Angela Rayner, dancing & the left
Pictures of Angela Rayner dancing in Ibiza have caused excitement and inevitably condescension in the right-wing media. An exception is The Times (Editorial 6th Sept) which approves, noting that unlike most politicians Rayner can actually dance.
I’m far from an expert but she certainly appeared to be a better dancer than Michael Gove.
Rayner has claimed that dancing is a working class activity but this is an historically complex matter.
Ballroom Dancing, when the Tory Party was a mass organisation, (as opposed to the current 150,000 members) was often associated with the political right, fund raising balls and so on.
Indeed Raph Samuel in The Lost World of British Communism, quoting Hugo Dewar, notes that by the 1940s the Communist Party at best frowned on dancing. It also disliked jazz (which didn’t stop Eric Hobsbawm writing the Jazz Scene using the pseudonym Francis Newton) and beards, although not of course at least until 1956 moustaches.
My knees are not really up to dancing nowadays but I recall for younger days discos at union conferences (in which I participated reluctantly) and on occasion attending clubs in North London that specialised in Motown records and dancing.
We might conclude that Rayner’s Ibiza dancing was in a working class tradition but not one specifically related to left politics. That might more or less fit the Starmer Government.
Tom Baldwin’s biography of Starmer notes that while he was doing his first degree at Leeds University he learnt the ‘shuffles, spins and flips of northern soul dancing’…
Dear me, I’d love to see Keith Northern Soul dancing