Rishi Sunak is creeping out of the Tory leadership like a mouse walking past a sleeping cat. This is a shame because his departure is significant, marking the end of a political era that began in the Eighties. Sunak’s hero …
The dangerous martyrdom of Tommy Robinson
Tommy Robinson is a paradox: he is a brave and enormously successful activist-journalist with a mean right hook. At the same time, he’s prone to sentimentality, sensitive to criticism and sees himself as a victim, tethering his own private troubles …
What Happened To England?
It used to be such a nice place, where you, as a foreigner, would be greeted by the most polite people you could imagine. But England and probably the entire UK has […]
Source: BJØRN ANDREAS BULL-HANSEN Read the original …
Donald Trump’s strange sincerity
The faster American culture spreads, the less foreigners seem to understand it. In October, the Irish novelist Anne Enright shared a few thoughts about the US elections. “[T]hese politics are playing out in some secret part of the American psyche,” …
Why Scotland can’t get clean
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 …
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, …
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 …
Will the Brics inherit the earth?
A momentous global shift is currently underway. One which finds expression today in the Russian city of Kazan where the Brics bloc is holding an international summit hosted by the supposed global pariah Vladimir Putin.
Since the onset of the …