The year was 1927, and Lieutenant-Colonel Reginald Applin, DSO, OBE, was on the warpath. The Conservative MP for Enfield was a man of decidedly robust opinions. In his youth he had served in the North Borneo Armed Constabulary. In middle …
The emptiness of awareness campaigns
If you’ve been on the London Tube recently, you’ve probably come across posters warning that staring is sexual harassment and is not tolerated. Publicity campaigns to address social challenges can be effective when the problem is well-understood and the message’s …
Harm reduction has captured the US
It seems that every large city in America has marked off a neighbourhood where drug addicts are free to die in the streets. San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, downtown Portland, Skid Row in Los Angeles, Hunts Point in New York, Kensington …
Chaos has consumed Israel
It’s all too easy to view the chaos of Israeli democracy as an outcome of close elections and irreconcilable differences. But elections have been close before, and fundamental disagreements on policy have barely registered since Naftali Bennet and Yair Lapid …
America’s fake caste war
If you listen to NPR or read The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Washington Post, you might think that Indians who live in the US, immigrants and their native-born children, are determined to impose the subcontinent’s caste system …
What progressive extremism experts get wrong
In 2017, when Maajid Nawaz appeared on Bill Maher’s Real Time, he openly discussed his past membership of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group that calls for the restoration of the Islamic caliphate. Back then, he enjoyed some renown as a “counter-terrorism …
The nightmare haunting the Tories
In a vast, bleak industrial hangar, endless coffins are laid out, as far as the eye can see. So begins a scene in Dennis Kelly’s conspiracy drama, Utopia, set amid the turmoil of the Winter of Discontent. In February 1979, …
How universities were corrupted
When are we going to do something about the state of our universities? We must surely by now be familiar with the symbols of this unfolding crisis. Philosopher Kathleen Stock, who was harassed by students and staff to such an …
This is not a class war
Headlines scream about a looming “class war“; reports warn of an inevitable “summer of discontent”. Britain’s newspapers are trying their hardest to evoke the chaos of the winter of 1978-79, which, in the neoliberal fairy-tale version of history, marked the …
The myth of American conservatism
Laura Ingalls Wilder was an American farmer and small-town farm journalist who rarely got involved in 20th-Century politics. She was not an activist for the vote and only entered in politics in old age, when she ran for a paid …
Our Russia strategy has backfired
Whatever the origins of the Ukraine war, the West and Russia are now engaged in a broader confrontation that is not confined to the military struggle: the war has become a competition in pain-tolerance.
This is, as Thomas Schelling wrote, …
The boomers destroyed the Tories
Boris Johnson stands over your hospital bed, mask and medical gown on, forceps at hand, shining a lamp brightly down on your face. There had better be a good reason you’re undergoing this surgery. Pain must have a purpose.
Think …
How to fly a Spitfire
The hangar is patriotically dressed with tiny flags and a large resin model of a Sunderland bomber. Miniature pilots in its cockpit have painted smiles. Sensible women are handing out buns and tea. Forties jazz plays; I might be in …
Biden’s cowardly war on conversion therapy
Body horror dwells in the fear of damage that cannot be undone. It involves stories of skin, and limbs, and teeth, and eyes — precious and irreplaceable, now scarred or severed or irrevocably changed. In some versions, the Icarus stories, …
What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
Covid cases are rising again. In the UK, they have broken through the 200,000 infections-a-day threshold for the first time since April. In America, the sixth wave is well under way. In countries that kept the disease at bay for …