There’s a slight hush and then a ripple across the room as he enters. “That’s MBS,” a delegate mutters in French, tugging at his neighbour to stand as Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, strides into the …
Britain is turning into South Africa
I’ve always suspected that Europeans are incapable of understanding South Africa, the strange and complicated nation where I was born and often return. At bottom, the issue is this: how can people so accustomed to safety, stability and a well-functioning …
Why Faroe Islanders kill whales
Three bottlenose whales have come to Kaldbaksfjorður. They can be easily seen from the winding road that skirts the edge of the narrow sound, ten minutes’ drive from Tórshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands. Two are adults, twice the …
Can we escape globalisation?
If there is a place that embodies our most romantic notions of living in harmony with nature, it is surely a small farming community in the rugged north of Portugal, Covas do Barroso. This village still maintains a tradition of …
Capitalism has corrupted the Easter egg
Britain’s first chocolate Easter egg was sold 150 years ago this year, by the chocolatier, Joseph Fry. It was hollow and filled with sweets. Whether Fry’s primary interest was in the egg as a Christian symbol, or whether the creation …
We must become barbarians
Call me a cynic or an anarchist, but these days I find it impossible to trust anything which comes to me with a seal of authority stamped upon it. I’m not defending this as a healthy response. But it is …
Capitalist radicals will shatter the world
“We are back to the enigmatic pulse-beat of the messianic,” wrote the literary critic George Steiner a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “No economist-pundit, no geopolitical strategist, no ‘Kremlinologist’ or socio-economic analyst foresaw what we are …
Why migrants are fleeing Albania
It’s a slow Sunday in Kukës, Northern Albania and I am trying to convince 40-year-old Bedri in Liverpool House, a local bar, that coming to England might not be such a good idea. “If I had €3,000, I would buy …
Who cancelled English folklore?
Sleeping Beauty. Cinderella. Puss-in-Boots. All names with which most of us are familiar. But in Britain, when it comes to our own folk tales, myths and legends, most are long forgotten. Few of us know the names of Woden, Herne …
Why we need World Cup nationalism
The tyranny of globalisation finally seems to be waning, but the liberal Left aren’t too happy about it. Writing in The Guardian this week, Gordon Brown complained that “nationalism has replaced neoliberalism as the dominant ideology of the age”. For …
Can Sunak end the new class war?
Will Rishi Sunak hang the paedos and fund the NHS? This is, after all, the most common British political stance. Every constituency nationwide skews this way: Right on social issues, Left on the economy.
But I’ve not seen anything in …
Neoliberalism died before Ukraine
The neoliberal order that triumphed on a global scale in the Nineties and 2000s aspired to the free movement of goods, capital, people, and information throughout the world. Unfettered capitalism would release the global economy from arbitrary constraints, and if …
America has captured France
France is no longer the country of Notre-Dame, nor the country of De Gaulle, where the Concorde was built and a broad middle-class prospered. To understand this moment of profound transition, you have to look past the results of last …
