position taking. The human dimension, the suffering, the grief for those left to mourn are secondary images inessential to the political meanings constructed around the act of violence. 2. The gunman Omar Mateen was a Muslim. He was not on any watch list, nor was there any indication he was a radical Islamist or, for that matter, particularly devout. Before Mateen went on his murderous rampage he apparently called emergency services and pledged allegiance to IS. With these circumstances, it's understandable the authorities are responding to it as an act of terror. Yet as Alishba points out, homophobia is a problem in Muslim communities - a point that's often impolitic for outsiders and to mention. According to Mateen's Dad, it was witnessing two men kiss that sent Mateen into a murderous fury. This is worth bearing in mind as this act is unpicked and made sense of. When these sorts of crimes are committed by Islamists, previous experiences in the West fall into the pattern of indiscriminate slaughter (London, Madrid, Paris, Brussels) or specifically targeted military personnel, such as the murder of Lee Rigby, or the 2009 killing of 13 people by Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood. This attack is more suggestive of last year's massacre by husband and wife pair Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik in San Bernardino which saw the killing of 14 of Farook's work colleagues, and the Syndey cafe siege: that is murders in which Islam is a flag of convenience for motives steeped in vengeance and narcissism. Or, in this case, plain old bigotry. We should find out in coming days. 3. Cue another round of American soul searching and hand-wringing about gun control. Obama will make his usual pleas, as he does every three to six months, and the GOP will blame the club goers for not taking their weapons with them. The right wingin', bitter clingin', proud clingers of their guns - as Sarah Palin likes to call this increasingly unhinged constituency - are happy to see the death of 50 gay clubbers here, a packed cinema there, and classrooms full of kids as so much collateral for their inalienable rights. The truth is that easy access to arms is only one part of the problem. There is something deeply sick with American society. No other advanced society suffers these sorts of shootings with anything approaching this level of regularity. It cannot be explained by the size of the population - per capita they're way above similarly developed countries. Nor do other states with large gun ownership, such as Canada where over a quarter of adults own one, have the same rates of violence. That leaves something exceptional about American culture. The constant reinforcement of individual gratification and sovereignty, even as the realities of free market fundamentalism trample all over it. The absence of mass, collectivist-inspired politics, the glorification of violence, the way American media and culture splits people into competing constituencies with little emphasis on integration. From afar it appears the nearest an advanced society is to a Randian nightmare, a dysfunctional dystopia where the war of all against all too often explodes into bloody outrages.
After having it on the shelf for many years, I've finally got round to reading The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. It's a socialist classic every bit as vital and necessary as the more celebrated The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell. As such, I'm not going to give any spoilers away, as much as one can spoil a book that's knocked around for 110 years. But I will make the case for you to read it. It follows the tribulations of Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant to the United States. Lured then as now by the promise of work and high wages, his illusions are quickly dashed as he settles into Packingtown (Chicago's New City district). Bringing with him an extended family, it is a remorseless tale of woe in which tragedy is heaped on misfortune piled upon yet more tragedy. It is a story of how working for the city's meat packers is fraught with precarity, exploitation, alienation, and destitution. As the book works through, circumstances and skulduggery break the family, break self-respect, and break the human spirit. Jurgis's career has him as a meat packer, a hobo, a beggar, a footpad, a political fixer, a scab, and finally achieves a redemption of sorts via socialist politics. What can readers take away from an old propagandist novel aimed at early 20th century audiences? Firstly, there is the burning sense of grievance. It's not the blind operation of the market serving Jurgis and his family a diet of misery. At each moment, the invisible hand has its strings pulled by the plotting of the beef trusts, the rigging of the city's politics and legal system, the criminality of capital's lieutenants, the corruption of union activists, and the calculations made to maintain this state of affairs. Injustice radiates off the page - only the most stone-hearted could fail to be moved. And what stirs is that the tyranny, cruelty, and brutality of the packing houses doesn't belong in the history books. It's in the semi-criminal factories and warehouses stuffed with migrant labour, legal and otherwise, across the advanced countries. It's the lot of the millions crammed into China's "special economic zones", of the Bangladeshi garment worker, and Brazilian child labourer, all the members of our class who continue to bear the crushing load and grinding iniquity of capital in circumstances not at all removed from The Jungle's meat packers. There's something here for accelerationism. Early on, Sinclair relates the elaborate organisation of the vermin-infested meat packing plant, from the conveyor belt of cattle and pigs through the process of killing, cutting, boiling, freezing, packing, and the disposal of leftovers. Even the scamming, the strategies of waylaying the food standards inspector, the cutting and selling of winter ice from the stagnant waste pond, all are the fruits of scientific management techniques. In the whir of industrialised slaughter, each man, woman, and child is a cog whose activity is absolutely determined by the momentum of machinery driven by the maximisation of all possible profit. It's a regimented ordeal captured with a sense of horrified wonder, of how an enterprise can be so ingenious, so stupendous, and yet so inhuman. The Jungle isn't as pithy as Marx's praise and condemnation of capital in The Manifesto, but Sinclair's praising of the packing industry as a means of burying it has a rhetorical force rare even among radical literature. If there are downsides to The Jungle, I think the party scene of the first chapter is out of place. And the final section of the book, where Jurgis is introduced to socialist politics, could come across a touch preachy (indeed, Sinclair himself later disowned it). But for comrades new to socialism, especially the more enthusiastic Jeremy supporters, this is vital reading. Like the experience of the newly radicalised, the scales tumble from Jurgis's eyes as the story of his life finally makes sense. He's seized by the zealotry of the convert and attempts his damnedest to recruit family members and acquaintances. Yet he's mystified that others cannot see what he sees, despite going through the same backbreaking, soul-shattering traumas. This teaches him patience and gives the book chance to explore the psyches of those resisting the socialist proposition. This is an ideal primer for the frustrations of radicalism, and is one I could have done with when I was an annoying 18 year old. Publication was met with a ferocious scandal around food hygiene and adulteration, and new standards legislation was imposed on the beef trust. As Sinclair put it at the time, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." While this was a happy, if unintended consequence, The Jungle's radical edge is yet to be realised.
After expending a long day compiling and pouring over spreadsheets, I wasn't expecting two terabytes worth of them would bring a smile to my face. Yet that happened last night when the massive leak from Mossack Fonseca of Panama City flashed across the world's media. In a society like ours where everyday folk can't move for video cameras and tracking devices, it's welcome when those at the top feel the heat of, for want of a better phrase, surveillance from below. As the data hasn't been dumped online for all and sundry to skim through, there will be more than a few scandals buried in the numbers and tedious legalese. Already, we've seen a few. Iceland's Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson has refused to resign after he and his wife were spotted dodgy-dealing. Papa Putin's inner circle are caught up, though he claims it's a conspiracy to destabilise Russia in the run up to parliamentary elections. If you say so, Vladdio. It must be those same dark forces who have it in for the likes of Jackie Chan and Lionel Messi, as well as David Cameron's late Dad. Not that Dave's going to talk about that. Inheriting millions that have given tax inspectors the body swerve is a "private matter", we're told. Mossack Fonseca have opted for the "within the rules" defence beloved of many MPs caught troughing on expenses seven (seven!) years ago. But, oh dear, what have we got here, clients under sanctionand several front companies for pretty unsavoury regimes, including our beloved friends and comrades in the Workers Party of Korea. All above reproach, which is why several tax authorities in the wealthiest countries have announced investigations. The leak is a significant political event, apart from seeing ruling circles the world over gripped by panic. The first, linking Dave to pots of money with questions of legitimacy hanging over them is yet another headache this useless government could be doing without as they flounder over the budget debacle, their lack of willingness to do anything to assist the beleaguered steel industry, and indeed their connivance in its decline. The problem for the Tories is they run the risk of not just of re-acquiring the nasty party tag, but being perceived for what they rightly are: a narrow (and narrowing) clique who are increasingly dysfunctional from the standpoint of British business. Their strength lies in appealing to enough people and convincing them their way is the best way, that they too will gain from the pain (which is always felt by other people anyway). Whether the Labour Party will benefit from the Conservatives' desire to skinny dip in toxic sludge remains to be seen, but their rudderless flailing and questions over the Panama papers, which are bound to embarrass other Tories and businesses with Tory links, is storing up huge political problems for them down the road. As the tangled web of dodgoir transactions are followed and the global circuits of illicit cash mapped, this feeds into political problems everywhere. Even broken antennae have picked up the fact that mainstream politics is in trouble. Anti-politics and naive cynicism is the de facto attitude at large, there is distrust of (representative) political institutions, and a soft polarisation of electorates under way in many countries. I say 'soft' because the organised expression of that polarisation, Jeremy Corbyn and UKIP here, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump over there, is diffuse and largely atomised. Hundreds of thousands are inspired by the new (old) leftism of Jez and Bernie, but a great deal of that support is passive and gestural. Pay three quid, register as a Democrat. Politics remains a spectator sport deserving the barest amount of participation. And what's true of the left is true of those newly-drawn into politics by the populist right. The so-called people's army depends on disgruntled voters fed up with the way of the world and has pulled only but a hardy few into activity. Likewise Trump. His rallies might be scary and bizarre viewed from afar, especially when violence flairs, but what do most of The Donald's supporters do after he's breezed through town? They go back to their everyday lives letting their inchoate anger fester and wait for a messiah to fix it for them. What repeated scandals involving elites do is crank up the frustration and the cynicism, and make the answers provided by the new lefts and new rights appear straightforward, no-nonsense, and appealing. With clear rallying points, what is amorphous today could well become organised tomorrow, and when that happens soft threatens to pass over into hard polarisation, and all the consequences that may flow from that.
