Crossrail took 20 years, and ran billions over budget, and only one of the three lines is open so far. But it’s open. And that’s something. For over the past decade or so I’ve grown pessimistic about the prospect of …
Why Baltimore didn’t defund the police
In Baltimore the protests that followed the death of George Floyd felt less like an eruption and more like a mellow reprisal of events that had taken place five years earlier. The death of Freddie Gray in police custody had …
Why Russia fears the Azov battalion
“People say that we are heroes,” says Lieutenant Illya Samoilenko. “But heroism only occurs when planning and organisation fails.” It’s early May and Samoilenko, second-in-command of the Azov Battalion that has spent weeks inside Mariupol’s besieged Azovstal steel plant, is …
The betrayal of Ireland’s borderlands
“My cousin owns that pub,” Father Joseph McVeigh says as a yellow building comes into view. “I remember the day it was bombed — just five months before Michael was murdered.”
Michael Leonard, Joseph’s cousin, was shot dead by Royal …
Covid was liberalism’s endgame
Throughout history, there have been crises that could be resolved only by suspending the normal rule of law and constitutional principles. A “state of exception” is declared until the emergency passes — it could be a foreign invasion, an earthquake …
The truth about the Buffalo shooting
After the horrific racist mass shooting of 13 people — 11 of them black — in a Buffalo, New York supermarket, it is vital to ask what caused such violence. For some progressives, the answer is already clear: Republicans, notably …
The Haçienda saved Manchester
The artist Jeremy Deller once gifted me a brick wrapped in newspaper. It was from a demolished factory building in Salford that had been co-founded in 1837 by the father of Friedrich Engels. Concerned that his son was mixing with …
Amber Heard’s toxic femininity
The Men’s Rights Movement was born to weigh in on cases like Johnny Depp’s. The movement gained prominence during the Seventies and Eighties in response to what some men saw as preferential treatment of women in family court cases, especially …
The twilight of identity politics
During the 2016 Democratic primary Hillary Clinton began to enthusiastically deploy identitarian arguments against Bernie Sanders. Her media surrogates derided his supporters as straight white “brocialists”. Bernie Bros were guilty of “mansplaining” anti-capitalism to the nation’s minorities and aspiring young …
What Putin and liberals share
Putin’s aggressive war on Ukraine may have had the unintended consequence of reviving a moribund Nato alliance, but for many liberals, that isn’t enough. Just as the war saved Johnson from seemingly inevitable ejection from Downing Street, so have defenders …
George Monbiot’s farming fantasies
Ever since they rode out of the Book of Revelation circa 90AD, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have wreaked existential havoc. They may now finally be about to achieve the End Times. We are either going to starve to …
Why pit villages turned to rave
Certain dance tunes never fail to take me back to the area I grew up in. Stirlingshire, in Central Scotland, is a county whose gloomy beauty and dramatic ruins have made it enduringly popular with tourists and retirees alike. In …
The mystery of Wagatha Christie
Like most sane, sensible people, I’ve been following the great news story of the age — the Wagatha Christie trial, in which Rebekah Vardy is suing fellow footballer’s wife Coleen Rooney for libel — with immense interest and attention to …
The cruel world of yoga
The bar for doing a yoga practice couldn’t be any lower: all you need is a mat and a body, although even the mat is optional. You don’t have to be flexible. You don’t have to be strong. You don’t …
The demolition of Kharkiv
Kharkiv, Ukraine
“I will not talk to anyone who calls this war a ‘conflict’! Bye!” The angry response surprises me. I’m typing a message on Facebook chat while I dash through a street in Odessa, buying last minute supplies for …
