Monthly Archives: January 2017

Talk about ‘unintended consequences’! Who – apart from me (well, elliptically at any rate: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/08/31/two-cheers-for-the-eu/) – predicted that voting for Brexit would make Britain more reliant on the United States, and consequently less essentially ‘independent’, than if she had remained … Continue reading →

Crude, I realise; but worth a thousand words. (I’m not sure of the source; I got it through Facebook.)

There’s little more I can add to the flood of commentary that is pouring out these days in criticism of America’s new President. His character flaws are obvious; my only contribution to this discussion is to suggest that they might be … Continue reading →

Theresa May’s sycophancy before this appalling, childish, bigoted, proto-fascist clown – at least in public: viz. her speech last night in Philadelphia – demonstrates just how low Brexit has pulled us down. Blair could also be said to have acted … Continue reading →

At the end of the nineteenth century many far-seeing British imperialists, realizing that the Empire couldn’t survive in its present form for very much longer, placed their hopes in what they called a new ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Empire to succeed it, ruled … Continue reading →

What we have just now, both in Britain and the USA, and looming in the rest of Europe, is mob rule; historically always dreaded by the privileged classes, who used the fear of it to impede the progress of democracy. … Continue reading →

Of course the Supreme Court was right to insist that Theresa May has to get the backing of Parliament before proceeding to trigger Article 50! I’m surprised that its decision wasn’t unanimous. I must read the three dissenters’ opinions – … Continue reading →

‘Who do you think you are?’ is the title of a TV programme going into celebrities’ genealogies. (Sweden has an identical series, as I’m sure have other countries.) I’ve always objected to the title, which implies that ‘who one is’ … Continue reading →

Amoral capitalist con-artists are a fairly common feature in literature – off-hand I can think of Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), and HG Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909) – and of course in historical reality: lots in the early … Continue reading →

Demonstrations and marches – and I’ve been on a few in my time, beginning with Aldermaston (well, the Trafalgar Square bit) – can be terrific. There’s a great spirit of what I suppose you could call ‘solidarity’ there, mixing and … Continue reading →