The Sleepwalk of the West

How big is the Good Society? What is human-scale – and are our cities within it? Success – as it prevails in the material urban mind – is a measure of one’s ability to deny the city. There are various ways the rich do this: in secondary country houses; in pleasantly expensive tree-lined oases, in the “exclusive” (note its shameless literal meaning) silence of penthouses.

It’s fashionable to claim there is “no such thing” as democracy. The view ranges from the moderate complaint of paltry electoral choice to radical claims that we are utterly in the grip of dark and unaccounted powers. Cue everything from apathy to Chomsky-esque polemics about the “manufacture of consent”, capitalism’s “false consciousness”, etcetera.

Last week a friend and I chatted with two pleasant American women for about an hour, in a café. Afterwards he – an American himself – turned to me and, pointing to where one of the women had sat, asked if I realised who she was. I said no. He said: “Monica Lewinsky.” It wasn’t [...]

I respect Anjem Choudary. You basically know where you are with him. He’s not a Politician – i.e. someone who knows that they don’t mean what they say. Nor is he a Moderate – someone who doesn’t know that they don’t really mean what they say. Choudary, I think, means exactly what he says. And [...]

As the British National Party edges ever further into our dimmed conscience, the political and media classes are in a rare nervous state. For there’s something big lurking beneath the easy abuse, something hidden in the righteous hand-wringing. The real question is this: what do we mean by national? Kipling wrote: Winds of the World, [...]