Think back to the political situation a decade ago, and one may have in mind a calmer, less dysfunctional time. Britain’s economy was growing, just about, and real wages were beginning to rise for the first time since the summer …
The peasants won’t go quietly
Farmers hurl eggs at the European Parliament. They dump manure wherever they go. In Spain, they burn tyres. In Occitania, office buildings. Their tractors have cursed the capital of Germany with terrible traffic. As in the Holy Roman Empire circa …
E.P. Thompson, Marxist rebel
Edward Palmer Thompson was an unlikely Little Englander. He was born 100 years ago into the sort of polymathic, globe-trotting family that this country no longer seems to produce. His parents met in Jerusalem in 1918, where his mother taught …
Green capitalism is a con
If religion was the opium of the masses in the days of Karl Marx, then today’s drug is the cult of green capitalism. The West has been fooled into thinking that a combination of futuristic green technologies and green growth …
The Marxist who recognised evil
Norman Geras, who died 10 years ago today, was an unusual figure on the Western Left: he was a Marxist who steadfastly and unequivocally opposed militant Islamism and jihadi terrorism. As a free-thinking political theorist, he was as strident in …
In France, money is dirtier than sex
Almost anywhere in the world, you would have confidently expected people to celebrate their country overtaking Japan, the UK and Germany, to clock more millionaires than everywhere else except the United States and China.
Not in France, though. Accusations flew, …
McDonald’s made me a Marxist
There is a saying at McDonald’s: “‘tits on tills’ — boys in the kitchen, girls on the counter.” The idea, as a 22-year-old former worker described in a recent BBC report, is “to put attractive people at the front”. Human …
Why we can’t tell the truth
The idea of truth has fallen out of favour in recent years. For one thing, it’s less politically important than it used to be. In the era of the Cold War, what beliefs you held to be true counted for …
The Marxism of Horrible Histories
Of all historians, living and dead, one has changed the way we think about history more than any other. Yet he remains curiously absent from feuilletons and podcasts. Terry Deary has never been one for self-promotion. So although anniversaries are …
The Unabomber never grew up
The Unabomber and I share several connections. Both of us hold PhDs, are of Eastern European descent, and attempted to escape the dismal modern world by fleeing to remote locations in western Montana — he after leaving academia, me just …
How I knew my phone was hacked
Prince Harry isn’t the only one who has been having trouble with his phone. About 40 years ago, I began to hear strange clicking sounds when I picked up the receiver; being of a rational cast of mind, I put …
Can the NatCon revolution escape the past?
It’s always interesting when the fiendish plans of undercover socialists are dragged into the light. This week, just such an occasion was unexpectedly provided at the National Conservatism conference. Alongside standard Thatcherite fare about free markets, small states, and level …
Why it feels like 1848 again
“We are on a stormy sea, without a shore”, wrote Alexis de Tocqueville to a childhood friend in the midst of the 1848 revolutions. “The shore is so far away, so unknown,” he added, “that our lives and perhaps the …
Neoliberalism killed the liberal dream
The 150th anniversary of J.S Mill’s death seems a prime opportunity to reflect on the tangled mess that liberalism has bequeathed to the 21st century. Fairweather liberals can’t decide whether to torch their dusty copies of On Liberty or dust …
Who will stand against Progress?
These days he would be mobbed as an “eco-fascist”, but Edward Goldsmith would probably have been better described as a traditionalist. The founder of The Ecologist magazine, where he employed me as a naive young writer in the late Nineties, …
