Brexit and now Trump are the delayed detonations of the unexploded bombs left behind by the Great Crash of 2008-2009. It seemed clear then that the financial meltdown was the logical end-point of a fundamentally flawed version of capitalism that had for ideological reasons inverted the real order of things, placing finance and shareholders as the centre of the universe round which the productive economy revolved, and patronisingly advising everyone else to wait for the benefits to trickle down. Brexit voters and the half of Americans who are worse off than they were in 1999 – and barely better off than in 1967 – have decided the wait is over. The explosion didn’t go off […]

In Don Siegel’s 1956 film shocker Invasion of the Bodysnatchers a California doctor becomes convinced that his patients are being taken over by alien replicants. They look the same; they’re just strangely emotionally absent. As those around him morph into their affectless lookalikes, it’s the frantic doctor who seems insane. ‘Relax, don’t fight it,’ he’s advised – can’t he see that it’s easier, simpler – better – to live in a world without unruly emotions – all the messy downsides of humanity?   Invasion has been interpreted in different ways, which is the beauty of imaginative human creations. Viewed today, however, one reading suggests itself above any other: the threat to human-ness is not communist […]