Professor: I teach & research political ideas & rhetorics, digital political culture, Brit Politics (& protest songs).
Aug 4 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
The instinct of mainstream politicians & commentators is to ‘depoliticise’ far right & racist street politics - by calling it thuggery, explaining it as a kind of ‘mistake’ caused by disinformation etc. They don’t want to ‘dignify’ it by admitting it to the Court (1/x)
They want to make it into a thing to ‘manage’ in a technical way: policing, media regulation etc.
I get why they think that.
That used to work. But not now. Not really.
The ‘mainstream’ doesn’t understand it’s not the mainstream anymore (2/x)
Apr 1, 2019 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Proposition of the Day: Our current ‘crisis of politics’ is evidence of just how much we need Politics. Politics is what we do when there are contradictions between groups’ interests or beliefs – how we contest & negotiate, reach a compromise settlement or change our minds (1/10)
That requires institutions/places/rituals which bring people together and which create and sustain a *political* culture - institutions we’ve been abolishing or weakening these last decades: trade unions & churches; schools & universities…(2/10)
Nov 9, 2017 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Been conversing (on and offline) with grassroots Brexitists again. Really struck by their intense lack of interest in the details of how to make it happen – verging on hostility to it, as if the search for practical steps to make it work is a trap (1/9)
I think that’s one more piece of evidence for the fact that Brexitism is a species of Utopian ideology, for which the belief in its happening is more important than its actually happening (2/9)
