When we think of student politics, we tend to imagine long-haired radicals full of righteous indignation, wearing Che Guevara t-shirts and reading (or perhaps pretending to read) Karl Marx. Not so for the young Rachel Reeves, who in the heady …
How small dick energy gave us Trump
Lou Reed was right. It’s hard being a man. In my mid-Twenties I spent three months living with my family in the mountains of Kabylia. As an analytical tool, that period was incredibly useful. Algeria, by comparison to the West, …
Zadie Smith’s multicultural fantasy
In 2023, the formerly edgy became the new canonical. At least that’s what the LRB thought of Zadie Smith’s last book. But was the darling of the Anglo-American literary establishment even edgy to begin with? Surely her debut White Teeth …
Could Anglofuturism liberate Britain?
With the accession of Donald Trump, the Labour government, which had settled on a low-octane replica of Bidenism for its governing philosophy, now finds itself diametrically opposed on every aspect of strategy, policy, and ideology to its imperial overlord. There …
Why virtue signalling won’t pay
“Goodness is the only investment that never fails,” said Thoreau. This week seemed to prove him wrong, though, with the news that the self-described Good Literary Agency has run out of funds. This “social enterprise literary agency” had been aimed …
Boxing fights on in Bethnal Green
As Storm Darragh continued its rampage outside, unleashing an eddy of beer cans and fried chicken boxes down Cambridge Heath Road, York Hall was starting to fill up. On the top step of the brass-railed balcony, a father and son …
Why Prevent isn’t fit for purpose
When I heard Axel Rudakubana had entered guilty pleas for the Southport stabbings, I imagined a collective sigh of relief in Downing Street. There would be no prolonged trial. No daily reports of Rudakubana’s gruesome crimes. My scepticism was, I …
The inconvenient truth about Southport
When Nigel Farage sensed that something shady was going on in the Government’s handling of the Southport massacre last July, where Axel Rudakubana murdered three young girls at a Taylor-Swift-themed dance class, he was widely rebuked for spreading misinformation that …
There’s nothing sophisticated about sadists
The Marquis de Sade was obsessed with the torture of women. “Sex without pain is like food without taste,” he wrote — and his life was positively a buffet. When he was not writing horny screeds from behind bars in …
The truth about private health scans
Private health checks used to be the preserve of wealthy CEOs. But with NHS waiting lists stretching into years, Neko Health has stepped in for the masses. In a blaze of publicity, the Swedish company has set up a new …
The big carbon capture con
“A white elephant.” “A colossal waste of money.” “A risk of carbon lock-in.” When Keir Starmer pledged £22 billion last October to carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects over the next 25 years, scientists and environmentalist NGOs were wise to …
Rachel Reeves, the pound shop George Osborne
The curse of finance ministers whose country’s business model is broken is that they are powerless to transform the economy, yet too powerful not to take the blame. But when the economy is merely stagnating, not yet in free-fall, preventing …
Will our universities ever recover from Covid?
From job losses to course closures, British universities are in meltdown — as panicked institutions are desperately shedding their crumbling 20th century identities. Yet if academics, subjects and even physical buildings all look set to go, with administrators scrambling to …
Britain’s post-imperial delusion
I only salvaged a few objects from my late dad’s home when it was cleared. But these included two that could be said to bookend his era of British history. The first was a barometer, presented to a Harrington ancestor …
The cruelty of ‘corridor care’
This week, while carrying out a SITREP or situation report in hospital, I came across a 93-year-old woman lying on a trolley in a corridor. Tailgating her was a 94-year-old man, also on a trolley, also suffering from a terminal …