Around 4,000 years ago, a band of roving tribespeople, known as the Hyksos, migrated west from Mesopotamia towards the fertile floodplains of the Nile Valley. They found a region ripe for the picking. Egypt’s pharaohs, complacent after centuries of political …
Welcome to Albania’s Little London
I’m standing near the foot of a mountain that looms over Has in north-eastern Albania, staring at a bright red phone box that appears to have been transported here from the streets of Nineties London. To one side, a row …
Biden can win on immigration
Inflation, crime, and immigration were the three big issues that were supposed to power a Republican “red wave” in the midterms. That didn’t happen, but these problems remain as real and as urgent as ever. Should they remain unresolved, they …
Australia’s immigration lessons for Labour
“Stop the boats!” With that three-word slogan, Tony Abbott, the Leader of the Australian Liberal Party systematically attacked the Labor governments of my boss Julia Gillard and her predecessor and successor Kevin Rudd. The arrival of boats from Indonesia carrying …
Anti-racism attacks my American Dream
What was I — a lifelong Democrat — doing at an election watch party in rural Virginia, surrounded by Republicans? As Ron DeSantis, 800 miles away, filled a huge TV screen with a post-landslide victory speech, he provided part of …
The gangs of Calais
Everything about Calais is grey. The sky is grey, the roads are grey, the mesh fences with their tangles of razor wire are grey. Even the bottle of water I’m drinking appears, in the coastal gloom, to be grey. Calais …
Why I’m voting Republican
The day I received my absentee ballot from the DC government, there was a story in the Washington Post about the DC Council’s imminent vote: “The bill would eliminate most mandatory minimum sentences, allow for jury trials in almost all …
Can Suella Braverman take back control?
I almost feel sorry for Suella Braverman. One minute, the Home Secretary was living her best life, happily raging against “the tofu-eating wokerati”; the next, she was being blamed for a firebomb attack on a migrant centre in Dover, the …
Denmark is a Right-wing paradise
The Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier probes the darkest depths of modern society, often with a deranged, comical touch. When I moved to Denmark a year and a half ago, it was reassuring for me that Lars was there, lurking …
France is haunted by civil war
Ranks of men in uniform are bombarded with Molotov cocktails, makeshift mortars, and small arms fire. Commando units prepare to infiltrate a smoke-covered urban fortress. A city burns under the watchful eye of the press, reporting on “a civil war”.…
The cruelty of Biden’s border policy
When it comes to “open borders”, Joe Biden has gone as far as a President can go without actually abolishing them. This June alone, US Customs and Border Protection apprehended more than 200,000 people at the southern border, leading Republican …
The violent heart of Boston
On the sultry evening of 28 July, at around 6.20pm, two young girls were playing with a hula hoop and a toy pram in the centre of Boston, Lincolnshire. A woman in an upstairs flat smiled to see the nine-year-old …
How populist is Liz Truss?
The contest to decide who enters Downing Street and then goes on to win the next election will be decided by a candidate who can reach both populist and fiscal conservatives. This is because the Conservative Party’s voter base is …
America’s fake caste war
If you listen to NPR or read The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Washington Post, you might think that Indians who live in the US, immigrants and their native-born children, are determined to impose the subcontinent’s caste system …
The Rwanda plan has failed before
Britain today is drastically different to the Britain I came to as a nine-year-old refugee almost 30 years ago. I left Kenya after burying my father, and travelled to Britain without my mother, with siblings I hardly knew. Somali families …