Politics & Economics

The ‘unconstitution’ has worked only because England’s ruling elites, out of decent self-interest, have never fully exploited its incredible lack of formal constraint on executive power....

No one has come out of it well: not the committee members, or the obfuscating civil servants, or Salmond, who refused to apologise for his ‘inappropriate’ behaviour, or Sturgeon who, though...

Men are far more likely to be killed than women; trans men and women more likely to face harm. But many women live in fear of the person they share a bed with. Daily life under duress, the bruises that...

It is as­sumed that there is an uncomplicated thing called ‘talent’ or ‘ability’, and that some people have more of it than others. It is also assumed – pretty much as...

Many building-owners have already begun the process of retrofitting safety features and billing them to lease-holders. Some will have sophisticated fire alarm systems installed, which isn’t a solution...

The well-oiled pistons of the market-state are increasingly accompanied by the creaks and squabbles of a Chinese dynasty. The country’s prized state companies are overrun by kinship networks. It...

Every step of the Brexit saga has been dictated by the Conservative Party’s struggle to save itself: to prevent voters defecting to the more uncompromising Ukip, and then to check the paralysing...

As any Palestinian could have predicted, Israel has been the first state to introduce colour-coded identification documents to distinguish between those who have been vaccinated and those who haven’t....

The ‘I’ of autobiography and racial belonging is not assumed in Imperial Intimacies. Hazel V. Carby’s shifting perspectives for her present and past selves – her narrative moves...

Most accounts of the Belt and Road Initiative focus on its geopolitics or geoeconomics. But large infrastructure projects have wider ramifications: lives are affected, connections forged and knowledge...

Unionists know that if they want their country to survive they need to make it attractive to those beyond their traditional base. Yet the DUP continues to indulge bigots, neglects the needs of working-class...

If it occurred​ to the home secretary, Priti Patel, or the minister for ‘immigration compliance’, Chris Philp, that an army barracks wasn’t the best place for refugees who...

The prospectus for Scottish independence has some awkward gaps, not least on the currency question, but it’s still far more comprehensively thought through than Brexit. This is unsurprising, given...

Bill Gates didn’t divest from fossil fuels until 2019. Better late than never, I suppose, but it was well known in the 1980s and at times Gates can sound a bit like your most bor­ing uncle telling...

Where are the space arks in orbit? The exploration of exoplanets in the circumstellar habitable zone? Satellite wars over the tiny layer of space immediately above the atmosphere are evidence of a fear...

As Navalny points out, Putin’s private domain is more than thirty times the size of Monaco. But unlike Monaco, it is protected by a no-fly zone and a naval security order requiring ships to stay...

Reformers said that non-­smokers took fewer sick days, fewer breaks; they rarely referred to smoking as a public health problem that might have something to do with class and racial in­ equality,...

Why have people’s political identities become so deeply determined by whether they went to university and how they define ‘racism’? Why these markers and not others? This may be a question...