I used to think, perhaps naively, that even the current Conservative government valued the NHS’s “national treasure” status too much to let it go the way of the debt-fuelled US healthcare system. Now, I’m not so sure: NHS privatisation, by …
Iran’s ideological war on Britain
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is an idiosyncratic creation of Iran’s revolutionary class that now sits at the centre of the modern Iranian state. In 1979, the Islamic constitution established the group as an “ideological army” — in deliberate …
Is the psychedelic industrial complex evil?
“More real than reality itself.” This is the sales pitch made by fans of dimethyltryptamine. Otherwise known as DMT, the compound found in ayahuasca returned to the spotlight recently thanks to Prince Harry’s description of his trips, which, he says, …
What if King Charles were your landlord?
Nansledan is a partially built village on a hill at Newquay: the wind blows through, almost knocking me off my feet. The Cornish housing crisis is a paradigm of the national one: towns filled with holiday lets and Airbnbs while …
The phoney ethics of ESG
This year at Davos, three letters were on the tip of every person’s tongue, perhaps the only acronym uttered with equal joy by Greta Thunberg and billionaire and BlackRock CEO, Larry Fink. They are ESG, or “Environment, Social and Governance”. …
The Tories are about to strike out
With the Government’s anti-strike bill marching its way through Parliament, many on the Right will be conjuring up warm memories of Margaret Thatcher’s war against the trade union movement. For many Conservatives, this was Maggie’s “finest hour”. For Keir Starmer, …
The cruelty behind white gold
As crimes go, it took balls. Just before Christmas, thieves stole 60 containers of bull sperm from a farm in Olfen, a small town near Cologne, Germany. You might wonder what you do with litres of bovine ejaculate. Well, bull …
Is Macron ready for a street fight?
“Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four.”
How many French people does it take to re-write the lyrics of a Beatles song? Answer: One million.
That was the combined size of the crowds which …
Keir Starmer the shapeshifter
Dogged by the Covid lockdowns and hamstrung by no discernible charisma quotient, Keir Starmer has spent the best part of his nearly three years in office telling voters what was wrong with his own side, while attacking the Government without …
How Iran’s protests erased the Kurds
After her death, Jina Amini trended under a name her family and friends never used for her. As Kurds living in Iran, Jina’s parents couldn’t register their daughter using the Kurdish name they had chosen. They had to pick from …
Why gamers can’t play politics
The barrier between video games and every other aspect of pop culture, already porous, has collapsed utterly. This is not, to be candid, what my pre-teen self expected to happen, back when I was lavishing untold hours on Super Nintendo …
Vietnam still haunts America
In the course of his troubled presidency, Richard Nixon spoke 14 times to the American people about the war in Vietnam. It was in one of those speeches that he coined the phrase “the silent majority”, while others provoked horror …
The Labour Party has a woman problem
Domestic abuse is about control and power and silencing someone. It can take many forms. A text. A glance. A threat disguised as a promise. The idea is to manipulate you; to paralyse you.
I have lived through an abusive …
What was the point of Jacinda Ardern?
No one saw Jacinda Ardern’s resignation coming, though many of her critics have been willing it for years. She has, she says, no more gas left in the tank after her five and a half years as New Zealand’s Prime …
Tár and the triumph of amoral artists
“Once I saw it, I was offended: I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian…”
Tár, Todd Field’s new film about an eminent female conductor, is splitting the musical crowd. …