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• Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
• Culturedarm's weekly newsletter straight to your inbox
• Movie reviews, earthy anecdotes, seven of the best and more . . .
• Bookmark your favourite or most hotly anticipated articles
• The satisfaction of supporting independent blah blah blah . . .

Lock it in and fuhgeddaboudit with an annual subscription to Culturedarm, which supports the site while providing access to special content including playlists and alternative tracks of the week. You get:

• The best new music from free jazz to noise to avant-pop
• Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
• Culturedarm's weekly newsletter straight to your inbox
• Movie reviews, earthy anecdotes, seven of the best and more . . .
• Bookmark your favourite or most hotly anticipated articles
• The satisfaction of supporting independent blah blah blah . . .

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Albums

Jugodefatuo – Bijù Bazar

A Principino whose body dissolves and recomposes perpetually, leads...

Patrick Shiroishi & Dylan Fujioka – Left up on the Tree

For several years now Patrick Shiroishi and Dylan Fujioka...

Nina Garcia – Bye Bye Bird

Working for almost a decade as Mariachi after getting...

Michael Bisio, Melanie Dyer, Marianne Osiel and Jay Rosen – NuMBq

Introduced by a deft clangour of gongs and chimes...

Michael Gordon & Theatre of Voices – A Western

Assailed by Howard Hawks and John Wayne for its...

Behind the Song

Behind the Song: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’

Beginning her career in pop music at the age...

Behind the Song: Chuck Berry – ‘You Can’t Catch Me’

'You Can't Catch Me', one of Chuck Berry's early singles, proved an unexpected commercial flop. It failed to chart upon its release at the onset of 1957 - despite being given prominence by the fledgeling rock and roll feature Rock, Rock, Rock!, which had opened in cinemas the previous month...

Behind the Song: Charles Mingus – ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’

Charles Mingus wrote 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat' as an elegy for the pioneering jazz saxophonist Lester Young, who died in March 1959, two months prior to the recording sessions for what would become Mingus Ah Um. A darkly elegant ballad with a lone dissonant note full of pathos...

Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha

'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...

Themes and References in Joanna Newsom’s Sapokanikan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky9Ro9pP2gc In the music video for 'Sapokanikan', Joanna Newsom saunters...

Tracks of the Week

Tracks of the Week 19.01.25

Benjamin Lackner plays the piano with a plangent grace...

Tracks of the Week 12.01.25

Not since Jerry Seinfeld groggily awoke to witness Tim...

Tracks of the Week 04.01.25

Fresh beginnings plus a few festive odds and ends...

Tracks of the Week 17.08.24

Allen Lowe's short bio says that the veteran saxophonist...

Tracks of the Week 10.08.24

David Lynch, the transcendental meditator and itinerant Eagle Scout...

At the Movies

Diego Maradona (2019)

★★★½ (3.5 out of 4 stars) - One of the successes of Diego Maradona lies in how it manages to restore some of the luxe hedonism and heady momentum to a story so often shrouded by bloated excess. A keenly self-conscious Maradona pushes himself through sporting triumphs and binge cycles, as the barrio boy from Buenos Aires in the slum city of Naples embraces the fur coats and neon lights.

Rams (2015)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Ageing, unmarried, and unkempt, brothers Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson) work side by side as sheep farmers in a cold and desolate valley in Iceland's northeast. Each the master of their own flock, they have not spoken for forty years owing to a dispute over their father's inheritance: considering Gummi the more conscientious worker, their father left him the whole of the land...

How to Steal a Million (1966)

★★½ (2.5 out of 4 stars) - Nicole Bonnet (Audrey Hepburn) is the daughter of an art forger, who has gathered so many supposed masterpieces in his private collection that he has won considerable renown in the world of art. Approached by the Kléber-Lafayette Museum, he proudly loans to the illustrious Paris institution (which for the sake of the film occupies the building of the real-life Musée Carnavalet) his most prized possession, his Cellini 'Venus'...

October Sky (1999)

★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - October Sky is a quaint coming-of-age picture utterly characteristic of this period in American cinema: polished but earnest, overtly sentimental, full of local colour, ostensibly presenting some hard-hitting themes without ever straying from the steely confines of quaint. It's in the same mould as films like The Cider House Rules and especially Billy Elliot, which it preceded by more than a year...

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

★★★½ (3.5 out of 4 stars) - On the morning of Saint Valentine's Day, 1900, the schoolgirls boarding at Appleyard College prepare for a day picnicking at Hanging Rock. In raptures they recite poetry from the Valentine's cards they have presumably sent one another; they put on their muslin dresses, and in a cross between a balletic embrace and an evolutionary procession, they awkwardly help each other with their corsets; and then they are off, but at the rock three of them vanish...

World Cinema

Amazing Grace (2018)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - At the height of her powers, Aretha Franklin went to church: to the New Temple Missionary Baptist in Los Angeles for two nights in January 1972, where she intended to return to her roots with a live recording of gospel music. The ensuing double album, Amazing Grace, would go double platinum, and it remains the best-selling record of her long and storied career. The acclaimed film director Sydney Pollack was tasked with shooting the performance for a feature...

Million Dollar Baby (2004)

★½ (1.5 out of 4 stars) - Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), from southwest Missouri, has worked as a waitress from her early teens. Stuck in grim poverty, she seeks a way beyond her circumstances, and determines to become a boxer. She turns up at a worn-down Los Angeles gym, owned and run by Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) with the help of Eddie 'Scrap-Iron' Dupris (Morgan Freeman): a former boxer himself...

How to Steal a Million (1966)

★★½ (2.5 out of 4 stars) - Nicole Bonnet (Audrey Hepburn) is the daughter of an art forger, who has gathered so many supposed masterpieces in his private collection that he has won considerable renown in the world of art. Approached by the Kléber-Lafayette Museum, he proudly loans to the illustrious Paris institution (which for the sake of the film occupies the building of the real-life Musée Carnavalet) his most prized possession, his Cellini 'Venus'...

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - In 1902 an inscrutable gambler, John McCabe (Warren Beatty), arrives in the fledgling town of Presbyterian Church in the northwestern United States. A hazy rumour has him as a gunslinger, and McCabe uses innuendo and disorder to quickly assert his position in the town, acquiring three prostitutes and opening a whorehouse, to which he plans to add a saloon...

North by Northwest (1959)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - A Madison Avenue advertising man, run-of-the-mill if unusually tanned with his grey flannel suit an impeccable fit, stands up at the wrong moment in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Roger Thornhill has theatre tickets. He wishes to send a wire to his mother, but by summoning the wrong waiter and ostensibly responding to the wrong call, he gets mistaken for George Kaplan, a government agent.

Earthy Anecdotes

Earthy Anecdotes: Katharine Hepburn Steals Stephen Sondheim’s Plant

By the turn of the twentieth century, the Turtle Bay neighbourhood on the east side of Midtown Manhattan was a 'riverside back yard' for the city of New York. Imposing brownstones and squalid tenement housing butted up against the breweries, gasworks, and slaughterhouses which lined the waterfront. Eventually the waterfront would be reshaped by the United Nations headquarters, with dozens of diplomatic missions...

Earthy Anecdotes: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Hellish Dinner Scene

One of the most influential horror movies of all-time,...

Earthy Anecdotes: Alex Ferguson, Mick Harford and The League That Got Away

In the winter of 1991, Manchester United stood atop...

Earthy Anecdotes: The Premiere of The Rite of Spring

On 29 May 1913, The Rite of Spring, the ballet and...

Earthy Anecdotes: Zola’s House at Médan by Paul Cézanne

In Banks of the Marne by the French artist...

Poetry

Alexander Blok – ‘Night, street, street-light, drugstore’ (1912)

Alexander Blok (Александр Блок) (1880-1921) was the foremost of...

Fyodor Sologub – ‘At Times There Comes a Strange Smell Wafting’

Fyodor Sologub was born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov on 1...

‘Silentium!’ by Fyodor Tyutchev

Silentium! Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal the way you dream,...

Pierrot Through the Arts

Pierrot, the sad clown in white face and loose...

James Joyce

Daily Visual 16.06.15: Bloomsday 2015

Bloomsday today in Dublin marks the culmination of a...

Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits; and the Jesuits and James Joyce

With the election yesterday evening in Rome of former...

Joyce, Nabokov, and Dirty Books: The Publications of Ulysses, Haveth Childers Everywhere, and Lolita

With Ezra Pound acting as intermediary, from the spring of...

Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha

'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...

Obituaries

Charlie Watts, Steadfast Drummer of the Rolling Stones, Dies at the Age of 80

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1_6z9oqet8 Charlie Watts, the backbone of the Rolling Stones for...

Kenzo Takada, the Japanese Designer Who Revolutionised French Fashion, Dies at 81

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7E4bITT4t8 With the wet weather and surging coronavirus already putting...

Juliette Gréco, Doyenne of the French Chanson, Dies at 93

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJSkGd-t6U Juliette Gréco, doyenne of the French chanson, died on...

Toots Hibbert, Reggae Pioneer and Lead Vocalist of the Maytals, Dies Aged 77

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErQ2UB44k-o Toots Hibbert, the pioneering reggae musician who imbued his...

Culturedarm

Subscribe to Culturedarm

A monthly subscription supports Culturedarm while providing access to special content including playlists and alternative tracks of the week. You get:

• The best new music from free jazz to noise to avant-pop
• Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
• Culturedarm's weekly newsletter straight to your inbox
• Movie reviews, earthy anecdotes, seven of the best and more . . .
• Bookmark your favourite or most hotly anticipated articles
• The satisfaction of supporting independent blah blah blah . . .

Lock it in and fuhgeddaboudit with an annual subscription to Culturedarm, which supports the site while providing access to special content including playlists and alternative tracks of the week. You get:

• The best new music from free jazz to noise to avant-pop
• Alternative playlists and tracks of the week
• Culturedarm's weekly newsletter straight to your inbox
• Movie reviews, earthy anecdotes, seven of the best and more . . .
• Bookmark your favourite or most hotly anticipated articles
• The satisfaction of supporting independent blah blah blah . . .

placeholder text
3
25
0

Albums

Jugodefatuo – Bijù Bazar

A Principino whose body dissolves and recomposes perpetually, leads...

Patrick Shiroishi & Dylan Fujioka – Left up on the Tree

For several years now Patrick Shiroishi and Dylan Fujioka...

Nina Garcia – Bye Bye Bird

Working for almost a decade as Mariachi after getting...

Michael Bisio, Melanie Dyer, Marianne Osiel and Jay Rosen – NuMBq

Introduced by a deft clangour of gongs and chimes...

Michael Gordon & Theatre of Voices – A Western

Assailed by Howard Hawks and John Wayne for its...

Behind the Song

Behind the Song: Charles Mingus – ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’

Charles Mingus wrote 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat' as an elegy for the pioneering jazz saxophonist Lester Young, who died in March 1959, two months prior to the recording sessions for what would become Mingus Ah Um. A darkly elegant ballad with a lone dissonant note full of pathos...

Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha

'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...

Behind the Song: Van Morrison – ‘Crazy Love’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIaKy1vM9hs 'Crazy Love' is the third track from Moondance, Van...

Behind the Song: David Bowie – ‘Subterraneans’

'Subterraneans' is the closing song on what has become perhaps David Bowie's most critically acclaimed album: Pitchfork placed Low at number 1 on their 'Top 100 Albums of the 1970s', on Q's list of the '100 Greatest British Albums Ever' Low was Bowie's highest entry at number 14, and while...

Behind the Song: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’

Beginning her career in pop music at the age...

Tracks of the Week

Tracks of the Week 19.01.25

Benjamin Lackner plays the piano with a plangent grace...

Tracks of the Week 12.01.25

Not since Jerry Seinfeld groggily awoke to witness Tim...

Tracks of the Week 04.01.25

Fresh beginnings plus a few festive odds and ends...

Tracks of the Week 17.08.24

Allen Lowe's short bio says that the veteran saxophonist...

Tracks of the Week 10.08.24

David Lynch, the transcendental meditator and itinerant Eagle Scout...

At the Movies

Paris, Texas (1984)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) was introduced against a backdrop of blue skies and sandstone buttes, but his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) wears a yellow Stetson cap and stands in front of a commercial tower block, which turns out to be painted. He sells billboard signs for a living, but agrees to travel to Terlingua, South Texas, to pick up his brother...

North by Northwest (1959)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - A Madison Avenue advertising man, run-of-the-mill if unusually tanned with his grey flannel suit an impeccable fit, stands up at the wrong moment in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Roger Thornhill has theatre tickets. He wishes to send a wire to his mother, but by summoning the wrong waiter and ostensibly responding to the wrong call, he gets mistaken for George Kaplan, a government agent.

How to Steal a Million (1966)

★★½ (2.5 out of 4 stars) - Nicole Bonnet (Audrey Hepburn) is the daughter of an art forger, who has gathered so many supposed masterpieces in his private collection that he has won considerable renown in the world of art. Approached by the Kléber-Lafayette Museum, he proudly loans to the illustrious Paris institution (which for the sake of the film occupies the building of the real-life Musée Carnavalet) his most prized possession, his Cellini 'Venus'...

The Blind Side (2009)

★ (1 out of 4 stars) - The Blind Side purports to tell the real-life story of Michael Oher, depicted here as a poor oversized black kid from the ghetto. He's in and out of foster homes thanks to an absentee father and a drug addict mother, until the father of one of his friends - on whose couch he has been sleeping - brings him to the attention of the football coach of a local Christian school...

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)

★½ (1.5 out of 4 stars) - When it comes to the blockbuster action movie, three franchises remain. There is the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other assorted comic book pictures, y'know, for kids; Tom Cruise, most clearly for the ever stellar Mission: Impossible series, wilfully forgetting Jack Reacher but with shoutouts to American Made, Edge of Tomorrow, and the upcoming Top Gun sequel, sure to be a success; and then there's The Rock...

World Cinema

The Sunshine Boys (1975)

★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - In The Sunshine Boys a pair of ageing and increasingly frail former comedians, Al Lewis and Willy Clark (George Burns and Walter Matthau), are brought together eleven years after their acrimonious separation in order to star one more time in a special for ABC. Veterans of the vaudeville circuit, their career together spanned forty-three years and six appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show...

Amazing Grace (2018)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - At the height of her powers, Aretha Franklin went to church: to the New Temple Missionary Baptist in Los Angeles for two nights in January 1972, where she intended to return to her roots with a live recording of gospel music. The ensuing double album, Amazing Grace, would go double platinum, and it remains the best-selling record of her long and storied career. The acclaimed film director Sydney Pollack was tasked with shooting the performance for a feature...

The Assassin (2015)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - In 9th century China, the weakened Tang Dynasty struggles to retain control over its militarised province of Weibo. Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi) has been trained by the nun Jiaxin (Fang-Yi Sheu) to assassinate corrupt government officials, but though she possesses all of the art, she cannot bring herself to kill a man as he sits cradling his sleeping son. So Jiaxin, who has raised Yinniang from the age of ten, sets her charge a more personal task...

Little Women (2019)

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Greta Gerwig imbues the seventh film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's classic coming-of-age novel with deft characterisation and heady momentum, across and finally through the screen. Each scene bustles with gesture and intonation even when its components aren't rushing headlong through the streets of Manhattan, idling about the parks of Paris, or swirling the ballrooms and striding fields and beaches in the vicinity of Boston, Mass...

Halloween (1978)

★★ (2 out of 4 stars) - In the suburban neighbourhood of Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween night, 1963, while other kids are out trick-or-treating, a six-year-old boy without any apparent motivation creeps up the stairs, slips on a mask, and slashes to death his near-nude teenage sister. Fifteen years later he's still confined to Smith's Grove, a sanatorium for psychiatric patients, but he breaks out and returns to Haddonfield...

Earthy Anecdotes

Earthy Anecdotes: Katharine Hepburn Steals Stephen Sondheim’s Plant

By the turn of the twentieth century, the Turtle Bay neighbourhood on the east side of Midtown Manhattan was a 'riverside back yard' for the city of New York. Imposing brownstones and squalid tenement housing butted up against the breweries, gasworks, and slaughterhouses which lined the waterfront. Eventually the waterfront would be reshaped by the United Nations headquarters, with dozens of diplomatic missions...

Earthy Anecdotes: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Hellish Dinner Scene

One of the most influential horror movies of all-time,...

Earthy Anecdotes: Alex Ferguson, Mick Harford and The League That Got Away

In the winter of 1991, Manchester United stood atop...

Earthy Anecdotes: The Premiere of The Rite of Spring

On 29 May 1913, The Rite of Spring, the ballet and...

Earthy Anecdotes: Zola’s House at Médan by Paul Cézanne

In Banks of the Marne by the French artist...

Poetry

The Early Poetry of Mina Loy

When the first issue of Others: A Magazine of...

Fyodor Sologub – ‘At Times There Comes a Strange Smell Wafting’

Fyodor Sologub was born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov on 1...

Pierrot Through the Arts

Pierrot, the sad clown in white face and loose...

‘Silentium!’ by Fyodor Tyutchev

Silentium! Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal the way you dream,...

James Joyce

Daily Visual 16.06.15: Bloomsday 2015

Bloomsday today in Dublin marks the culmination of a...

Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha

'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...

Joyce, Nabokov, and Dirty Books: The Publications of Ulysses, Haveth Childers Everywhere, and Lolita

With Ezra Pound acting as intermediary, from the spring of...

The Homeric Parallel in Ulysses: Joyce, Nabokov and Homer in Maps

When Ulysses was published on 2 February, 1922, it was the...

Obituaries

Stephen Sondheim, Who Reinvented the Musical Theatre, Dies at the Age of 91

The composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim died on Friday...

Ned Beatty, Deliverance, Nashville, and Network Actor, Dies at the Age of 83

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TwyrAS2lU8 The actor Ned Beatty died of natural causes on...

Michael K. Williams, Actor Who Illuminated the Lives of Marginal Black Men, Dies Aged 54

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50RJhOFDmiA Michael K. Williams, the actor who became known for...

Dean Stockwell, Star of Blue Velvet and Quantum Leap, Dies at 85 Years Old

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhPosL3UAN8 The actor Dean Stockwell died of natural causes on...

Culturedarm

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Theresa May and the Snap Election: Opportunism of the First Rank

As Theresa May decided after all to call a snap general election, which will now take place in just seven weeks’ time on 8 June, too few commentators called May out for what amounts to a brazen and deceitful display of political opportunism. Rather than questioning the strength of her leadership or calling her a liar, they simply threw up their arms and described her as inscrutable instead.

The decision to call a snap election was a surprise – a shock even, and a nasty one at that – but mostly because May has been adamantly ruling out the possibility ever since she began her campaign for the leadership of the country, in the immediate aftermath of the EU membership referendum last June.

Just a week after the UK voted by a slender margin to leave the EU, May commenced her leadership campaign by stating ‘There should be no general election until 2020’. Pressed on the issue as Prime Minister, in September she huffily assured, ‘I’m not going to be calling a snap election. I’ve been very clear that I think we need that period of time, that stability, to be able to deal with the issues that the country is facing and have that election in 2020’.

Of course in a mere matter of months, May had switched from a Home Secretary supporting however nebulously the campaign to remain in the EU – even giving a major speech in which she urged Britain to ‘stand tall and lead in Europe’, although she added that the country should quit the separate European Convention on Human Rights – to a Prime Minister who could recite almost on a daily basis ‘Brexit means Brexit’, and to toss with the rest.

Michael Heseltine – the Tory peer who was recently sacked from five roles as a government economic advisor because he dared to flout the party’s wishes by voting against Brexit –  has condemned May for showing such a sudden change of heart. Incorporating an unflattering comparison with Margaret Thatcher, he invoked May’s ‘stand tall and lead’ comment and said, ‘I don’t know how someone who made that speech can, within a few weeks, say Brexit is Brexit and ask the nation to unite behind it […] This lady was for turning’.

But after making her reputation on the blood and thunder of anti-immigrant rhetoric, it was perhaps less of a surprise to see May shift her stance on Brexit and the EU. Her big speech aside, she offered little to the ‘Remain’ campaign, striving only to leave her skirt suits, tartans, and expensive leather trousers visibly unsoiled. David Cameron’s former communications chief would later accuse her of a ‘sphinx-like approach’ which left the then-Prime Minister feeling ‘badly let down’.

This time however, the U-turn, the flip-flop, the inelegant back-pedalling and the screeching reversal, caught everyone unaware partly because it was still more sudden. Less than a month ago May’s official spokesperson said, ‘There is no change in our position on an early general election, that there isn’t going to be one […] It is not going to happen. We have been clear that there isn’t going to be an early general election and the Prime Minister is getting on with delivering the will of the British people’. So shrill populism aside, less sphinx than two-faced Janus.

In announcing the snap general election, May suggested:

‘I have only recently and reluctantly come to this conclusion. Since I became prime minister I’ve said there should be no election until 2020, but now I have concluded that the only way to guarantee certainty and security for the years ahead is to hold this election and seek your support for the decisions we must take.’

Seeking to explain away her about-turn, she argued ‘The country is coming together but Westminster is not’, accusing the other parties of ‘game-playing’ and adding ‘division in Westminster will risk our ability to make a success of Brexit and it will cause damaging uncertainty and instability to the country’.

The truth though is that with their refusal or inability to formulate and convey meaningful plans for Brexit, with their various descriptions of legally residing EU citizens as ‘main cards’ and ‘bargaining chips’, with their backroom deals with Nissan and towards the City of London, and their show of intolerance towards immigrants, their disregard for education, the presence of Boris Johnson, their focus on foodstuffs, it is the Tories and Theresa May’s government who are playing games.

The Labour Party – the official party of opposition – have meanwhile done nothing whatsoever since the referendum to halt the rush of Brexit or even quibble with the unrealised ramifications of the result. It is not their policy to call for a second referendum, and even when they have meekly asked that parliament be allowed to scrutinise the government’s plans, they have been overwhelmingly obliging to the point of bending over.

When they asked last December for Theresa May to publish something regarding her Brexit strategy, they stopped short of demanding a full policy white paper, accepting the vaguest of commitments from the government while readily tying themselves to the invocation of Article 50 by the end of March. In the process they rendered the ongoing hearing in the Supreme Court – which ultimately decided in favour of the principle of parliamentary sovereignty – utterly irrelevant, the Labour Party effectively doing the government’s job for them.

The Liberal Democrats too have hardly rubbished the result of the referendum, and while they advocate a second one on the final terms of any Brexit deal, they currently possess just 9 seats. In early February, when the House of Commons met to vote on much-touted amendments to the Brexit bill, which had been variously proposed by the Liberal Democrats and Labour, every amendment was rejected along party lines.

The proposed amendments covered everything from the rights of EU citizens to Gibraltar, the Good Friday Agreement, and the financial impact of Brexit on the NHS, but even when Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Scottish National Party stood together, their votes were not enough. The Conservatives already possess a significant majority in the Commons – 330 seats compared to Labour’s 229, the SNP’s 54, and the Liberal Democrats’ mere 9 – especially when everyone within the party, with the notable exception of Ken Clarke, shamelessly toes the far-right Eurosceptic line.

The House of Lords too only briefly maintained a sense of morality around the rights of EU citizens and the necessity of allowing parliament a ‘meaningful’ final vote. So where is this ‘division’ and ‘game-playing’ in Westminster? Parliament is not even close to bringing government to a standstill. If anything the opposite is the case: the Conservatives currently have things far too much their own way. Populism, Brexit, the Tory majority, and Labour disarray have already combined to neuter all opposition in the Commons, and a few cries of ‘Unelected!’ swiftly ward off any threat posed by the Lords.

It is equally ludicrous to imply that leading figures in the EU or the heads of its twenty-seven remaining member nations will somehow be cowed or made generous by Theresa May’s added strength back home. Juggling the desires to maintain the integrity of the union, to achieve a mutually satisfactory deal, and to first and foremost manage affairs successfully in their own countries, May’s electoral viability across the UK will trouble them not one jot. The success of Brexit negotiations from Britain’s perspective will rest on reasonable proposals and a softening in the sort of attitude which until now has only riled everybody else up.

So the real reason for this snap election is opportunism, because the Conservatives are well ahead in the polls, and wish to strike now while Labour lumbers from crisis to crisis, and perhaps too because the question of independence has Scotland on edge.

Calling an early election before the invocation of Article 50 would have made the vote in effect a second referendum, threatening May’s position and the prospects for hard Brexit. And sticking with May 2020 – when the next election should have taken place according to the Fixed-term Parliaments Act – would have meant going to the polls a year after the conclusion of Brexit negotiations, with transitional arrangements running amok and all sides more than ready to decry the sorry nature of the deal that has been reached.

Theresa May’s political career is nothing if not opportunistic. Whether inciting hatred of immigrants and distrust of the European Union as Home Secretary, or lingering in the shadows during the referendum campaign and pouncing once the Tory leadership became vacant, opportunism is this vacuous woman’s lifeblood.

She has been accused of running a government without policies while the country’s focus remains fixed on Brexit, and her supposed strength as Prime Minister rests on a vaginal resemblance to Margaret Thatcher, and her refusal to show any character or sense of fun. She rarely makes a gaffe because she speaks only in soundbites, she knows only to scoff bacon butties or Byron burgers in the comfort of her own home, and she distances herself from other politicians, realising that they’d only drag her down as she sticks instead to a small coterie of loyal aides.

A taste for fashion and the ability to read out scripted put-downs come Prime Minister’s Questions are the sum total of her personality. But let’s focus on her political achievements instead. As Home Secretary she illicitly deported 48,000 students, and deported or barred numerous other people from the UK based on flawed and highly partisan advice. She presided over detention centres which were underfunded and overcrowded, lacking healthcare provision, and rife with sexual abuse. She hired vans emblazoned with billboards telling immigrants to ‘go home’, while claiming that immigration makes it ‘impossible to build a cohesive society’ and lying about the impact of immigration on jobs.

And amid all of these abuses of power, amid all the vile and divisive anti-immigrant rhetoric, she still found time for a secret trip and a dodgy ‘memorandum of understanding’ with Saudi Arabia, and repeatedly pressed to push through her Snoopers’ Charter which even in its revised form as the Investigatory Powers Act – finally passed last November – makes Britons among the most spied upon people in the world.

As Prime Minister one of her first tasks was steering through the renewal of the Trident nuclear programme – with it later emerging that she had withheld a serious missile malfunction from the debate. Aside from attempting to evade scrutiny over Brexit, in foreign policy she has continued to provide military support for Saudi Arabia as it orchestrates a humanitarian crisis in Yemen, while since January she has gone cap in hand to such political luminaries as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Donald Trump.

Domestically she has done nothing and promised little with regard to the grossly underfunded social care sector and the NHS. Her chancellor’s first budget saw him forced into an embarrassing reversal on a planned national insurance rise for the self-employed, a policy that broke a Conservative manifesto pledge, while despite noises to the contrary, welfare austerity remains. Plans for worker representation at boardroom level were overstated then quickly shelved. The Northern Powerhouse no longer exists even as a sop to the north. And while she has repeated a few phrases around social justice, the only domestic policy which she has wholeheartedly supported involves the reintroduction of grammar schools.

As quickly as she announced the snap general election, Theresa May’s team confirmed that she has no intention of taking part in any televised election debates. After the dissolution of parliament, there will be little time for substantial manifestos or policy initiatives, and little inclination on the part of an exhausted public to listen to any of it anyway, reducing weeks of campaigning to soundbites and recycled arguments about ‘leadership’ and ‘control’.

May’s hope is that she will come away from the election with an even more sizeable majority in parliament, capitalising on Labour’s lack of focus and unity to deal the opposition a defeat like never before. It is all about strengthening her power domestically and suppressing the faintest signs of dissent – even the danger that any might come from within her own party as Brexit negotiations unfold.

If she gets her wish, the country will head towards Brexit utterly blindfolded, her plans never enunciated on the basis that we are playing a game of poker, where whoever blinks first loses and argument and compromise have no place. Rights we be left unprotected, Britain will be on its way to becoming a ‘great global trading nation’ that relies on sinister arms deals and favours only a rich elite, parliament will be reduced to a rump. This is not an attempt to prevent the opposition stagnating the business of government, but the attempt of a stagnant mind to rid itself of all opposition. For Theresa May, any opposition is too much.

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A version of this article was originally published at The Shimmering Ostrich.

Christopher Laws
Christopher Lawshttps://www.culturedarm.com
Christopher Laws is the writer and editor of Culturedarm, currently based in Umeå, Sweden.

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