It was around 2014 that I started to notice tracts warning about the dangers of populism from organisations with a close affiliation to New Labour. Over the decade since, little has changed: injected with the rocket fuel that was Brexit …
The Left-wing maverick who could stop the AfD
“The future of The Left is a future without Sahra Wagenknecht.” Despite the rapid rise of the Right-wing party AfD in Germany, which secured 18% of the vote in this weekend’s Hessian election, the Leftist party Die Linke wants nothing …
Israel and the rise of a new world order
Within hours of Hamas’s attack on Saturday, the celebrations had started in Iran. The Office of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei released a new propaganda video, glorifying the so-called “Al Aqsa Storm” operation. In Tehran’s “Palestine Square”, regime flunkies …
Who will save us from boarding-house Britain?
Perhaps the Conservative Party Conference would better have been cancelled: after all, no one in the country, not least those on stage making pronouncements about the party’s future policies, has the slightest belief that any of those policies will ever …
Keir Starmer has no story to tell
In the autumn of 1996, Tony Blair and the New Labour bandwagon arrived in Blackpool for the final party conference before the election. A sense of euphoria was starting to take hold: as they hit 57% in the polls, it …
The mothers who Ireland forgot
Bernard Canavan has spent decades searching for information about his life before he was adopted in 1948, when he was nearly four years old, from St Patrick’s Guild in Dublin. When I visited him at his home in Willesden, the …
John Gray: liberal civilisation is finished
John Gray recently visited the UnHerd Club. Below is an edited version of his conversation with Freddie Sayers.
Freddie Sayers: Is it your view that liberal civilisation has passed into history?
John Gray: Yes, and it’s not coming back. …
John Gray: liberal civilisation is finished
John Gray recently visited the UnHerd Club. Below is an edited version of his conversation with Freddie Sayers.
Freddie Sayers: Is it your view that liberal civilisation has passed into history?
John Gray: Yes, and it’s not coming back. …
Is Israel prepared for war?
The images beggared belief. Palestinian gunmen driving through an Israeli city, firing at passers-by from the bed of a pickup truck. The body of a dead Israeli soldier, his green uniform stained red, being dragged from a car inside Gaza …
How magical combat can win the next election
At a certain point in the life cycle of every civilisation, intellectuals become entranced with the idea that there must be a rational order underlying the blooming, buzzing confusion of the universe. At this stage, most people hail the triumph …
Starmer needs Corbyn’s secret weapon
The barriers are going up for the Labour party conference. Not just to protect, of course, but to exclude. The National Executive Committee is considering a rule that would threaten party members with expulsion if they campaign for rival candidates …
Scotland deserves better than this circus
You know something serious is about to go down when London lobby journos start saying things like: “We should pay attention to what’s happening in Scotland.” Many of us up here are not only resigned to our junior status in …
The benign bullshit of Arnold Schwarzenegger
I’m not a fan of self-help books. Their prose ranges from dully functional to the equivalent of a hot-breathed salesman prefacing every sentence with your Christian name. Most of these books are based on the experience and expertise of their …
The EU’s end is in sight
On 6 August 1806, an imperial herald climbed to the balcony of the Viennese Church of the Nine Choirs of Angels and, after summoning the city’s inhabitants with a silver fanfare, proclaimed the legal dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. …
Can pluralism be low-crime?
My small Shires market town reported a handful of crimes a year when we moved here a decade ago. Over the past year or so, every garage on my street has been burgled. Only last week an escaping shoplifter shoved …