Over the last decade it has become an inevitable cycle: every election that shocks the interests and expectations of the EU’s technocrats is met with predictions of the bloc’s inevitable break-up. I’ve been guilty of this myself — even though, …
Tusk’s return could backfire on the EU
Was this the election that kickstarted the European Union’s renaissance? Seemingly against the odds, the liberal-centrist pro-EU coalition led by former European Union President Donald Tusk emerged victorious in Sunday’s elections in Poland, stopping the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) …
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. …
Europe has betrayed Lampedusa Man
When the histories of Europe are written, they will write at length about Lampedusa. This small Italian island has become not only the barometer for the permanent migration crisis which now defines the continent’s condition, it has become the metaphor …
Will we execute the Russian oligarchs?
As the war was starting in the early hours of February 24, 2022, when the CIA was forecasting Kyiv’s imminent fall and a quick victory for Moscow, a wealthy Russian friend mailed me for my views. His own were conveyed …
Is this the end of the Soros empire?
Even in retreat, the Soros empire commands a feverish hysteria. When, last December, the 93-year-old George finally handed control of his Open Society Foundations (OSF) to his 37-year-old son, Alexander, many of his liberal supporters wondered whether it was the …
The case for leaving the ECHR
Was it Theresa May who broke the taboo? In April 2016, in her only public speech during the Brexit referendum campaign, the then Home Secretary reluctantly concluded that the UK should remain in the EU, but leave the European Convention …
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 …
The Ukraine war is about to get worse
Amid the never-ending coverage of the latest offensive or counteroffensive in Ukraine, it is often unappreciated just how much worse the global economic repercussions from the conflict could have been. Russia is the world’s leading exporter of gas and provided …
The populist Right are fake revolutionaries
Predictions that the pandemic would spell the end of populism and thrust voters back into the political mainstream have turned out to be little more than wishful thinking. In the US, polls show Trump creeping up on Biden. In Europe, …
Britain is Europe’s liberal outcast
When Labour wins the next election, Britain will assume a role in Europe something akin to the indomitable Gaulish village in Asterix: the last holdout of liberal-Left political power in a continent swinging firmly to the Right. Yet for a …
At Nato, America recaptured Europe
It is now clear that the Russian invasion of Ukraine marked the end of one era in world politics and the beginning of a new one. As with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of détente …
Why Britain can’t control inflation
“We are living in an expensive and increasingly poor country,” thundered The Guardian‘s political editor, furious at the crumbling state of the nation unable to pay its workers properly. “It is not much use lecturing people about paying themselves more …
Brexit has stumped our zombie elites
Sometime very early in the morning of 24 June 2016, I woke up, as middle-aged men tend to do. I looked at my phone to see the result. My only thought was: “Fuck, that’s a lot of work.” Then I …
The new world war on free speech
The war on free speech is hardly a novel phenomenon, instead mutating over the centuries. What is new, however, is its global aspirations: today, the conflict takes the form of a world war.
You can see its shadow in every …