James Butler is a contributing editor at the LRB. He co-founded Novara Media in 2011 and hosted its weekly radio show for several years.
Early results matter. They matter when TV pundits are required to fill hours of overnight election coverage, and they mattered especially during the 72-hour period that followed the UK-wide elections held on 6 May, during which results continued to trickle in. Labour was expected to lose the Hartlepool by-election, but the margin of its defeat, announced in the early hours, set the story...
In response to a series of adroit questions from Dean Russell about the structural and institutional lessons that might be derived from his experience, Cummings could only return to Johnson’s personal flaws, ‘like a shopping trolley, smashing from one side of the aisle into the other’. It’s true that ‘don’t elect Boris Johnson’ is a useful first step for dealing with any problem, but it is a little galling to hear it coming from the man who masterminded Johnson’s rise.
A longer, updated version of this piece appears in the 3 June issue of the paper.
It was a disorienting election: incumbency was obviously an advantage, and the yardstick of what ‘ought’ to happen in a ‘normal’ political cycle is less useful with a government that has branded itself the liberator of its people from European bondage, overseen a vaccination programme that eclipsed its culpable failures earlier in the pandemic, and not yet turned off the economic life support. None of these facts are discernible under Labour’s stagey embrace of sackcloth and ashes, and they have not yet troubled the party’s instinctive factional fighters, who scent advantage in the wind.
Head out from the moorings on the Thames where I live – passing around the riverfront’s gated colonies and skirting the wharves, long since reanimated as desirable ‘resi’, on which my grandfather had his first job (‘A man’s job, at fourteen’) – and in a few minutes you reach a clutch of houses which might have been grafted from a garden city....
It began with the beheading of a god. In a dispute over theological primacy, Brahma – traditionally identified as the creator – insulted Shiva. The offended deity poured all his anger into the creation of a new god, Bhairava, who emerged wreathed in fire and shining like the god of death. He tore off one of Brahma’s heads, which immediately attached itself to his hand in...
In the run up to the local elections, and following his recent piece on the care crisis, James Butler joins Tom to discuss some of the other problems facing the UK, and what the two major parties are promising...
James Butler and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite talk to Tom about Britain's new monarch and Prime Minister.
James Butler joins Tom to consider the fall of Boris Johnson, the candidates hoping to replace him, and what the next few years of British politics might look like.
Geoff Mann talks to James Butler about the economic models developed by William Nordhaus and others, widely used by governments around the world as a tool to tackle climate change.
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