Boris Johnson’s ex spindoctor takes the knee on Britain’s cutprice version of Fox News. Can it get weirder?

Engerland — the dialectic’s point of change…

How we derailed a Tory cultural warfare offensive

Paul Mason
7 min readJul 16, 2021

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When you watch a mass cultural event build, take place, reach a critical crescendo — and then re-stabilise, into a new and scratchy disequilibrium — you need a specific language to describe it.

Since most of the British press have never read Hegel their ability to grasp what just happened is reduced to a series of garbled exclamations.

So thank f**k for the dialectic. What’s happened was a classic example of what the antifascist poet John Cornford once called “the dialectic’s point of change” — the sudden shattering of a political glacier, under severe geomorphic forces.

It was tragic, it was glorious, it ended with drunken bonehead sticking a lighted flare up his backside (see above) and then the ignominious failure of a Tory stratagem.

Over the past five weeks we saw the Conservative government seize on a collective decision by the England football team to ‘take the knee’ as an opportunity to mobilise their reactionary voting base against “woke”.

As I wrote on 8 June: the subtext was a straight read-off from the thought architecture of modern fascism. The knee is to English football what Critical Race Theory is to academia: a foreign and alien ideology…

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Paul Mason

Journalist, writer and film-maker. Author of How To Stop Fascism.