“Men must not close our eyes and minds to what happens to women in this world. We must fight, alongside them, for them to be believed, at the ballot box; with art; by listening, and change this world for the …
How the Democrats can win the Rust Belt
Almost every week, Herman heads over to the local gun club, where he can reliably find some of his buddies — old union friends from the steel mills and others. They hang out in the bar room of the clubhouse, …
Macron’s Olympic truce is over
“Paris became a place of celebration once more, and France found itself again.” Tony Estanguet, the president of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games organising committee, could be forgiven for indulging himself during his speech at the weekend’s closing ceremony. Even …
The French Left is celebrating too soon
Contrary to those punching the air and heaving enormous sighs of relief, it is difficult to draw any definitive conclusions about the recent legislative election in France. The ecstasy felt by many at seeing the National Rally (RN) fall far …
The faux radicalism of the Popular Front
Interviewed on French television last Friday, a prominent parliamentarian from the far-Left La France Insoumise, Matilde Panot, defended a claim made by her leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, about the relative inexperience of Léon Blum when he became head of the French …
Why the Left failed on October 7
A sentence I never imagined I’d write: I now think Jeremy Corbyn did Jews in Britain a favour. His time as Labour leader, between 2015 and 2020, was an extremely weird one for British Jews, but eye-opening all the same: …
Jacques Delors destroyed the European Left
There’s a story European progressives like to tell themselves: that, after the horrors of the Second World War, their governments struck a quasi-utopian compromise between capitalism and socialism — only for it to be corrupted by the import of the …
Where is the Left today?
There is something presumptuous lurking in the very phrase, “the Left”. Under a show of cosmopolitan inclusion, the term hides a reality of unconscious parochialism. The parochialism is both geographical and historical in nature.
First there is the implicit geographical …
Marx’s vision of inequality
It is often assumed that Marx was an egalitarian thinker. This is done, I believe, not through reading Marx (few people do it) but by applying a simple extrapolation. According to this common, and somewhat naive, view of the world, …
How Keir Starmer betrayed the North East
For decades, the North East was home to the right sort of Left. Durham, Tyneside — these are places rich in labour history and heraldry, ancient seedbeds of a working-class trade unionism which predates the Labour Party itself. But, though …
The awkward truth about free speech
Is it ever possible to take a neutral position on the importance of free speech? The task certainly seems quite difficult. As Vogue’s favourite philosopher, Amia Srinivasan, notes this month in the London Review of Books, many Right-wingers seem to …
Starmer will regret purging the Left
On Wednesday evening, when Labour members in North West Durham gathered to choose whom to back as the new mayor for the North East, they were given a strict warning: there should be no mention of Jamie Driscoll. The party …
The true Left is not woke
It is 85 years since the great bluesman Lead Belly coined the phrase “stay woke” in “Scottsboro Boys”, a song dedicated to nine black teenagers whose execution for rapes they never committed was only prevented by years of international protests …
Why do we pretend to be working-class?
Are we, to quote New Labour in the Nineties, “all middle-class now”? Do we all want to be? Not according to recent polling; far from middle-class norms pervading, British people disproportionately see themselves as working-class.
To understand why, it’s worth …
Can Starmer break Labour’s curse?
While the rest of the country shivers, takes an anxious glance at their online bank account and gloomily turns the thermostat even further down, one man has good reason to celebrate as we stagger towards the end of the year. …