In truth, the old maxim that justice “must be seen to be done” has nothing to do with the rights of spectators or reporters in court. It comes from a judgement established in 1924 during a dangerous driving case, in …
Why is the NHS hiring fake doctors?
When 25-year-old Benedict Peters showed up in A&E in 2022 with chest pain, he was discharged with a diagnosis of gastritis and anxiety. That night, he died from an aortic dissection, a fatal bleed from the largest artery in the …
The cost of Russia’s collapsing empire
Ukraine’s counteroffensive has stalled, and Vladimir Putin is once again blustering as if Russia were a first-rate power. The problem, paradoxically, is that it is not. The damage his country has sustained throughout the course of the Ukraine war has …
We are all prisoners in Plato’s Cave
Some meditations on the human condition blaze with truth even after millennia. And perhaps none more so than Plato’s Cave. Plato assumes what was self-evident to both the simple and the wise from the beginning of civilisation until just yesterday: …
How Britain killed off its musical tribes
When the Teddy boys burst onto the scene at the start of the drab Fifties, they established the template for all subcultures to follow. There have always been ultra-loyal music fans of individual artists, but this was something else: a …
King Charles and the twilight of the Boomers
God Save The King. The announcement yesterday that King Charles is receiving treatment for cancer has sent another tremor through a Britain that feels frailer by the day.
And yet, this reminder of our King’s frailty, at 75, also stands …
The future is barbarian
The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have been on many minds recently, not least because neither has been working out the way our politicians and pundits insisted they would. As a result, a genuine revolution in military affairs …
Everyone loses in America’s misinformation war
The below forms part of the testimony Lee Fang delivered to the House Select Committee on Weaponization on 6 February, 2024.
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Chairman Jordan, Ranking Member Plaskett, esteemed members of the Select Committee,
As an independent investigative journalist, it is …
E.P. Thompson, Marxist rebel
Edward Palmer Thompson was an unlikely Little Englander. He was born 100 years ago into the sort of polymathic, globe-trotting family that this country no longer seems to produce. His parents met in Jerusalem in 1918, where his mother taught …
The burden of Jewish privilege
We Jews have an old joke about the Holocaust: Abie Cohen, after being gassed and burnt in Auschwitz, goes to heaven. After a few weeks of waiting patiently, he eventually gets to see God and demands to know if the …
America’s arrogance has kneecapped Israel and Ukraine
It seems unlikely that America will make it to this November without being forced into a very public reckoning with a decade of disastrous foreign policy failures. Taken separately, any one of America’s impending losses in the Middle East, Eastern …
Is it naive to believe asylum seekers?
Elizabeth I put it best. “I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls.” In other words, who knows what people really believe? When I baptise people, I ask them — or those who stand in for them — …
Can Jordan Bardella seduce France?
If you asked an AI-powered robot to generate a new star for France’s hard-Right National Rally (RN), it would probably produce someone just like Jordan Bardella. The MEP and head of the party’s ticket for June’s elections to European Parliament …
Techno-admin will ruin your life
An older relative of mine — I’ll call her Jan — moved house a couple of years ago. She’s in her late seventies, and technology scares her: she doesn’t like the fact that everything is done via app or website. …
The death penalty degrades America
Last week, having tried and failed to kill him with the more traditional lethal injection, the state of Alabama suffocated Kenneth Smith to death for his role in a 1988 murder-for-hire. In this unprecedented method, which the state has called …