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Britain is abandoning its commitments to human rights and the protection of refugees, established after the Second World War. Brexit has given the extreme right of the Conservative Party an opportunity to persecute the world’s most desperate people.
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Reading Everyday Stalinism by Sheila Fitzpatrick (one of my favourite social histories of the USSR, as regular listeners will know), one thing becomes abundantly clear about the Soviet view of time and history itself. The historical and social state that the party would describe as communism was always something to be eventually reached and never actually experienced. In the 1920s and 1930s, party members and leaders would make pronouncements about how far of, chronologically, communism was, and give reasons as to why it was not yet attained. Often those explanations were that saboteurs, enemy spies and enemy classes were holding…