Earlier this year, I predicted that 2024 would be the year of Zoomer race politics. At the time, I didn’t suspect that the first and most marked electoral evidence of this shift would come from France. But over the weekend …
How London killed the Cockney
Ruby Murray, one of the most popular musical artists of the Fifties, is remembered today less for her schmaltzy ballads than as Cockney rhyming slang for curry. Now, though, Ruby’s gastronomic legacy has become a battleground.
Dishoom, the restaurant chain …
The EU is turning into a Remainer nightmare
With the EU elections less than a month away, one can only imagine the cognitive dissonance that the pro-EU, anti-Brexit crowd must be experiencing. In a curious twist of fate, the EU is turning into everything Remainers feared Brexit would …
Ireland’s populist insurgency
The first thing that strikes you about Dublin is how different the political stickers on lamp posts are: while in Belfast the overriding theme is either pro-Palestine or Irish unity, in Dublin’s central O’Connell Street, it is “Defund The NGO …
The future belongs to Right-wing progressives
Reactionary as I am, it gives me no pleasure to report that conservatism is finished. As Britain struggles with the exhausted death-spasms of liberal Toryism, the only subset of Right-wing thought in the West today that doesn’t feel moribund is …
The return of the Irish Right
“The transformation of Ireland over the last 60 years has sometimes felt as if a new world had landed from outer space on top of an old one,” wrote Fintan O’Toole, a commentator who is generally approving of this new …
Centrist McCarthyism is taking hold
Why are so many working-class voters rebelling against the centre-left? For those establishment politicians being spurned in favour of populist movements, there is a straightforward answer: the masses, in turning away, are ignorant, delusional and bigoted.
Nowhere is this more …
Is it naive to believe asylum seekers?
Elizabeth I put it best. “I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls.” In other words, who knows what people really believe? When I baptise people, I ask them — or those who stand in for them — …
Andrew Sullivan: What I got wrong about Trump
Andrew Sullivan is one of America’s best known political observers and writers. He is an independent-minded conservative who supported Obama, was a leader of the gay marriage movement, and has since argued forcefully against Donald Trump. His Substack is one …
Canada’s immigration backlash is far from populist
As the United States and Texas state governments clash over the Mexican border, a very different kind of immigration crisis is taking place elsewhere in North America. Unlike in the divided US, Canada is supposed to be one of the …
After MAGA, a new Trump rises
As America inches ever closer to its next election, the rest of the world is now forced to face the fact that Donald Trump is almost guaranteed to be the Republican nominee, and the favourite to return to the White …
Are people really fleeing Texas?
There’s a lot of talk about “narratives” these days, and they are indeed powerful tools for shaping perceptions. Take California, for instance: for most of my life, it was the apex of opportunity, a republic of dreams where fortunes were …
China’s super-rich are fleeing to Singapore
Sentosa, a resort island of palm trees and imported sand off the southern coast of Singapore, is a place devoted to pleasure. It has theme parks, golf courses, elegant gardens and casinos. You get the sense that the rules of …
Why England hates incompetent tyrants
The English hatred for incompetent tyrants runs deep. In 1215, King John of England was forced to sign a treaty limiting royal power, after his most powerful barons rebelled against his military incompetence, arbitrary decision-making, and swingeing tax regime. Yet …
Israel’s true border crisis
Of all the lessons to be learned following Hamas’s brutal incursion into Israel, one is so glaringly obvious that it runs the risk of going unnoticed: the attack was a failure not just of Israel’s border security systems, but of …