Our national conversation on Shamima Begum, which ebbs and flows according to the imperatives of Begum’s legal team and a simultaneously cynical and naïve mass media, is saturated in bullshit. For her detractors, the 23-year-old East-London runaway is a danger …
Why Bishops should be political
Good Friday coincided with Passover this year. We didn’t have a proper Seder service because we had just moved house and everything we needed was hidden in unpacked boxes. But at least we had all our possessions with us. For …
What Zelenskyy got wrong about Israel
In Israel, one of the most-shared videos in recent weeks shows a Ukrainian soldier named Alex revealing the contents of his military backpack. After waving his night-vision goggles at the camera, he pulls out a Ukrainian-language translation of Golda, a …
Russia will never want peace
I honestly can’t remember the number of times I’ve written about Russian peace talks. I could try to look it up, but I suspect it would only depress me. Ukraine and Syria; tangentially Georgia and, I guess, Chechnya. None of …
What we failed to learn from Syria
The 11th anniversary of the war in Syria passed earlier this month with little notice, eclipsed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the two wars are intimately connected. It was Russia’s entry into the Syrian war in 2013, at the …
Is this Ukraine’s last chance for peace?
Nearly two weeks into the invasion of Ukraine, observing from a distance, it still feels as if there are two different wars, which barely overlap, taking place.
The first is the war on social media: in this war, a combination …
How Vladimir Putin weaponises refugees
For the last three decades, Europe’s leaders have pursued a noble strategy to prevent conflict using trade, aid and diplomacy. But their reliance on soft power has had an unintended consequence: it has left them divorced from reality.
Soft-power tools …
A no-fly zone in Ukraine will backfire
In their desire to show solidarity with the embattled Ukrainians, the war in Ukraine has led some British commentators to slip the bounds of rationality — and none more so than the Chair of the Commons Defence Select Committee, Tobias …
Sanctions won’t save Ukraine
Unsurprisingly, the West has decided it won’t send its sons and daughters to die for Ukraine. Instead, it hopes to cripple Russia with economic sanctions. Will such measures bring about the end of the Russian invasion? Will Vladimir Putin scuttle …
