A judge in a libel case once warned the jury not to award “Mickey Mouse damages”, plunging them into confusion over whether he meant ridiculously large or ridiculously small. The Government, however, has no such doubts about what counts as …
Hillary Clinton still doesn’t get it
Let’s indulge in some nostalgia for a moment. It’s Nineties America and “political apathy” is the complaint on every politician’s lips. The end of the Soviet Union is a recent memory and Western democracy has emerged triumphant, though the average …
Hip-hop: the last bastion of American freedom
On 11 August 1973, there was a party at an apartment building at 1520 Sedgewick Avenue in the Bronx. The host, Cindy Campbell, was a black immigrant teenager from Jamaica who wanted to earn some extra cash to buy back-to-school …
Lana Del Rey’s dissident femininity
It’s been quite a fortnight for Lana Del Rey. Last week, she was lauded as a “singer-songwriter laureate” and “the great American poet of the 21st century”. This week, she closed the Lollapalooza festival in the US by being physically …
Can the Tories stop mass migration?
During a recent holiday in the East of England, I followed a sign through a farm gate offering raspberries for sale. It turned out to be a table in an empty farm outbuilding, with punnets of raspberries, a weighing scale, …
The West and China share the same fate
A simple and easy narrative is often provided to explain our present moment: a new Cold War, we’re told, is dawning between the United States and China, complete with a global ideological “battle between democracy and autocracy”. The future of …
Niger and the collapse of France’s empire
First, there was Mali; then came Burkina Faso. Today, in the epic saga that is the anti-Western revolt sweeping across the Sahel, it is the turn of Niger to play the protagonist — the third country to suffer a coup …
Inside Tony Blair Inc.
I
At the end of every week, Tony Blair receives his “box” to review over the weekend. It is no longer the tatty, old red briefcase of a Prime Minister, but a virtual one accessible from his laptop wherever he …
The sex coach is killing intimacy
There’s a scene in the movie Demolition Man where two characters have sex — or rather, what passes for sex in the futuristic utopia where the film takes place. The act itself has been replaced by a cybernetic facsimile thereof: …
How Twitter lost the libs
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be online, but to be chatting shit with your mates was very heaven” — William Wordsworth
It’s been a while since anyone would believe any ascribed quote on Twitter. In my trembling little …
The Donald Trump Monster Movie
In Hollywood sci-fi movies from the Fifties, there is often a moment when the US military drops an atomic bomb on a monster. It then invariably emerges from the radioactive cloud unscathed — to the disappointment and horror of those …
The lost boys of England’s youth hostels
The year before Tony Blair’s first victory, I cycled from Whitehaven to Newcastle on the C2C route. My companion was Bill, a 16-year-old from Sunderland, whom I met at a Youth Hostelling Association mountain-biking weekend and who was off to …
Ukraine has exposed the EU’s nationalism
Over the past decade, and especially since the political shocks of 2016, there has been an increasing tendency to see both domestic and international politics in terms of a set of binary opposites: democracy and authoritarianism, liberalism and illiberalism, internationalism …
In defence of critical theory
If you’ve been watching the latest pitched battles in America’s culture wars, you’ve doubtless heard of the much-ballyhooed and much-denounced field of critical race theory. One thing you may not have gleaned from all the media furore, though, is that …
The Luton estate that made Andrew Tate
Two years before the Tates moved to Marsh Farm, there was a riot — followed by a rave. It was July 1995: a summer of drought, Tory civil war, and three nights of anarchy on an estate in Luton. After …