Five summers ago, 11 Labour and Conservative MPs quit their parties to form a breakaway faction in parliament. To the then Independent Group, then Change UK and latterly the Independent Group for Change, the motivating issues were Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership …
The radical Right is winning on TikTok
Earlier this year, I predicted that 2024 would be the year of Zoomer race politics. At the time, I didn’t suspect that the first and most marked electoral evidence of this shift would come from France. But over the weekend …
The populist battle for Ashfield
Something doesn’t seem quite right about Nigel Farage. We’re in the backseat of a car parked outside the Rifle Volunteer, and he’s just spent a solid hour in his element: shaking hands, grinning and taking selfies with supporters in Ashfield. …
The populist battle for Ashfield
Something doesn’t seem quite right about Nigel Farage. We’re in the backseat of a car parked outside the Rifle Volunteer, and he’s just spent a solid hour in his element: shaking hands, grinning and taking selfies with supporters in Ashfield. …
America’s cult of Weird
Readers, friends, sea cucumbers, square roots of negative one! A momentous anniversary will soon be upon us! Next year, 2025, will mark the 80th anniversary of the day a car rolled into my hometown of Reno, Nevada, in the strange …
Iran’s next president will be just as powerless
It took nearly 24 hours for the regime in Tehran to finally confirm that the deeply unpopular and uncharismatic Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and other prominent officials, including Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abodollahian, had died when their Seventies-era helicopter crashed in …
Europe’s insurgent Right won’t change anything
Depending on where you stand politically, you might view the Right-populist surge in the European Parliament as either a grave threat to democracy, or as a striking victory for it — and a major step forward in “taking back control” …
Labour has broken Gen Z’s heart
Summer has finally arrived in London. Beer gardens are packed, Lime bikes whizz through disgruntled traffic. There is a quiet optimism: the election is soon. For the first time that we can remember, we might not have a Tory government. …
The vacuous politics of Franz Kafka
We have been lied to about Kafka. Our received image is that of a morose manic depressive, a gloomy and sickly bundle of nerves hacking away at his craft in isolation, like some Lana del Rey avant la lettre. But …
Belfast is crumbling
Belfast was once described as “a conservationist’s nightmare”. Not much has changed. Vacant, dying buildings slouch on every other street. You notice the big ones first, places like the Crumlin Road Courthouse, a huge Victorian building cored out by decay. …
Farage’s army is on the march
What a difference a week makes. This time last Saturday, I was watching Nigel Farage’s ragtag rebel army in Great Yarmouth struggling to rouse themselves for one last attack on the fortress of Westminster, somehow knowing in their heart of …
Julius Evola: the far-Right’s favourite philosopher
On 25 November 1970, the great Japanese novelist and playwright Yukio Mishima arrived for an appointment with the commandant of the Tokyo barracks of the Japan Self-Defence Forces, Eastern Command. With the help of four others who joined him on …
Why Scotland’s ‘witches’ fought back
Witch hunts have long tormented Scotland. Thousands of women were tortured and executed there in the early-modern era, for the opaque crime of “witchcraft”. Over the past five years, a similarly senseless, though slightly less violent, campaign has been waged …
The narcissism of liberal gods
By now it’s a cliché that liberalism in the Anglosphere has become a religion, whether or not its adherents know it. But less often remarked is a fact somewhat in tension with this claim: namely, that its worshippers get to …
Britain doesn’t want to go to war
The differences between the two main parties in the UK on most foreign policy questions are matters of almost imperceptible nuance. As we were reminded in the first election debate, both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are united in their …