Month: October 2022

Here’s a beginner’s guide to fascism (my title!) from Spiked. It summarises Mussolini’s rise to power in early twentieth century Italy. The war of 1914 to 1918 was as disastrous for Italy as it was for most other European countries, leading to economic and political chaos. In Russia the Bolsheviks had already swept away the…

I’m prompted to write this note by a recent article in The Daily Sceptic. The article is about the origins and changing meaning of ’conservatism’ in British politics, which show that it embodies no fixed ideology. There seems to me to be a good deal of truth in this observation. For me, a conservative frame…

The 2022 conference of the UK Social Democratic Party has generated a little publicity. Rod Liddle, a well-known journalist and party member, summed up its credo as a combination of social conservatism and a preference for the nationalisation of public transport and the utilities. Recent conservative governments have given up on the former, and the…

Iconoclasm is an enduring feature of political life. Christian and Islamic zealots were not the first – the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs often chipped away at their predecessors portraits – and nor are they the last. In the twentieth century Russian communists under Stalin altered photographs to pretend that former colleagues (those with dissenting ideas) had…

I chose the image on the home page because it represents two important aspects of culture and the conflict which can arise around them. Religious practice and the part which pictures and sculpture can play within it, and the symbolic significance of art works themselves. A few years back, the publication of a cartoon image…