Tourists emerging from Glasgow’s Central Station onto Gordon Street are immediately confronted with a scene familiar to every Glaswegian: cold air, tornadoes of litter, and the visible overlap of the city’s drug and homelessness crises. To the right, a group …
Gaza’s children have no future
When I was a boy, growing up in Gaza, we used to play a game called “Arabs and Jews”. Two children would be designated captains and pick their teams, then we would find some sticks, pretend they were guns, and …
Israel’s plan to weaken the Iranian regime
Before Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei set out to conquer the Sunni Arab world in 1989, there were self-imposed rules that set real limits to Arab-Israeli warfare. In all the conflict between Israel and Arab states since May 1948, the world …
Why I miss the bitchy fashion police
Do you remember a time when women on television could be exhilaratingly rude about what other women looked like without everyone else being Deeply Disappointed? On Wednesday I had a flashback to this distant state of affairs as I saw …
When Trump fed the press a nothingburger
In his 1991 song “New Jack Hustler”, Ice T tells a tale that was already a gangsta rap cliche when the song was released — a narrator’s first-person story of his career as a successful seller of drugs, a busy …
Britain won’t be Balkanised
Imagine: the border with Scotland is closed and your home city of Manchester besieged. Before you know it, you and your family are having to flee to Wales to escape bombs and full-blown civil war. Such is the scenario of …
Sahra Wagenknecht’s insider revolution
When Sahra Wagenknecht founded her new “Left-conservative” BSW party earlier this year, it seemed as if it might fill a gaping void in Germany’s political spectrum. In the UK, Maurice Glasman famously branded this combination “Blue Labour” — but until …
Trump senses British weakness
It must be all-so familiar to Theresa May. There she was in 2017, holding hands with The Donald, walking in the White House as the first foreign leader invited to see the new Caesar after his inauguration. Poised to assume …
Would you move to Mother Russia?
Last year, Tucker Carlson scandalised America by travelling to Russia and interviewing Vladimir Putin. As US viewers denounced the idea that one ought to speak to an enemy such as Putin, Tucker strolled around Moscow, filming himself taking the subway, …
How intersectionality killed feminism
You’d think that Suffs, a play about women’s suffrage, would be considered to be pretty progressive. It’s currently playing on Broadway, and has enjoyed broadly positive reviews from all the usual outlets. Yet earlier in the year, this most liberal …
The end of Lebanon’s French connection
A day after the Beirut port blast shattered the city in August 2020, Emmanuel Macron arrived in Lebanon as a self-proclaimed saviour. Like JFK in West Berlin, or Fidel Castro in post-revolutionary Havana, the French President toured the streets. Thronged …
Blair was right about ID cards
Why won’t Keir Starmer support digital ID? When they caught wind of the electoral landslide, Blair and Blunkett lurched from their caskets to demand a return of this, New Labour’s most divisive and, eventually, most thoroughly defeated policy. But Labour …
How Osbornism failed
That American authority is shot. That an accord and relationship will have to be established with illiberal governments. That the dominance of the dollar is over. That the world will be defined from here on out by “multipolarity”, with Britain …
Why Native Americans don’t vote
If voting is sacred, nobody told Ross John. “I’m not a voter in state and federal elections,” the 68-year-old businessman and Seneca nation citizen tells me, “because I’m not a US citizen.” Technically, John is an American. But his reaction …
Israel and the trials of liberal solidarity
October 7 kicked Israel into terror of body and mind. The savage massacres, unfathomable in themselves; the mounting evidence of rapes, beheadings, immolations; the government’s colossal failure; the nightmare of Israelis, young and old, captive in Hamas tunnels; the foreboding …