A clearheaded take on the recent UK general elections

With all the recent noise from blairites and right-wingers stating that the only way for Labour to be relevant is to be Tories-light, it is good to see someone make some sense after all -even though it's on a blog, not on very public media.

So, take a look at that.


As an aside, I find it remarkable (though not surprising -there has been a strong tendency in developed countries to make sure that polities only get the choice between parties that elites approve of, something a friend called "elites having solved democracy") that this call to move on Tories ground should be made so strongly and be dubbed "moving to the centre ground", when:

-Well, that was essentially the positioning that the Liberal Democrats took and they got resoundly thrashed
-Labour, as it was, ran to the right of the median voter, a fact that is evidenced by countless polls of preferred policies, by the results of the SNP when running against austerity, and by the fact that people picked by some distance the Green programme when programmes were presented without being attributed to their parties of origin. So how can moving further to the right be called moving to the centre?

Anyway, have a look at the link, it makes good reading.

Awful

By now, everyone probably knows that the Conservative party has achieved an absolute majority in the latest general elections in the UK.

And that is tragic in many ways.

Cyrille at Ronnie's

No, not a bout of megalomania.

You see, French artists taking some of their roots in Gipsy jazz have been in view of late at Ronnie Scott's.

Biréli Lagrène in March, and six months after I finished a post about Stacey Kent with these words: "Now, if we could bring Cyrille Aimée to Ronnie Scott’s.", she was indeed the star of the show.

Admittedly, I had suggested in October that it would be fun to pair her with Esperanza Spalding playing bass, and that did not happen (although it really would be the ultimate curly hair match), but I was not going to complain.

It was her debut at the club, apart from her joining in the jam session a few years back, and she was touring with her band. 

I had last seen her at another debut, when she sang at the Django Reinhardt festival for the first time, in Samois, where she grew up, a concert at the end of which I heard a new friend who had been following them for a while mention how they had by now gelled into an incredibly tight band. This had been a great, unforgettable moment. I jumped on the chance to book my tickets, but prepared myself for a concert that could never quite live up to that of course.