Scarborough’s Grand Hotel isn’t so grand these days. Built in the shape of a V to honour Queen Victoria, this sandy-brick behemoth was billed as “the largest and handsomest hotel in Europe” when its doors opened in 1867. Edward VIII …
The collapse of New York’s immigration dream
New York has always been powered by immigration. Over the 20th century, it was the Irish who built the subways and the Greeks who ran the supermarkets; now, Colombians watch over our children and Bangladeshis drive the cabs. Yet in …
The Rwanda plan has failed before
Britain today is drastically different to the Britain I came to as a nine-year-old refugee almost 30 years ago. I left Kenya after burying my father, and travelled to Britain without my mother, with siblings I hardly knew. Somali families …
How Britain betrayed my Ukrainian family
“This reminds me of the Soviet Union,” joked the elderly Ukrainian woman as we joined the queue snaking out of the UK Government’s visa centre in Warsaw. Of course, we had expected a queue — what we hadn’t expected was …
Europe’s empty promises to Ukraine
Every war has a photograph that captures its horrors. Vietnam had Napalm Girl; Spain had The Falling Soldier. How will the war in Ukraine be remembered? Thanks to Vladimir Putin’s ruthlessness, an image of a heavily pregnant woman being stretchered …
How Vladimir Putin weaponises refugees
For the last three decades, Europe’s leaders have pursued a noble strategy to prevent conflict using trade, aid and diplomacy. But their reliance on soft power has had an unintended consequence: it has left them divorced from reality.
Soft-power tools …