When I first met Joseph Biden as a newly elected Senator in 1974 he was absurdly young and looked younger, but he had already suffered two tragedies: the financial downfall of his father from elegant affluence to poverty, and the …
British feminism needs a history lesson
These days, we tend to interpret figures from long ago as if they lived just across the road. Such is the thesis of French sociologist Olivier Roy, who argues that an erasure of national cultural history is well underway. We …
Why all MPs are gamblers
“Are you two really the best we’ve got to be the next prime minister of our great country?”, asked Robert, during the final election leadership debate. As a Question Time audience intervention, it was a classic of the genre: knowing, …
The fall of Macron’s personality cult
With only days to go before the first round of the snap legislative elections called by President Emmanuel Macron, French politics remains as dramatically volatile as at any moment since the massive protests of 1968. A hung parliament, with the …
Did Justin Trudeau cover up the Chinese spy scandal?
Did the Chinese Communist Party interfere in the past two Canadian elections? A fantastic series of leaks from Canada’s Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) over the winter of 2022/23 suggests so. The leaks point to a vast CCP campaign of political …
The faux radicalism of the Popular Front
Interviewed on French television last Friday, a prominent parliamentarian from the far-Left La France Insoumise, Matilde Panot, defended a claim made by her leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, about the relative inexperience of Léon Blum when he became head of the French …
Labour won’t save the NHS
Any culture, society or nation is ultimately judged on how it protects its citizens, and how it treats and cares for its most vulnerable. And on this standard, the Conservatives have failed. Over the past 14 years, their contempt has …
A plague of fallacies has devoured the internet
We lived, without knowing it then, on the other side of the digital chasm. I know the first time I heard the word “internet”: on a trek through Ness Woods in Northern Ireland. My father, self-taught and insatiably curious, told …
The Big Air Con
Airport world is a parallel dimension. No matter where they are geographically, all airports are essentially the same place, with a simplified “international English” and a time zone only loosely tethered to its location. Airport world even has its own …
You have been expelled from politics
In a short story published in 1955, Isaac Asimov imagined America’s Presidential election day in 2008. Amid intense excitement, the entire world watches on as an ordinary citizen is led forward to cast his vote — the only vote needed …
The Bear: a perfect drama for the Biden era
Tomorrow’s menu of television broadcast will deliver an onslaught of anger, argument and forceful articulation of two distinct visions of America’s future. No, not the presidential debate on CNN, but the season three of The Bear, on Hulu. For The …
The very eccentric birth of Labour
In the freezing West Riding winter of January 1893, around 120 miscellaneous radicals and reformers met in Bradford’s Labour Institute — originally a Wesleyan chapel, later a Salvation Army barracks — to debate the creation of a new political body. …
The EU’s economic war on Le Pen
With France bracing itself for the first round of its snap parliamentary election this Sunday, the near-certain prospect of victory for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) has sent French and EU elites to their panic stations. Reeling from their …
California has surrendered its streets to assholes
I have always felt a white-hot hatred for those Harley clowns, in their clown costumes, who gratuitously rev their stone-age V-twin engines as you sit outdoors trying to have a conversation. The only proper response, I believe, would be for …
Britain’s weirdest constituency
If you live in Sheffield Hallam constituency, there’s a fair chance you’ve been approached for a vox pop by a broadsheet newspaper recently. The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times — all have come to visit in the …