The cardinals are already meeting to discuss who should be the next pope. Some of the liberal ones, who feel safe because they’re in favour with the ailing Pope Francis, can be seen comparing notes in a bar near the …
Karl Polanyi’s failed revolution
Few 20th-century thinkers have had such a lasting and profound influence as Karl Polanyi. “Some books refuse to go away — they get shot out of the water but surface again and remain afloat,” Charles Kindleberger, the economic historian, remarked …
Columbia’s parody of radical activism
This week, amid widespread US campus protests against the war in Gaza, a video emerged of a confrontation on the Columbia quad. A slender young black man in a keffiyeh and a pair of florid pink Crocs paces through the …
Would Kant really support BLM?
Poor old Immanuel Kant, scourge of many an undergraduate essay crisis, whose 300th birthday fell this week. Was ever any other major intellectual figure put through so much painful contemporary “rethinking”?
According to the late political theorist Charles W. Mills, …
How civil servants killed the spy
The police were searching the home of a Libyan terror suspect, Abu Anas al-Liby, in Manchester when they came across an al-Qaeda handbook. The year was 2000, and the handbook — later dubbed the “Manchester Manual” — laid out the …
Dungeness is England’s last hope
I spent St George’s Day watching Derek Jarman’s The Last of England. The film is an apocalypse of sorts. It reveals what is to come. More importantly, it reveals what is already here. An opening monologue tries to pin down …
Why the West will refuse to fight
Citizens won’t sacrifice themselvesCitiznsWestern politics is defined by a conflict that is always awkward and sometimes cringe. On the one hand, our leaders are full of loud-mouthed passion, warning that the days of peace are over and that we now …
How Parklife skewered the Nineties
If Damon Albarn was telling the truth, and Saturday’s Coachella performance was Blur’s “last gig”, it was a miserable swansong. A field of influencers (some of whom appeared to not know who Blur are) crowded into the most corporatised festival …
The fantasy of open borders
Before entering today’s torturous immigration debate, we would do well to remember James Baldwin. “Power without morality is no longer power,” he observed. And the border question is fundamentally a moral one.
On one side, there is a growing belief …
Zombie knives: a metaphor for Britain
Another day, another report of a child stabbing another child. On this occasion, it was a 15-year-old girl in the comprehensive school in the former mining valley of Ammanford in Wales. She left three injured, including a fellow pupil, seriously …
The mythical masculinity of Donald Trump
As Donald Trump endures the eternity of the next month or so on a wooden bench in a courtroom in lower Manhattan, legions of his followers will decry the legal proceedings against him. They will insist that the claims and …
Will Jamie Driscoll beat Labour in the North East?
It was a scene to bring back memories not just of the Jeremy Corbyn era, but the full-blooded Labour struggles of the Seventies and Eighties — a time when the unions terrified governments of both colours, and when the hard-Left …
How the police lost control of London
Even in supposedly secular and tolerant London, the safety of Jews has recently come to seem an unnervingly fragile thing. Last week, a London police officer was filmed threatening to arrest a man for being “openly Jewish”, and there have …
More anarchy awaits in Africa
“God Loves You.” An accusing finger looms out of the billboard, pointing directly at passers-by. Lord Kitchener has been press-ganged into a different kind of national service.
Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, is a tundra of low-roofed buildings and patchy roads lined …
How vice consumed Blackpool
Every online review for one of Blackpool’s brothels tells a sordid story. “I plan to visit nightly,” writes a punter whose wife has just died. “A depressing hovel,” claims another who took a teddy bear with him. A third admits …