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 …
Who is to blame for gender theory?
Here’s a version of a story you might have heard before: first feminists got what they wanted, and then they got what they deserved. At some point in the Noughties, the idea that men and women were fundamentally alike in …
The fatal flaw in David Lammy’s progressive realism
There is a fundamental problem with David Lammy’s concept of Progressive Realism, the mooted foreign policy doctrine according to which our coming Labour government will manage Britain’s most dangerous strategic environment since the Second World War. Reading through its mixed …
Liberalism didn’t protect Salman Rushdie
Why did he do it? Hadi Matar, 24 — dim, lugubrious, incel-y — had by his own admission “read, like, two pages” of The Satanic Verses. Judging by his slacker patter, one wonders whether he fully understood them. Yet there …
The enlightened case for being selfish
Ever since the events of October 7, the streets of American and Western cities are routinely filled with heated demonstrations. The vast majority of the people in attendance are usually not themselves citizens of Palestine or Israel, but locals whose …
Inside the Gen Z sex war
Women to the Left, men to the Right. And heaven forbid there is any crossover. These days, young people are floundering in their sex-based political silos wanting different things: girls are still seeking equality and boys miss being the good …
The tyranny of Columbine
The 25 years since the Columbine massacre have given us many occasions — other massacres, alas — to invoke it. But this repetition has had the strange effect of dimming and narrowing our sense of what “Columbine” was in its …
The Israel-Gaza war has changed everything
Analysts, journalists and strategists are all required to ignore the near-impossibility of truly understanding a war as it unfolds. Failing to do so would send us into a morass of self-doubt, and our work would become a useless succession of …
How Antifa went mainstream
In early 2018, I attended a reading at an independent bookstore in the heart of bourgeois Brooklyn. It was to launch the memoir of a Mexican-American former Border Patrol agent who had become disillusioned and quit. To the surprise of …
Why did we forgive OJ Simpson?
Hours after the news broke that OJ Simpson had died from cancer at the age of 76, I was sitting in a conference room, listening to an elevated but meandering discussion on the topic of forgiveness. Could absolution be empowering …
A war is brewing in the Pacific
The US may be losing ground to new global powers in many respects, but when it comes to the business of sowing conflict around the world, it remains unrivalled. As it slowly abandons Ukraine to its own fate, after playing …
Iran needs another revolution
Iran’s attack on Israel last week was not a surprise, nor did it inflict significant damage. It was nonetheless a paradigm shift. This was the first long-distance, large-scale drone strike in history — and the first time Iran attacked Israel …