Politics & Economics

What is the meaning of support?

David Renton

30 July 2025

With the proscription of Palestine Action early in July, the question of what support for a terrorist group means has become urgent. Very few people in Britain supported al-Qaida; many more support the disabling of factories that supply arms to Gaza.

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Who’s afraid of Palestine Action?

Huw Lemmey

11 July 2025

It is now​ a criminal offence, under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000, to express support for Palestine Action, a direct-action group formed in 2020 with the aim of disrupting the British factories . . .

Gaza under Siege

Tareq Baconi

10 July 2025

Afew​ years ago I had a meeting with a European diplomat in Brussels. He was a well-intentioned mid-career official looking for ways to get more aid into the Gaza Strip. At the time Israel was limiting . . .

Dynastic Capitalism

Katrina Forrester

10 July 2025

We​ are used to hearing that neoliberal political economy is about shrinking the state, and it is true that for many people in the US and the UK the experience of the years since Reagan and Thatcher . . .

Gulf Contracts

Peter Talbot

26 June 2025

The week​ before I went to the Middle East, the company held a Global Town Hall. ‘Town Hall’ is the faux-folksy term used by modern multinationals for meetings at which senior management transmit . . .

The World since 7 October

Adam Shatz, 24 July 2025

 The inability of Western powers to condemn Israel’s conduct – much less bring it to an end – has made a mockery of the rules-based order that they claim to uphold.

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Bolsonaro’s Brazil

Perry Anderson, 7 February 2019

By comparison with the scale of the upheaval through which Brazil has lived in the last five years, and the gravity of its possible outcome, the histrionics over Brexit in this country and the conniptions over Trump in America are close to much ado about nothing.

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Let Them Drown

Naomi Klein, 2 June 2016

Environmentalism might have looked like a bourgeois playground to Edward Said. The Israeli state has long coated its nation-building project in a green veneer – it was a key part of the Zionist ‘back to the land’ pioneer ethos. And in this context trees, specifically, have been among the most potent weapons of land grabbing and occupation. 

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Where will we live? The Housing Disaster

James Meek, 9 January 2014

The government has stopped short of explicitly declaring war on the poor, but how different would the situation be if it had?

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What I Heard about Iraq: watch and listen

Eliot Weinberger, 3 February 2005

In 1992, a year after the first Gulf War, I heard Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, say that the US had been wise not to invade Baghdad and get ‘bogged down in the problems of trying...

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Moderation or Death: Isaiah Berlin

Christopher Hitchens, 26 November 1998

In​ The Color of Truth*, the American scholar Kai Bird presents his study of McGeorge (‘Mac’) and William Bundy. These were the two dynastic technocrats who organised and...

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Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future

Edward Luttwak, 7 April 1994

That capitalism unobstructed by public regulations, cartels, monopolies, oligopolies, effective trade unions, cultural inhibitions or kinship obligations is the ultimate engine of economic growth...

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The Morning After

Edward Said, 21 October 1993

Our peoples are already too bound up with each other in conflict and a shared history of persecution for an American-style pow-wow to heal the wounds and open the way forward. There is still a victim and a victimiser. But there can be solidarity in struggling to end the inequities, and for Israelis in pressuring their government to end the occupation, the expropriation and the settlements. The Palestinians, after all, have very little left to give.

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Maastricht and All That

Wynne Godley, 8 October 1992

A lot of people throughout Europe have suddenly realised that they know hardly anything about the Maastricht Treaty while rightly sensing that it could make a huge difference to their lives....

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Short Cuts: Ready for War?

Tom Stevenson, 26 June 2025

The standard assessment of the British armed forces is that they have become ‘hollowed out’. The army has too few tanks and too little artillery to form the armoured divisions its own plans demand....

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TV Meets Fruit Machine: Faragist TikTok

William Davies, 26 June 2025

In my own For You journey into Faragism, I was struck by the recurring assumption that the ultimate prize was exit of some form or other: retiring to live off passive income or emigrating to a less broken...

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Diary: Rape Crisis Centres

Lili Owen Rowlands, 5 June 2025

There are no rules about what constitutes a crisis. Calls can be about an assault that took place days earlier or an experience that has been buried for decades. Part of the work is giving practical information,...

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The United States was born in war and has waged a war of some sort in every year of its existence. Silicon Valley knows that war is good for business. And many of its most powerful people want us to stop...

Read more about Collective Property, Private Control: Defence Tech

Universities’ reliance on international students is only the most recent attempt to solve a broader problem, one that continues to dog British policymaking when it comes to major social and cultural...

Read more about Short Cuts: University Finances

Is this fascism?

Daniel Trilling, 5 June 2025

Are​ we, as Richard Seymour suggests, ‘in the early days of a new fascism’? In Disaster Nationalism, Seymour argues that in trying to understand the new far right, we have been looking in the wrong...

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Behind this anti-establishment mood, which has rankled in British politics for many years now, lies the nastier promise of Faragism. It is not only that his voters are angry or disenfranchised, though...

Read more about Short Cuts: Labour at the Cliff Edge

Hokey Cowboy: Is Hayek to blame?

David Runciman, 22 May 2025

Hayek suspected that nothing about the vindication of neoliberalism was likely to be straightforward. Some magical thinking would be needed to leaven the mix. He wanted elites properly educated in the...

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Diary: Safe and Unsafe Ports

Jérôme Tubiana, 22 May 2025

In 2019, I made several visits to Dhar al-Jebel, a Libyan detention centre better known as Zintan, after the nearest town. Around a thousand migrants, most of them Eritreans, were being held there indefinitely....

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Renters v. Rentiers

Jack Shenker, 8 May 2025

Housing injustice, unlike most of the social ills afflicting our atomised society, has the potential to unite and radicalise. Having knocked on doors for Acorn in Tottenham, I’ve seen how swiftly conversations...

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It’s a shitshow: Thatcher’s Failed Experiment

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, 8 May 2025

Tim Lankester, Thatcher’s private secretary for economic affairs for the first two and a half years of her tenure, describes the monetarist experiment as ‘one of the most unsatisfactory episodes of...

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John Pring’s account reveals something of the character of austerity: it isn’t so much that the state withdraws from an involvement in people’s lives, but that its contact with them is degraded....

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Short Cuts: Labour’s Straitjacket

John Lanchester, 17 April 2025

The Tories, in office, prepared a trap for Labour. It had a large sign on it saying ‘It’s a Trap’ and then next to that another sign saying ‘When We Say, It’s a Trap, What We Specifically Mean...

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The immediate effect of Trump’s menaces, and the visit to Nuuk in January of his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, was to highlight the paradox of Denmark defending Greenland’s freedom, when it is Denmark’s...

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Regime Change in the West?

Perry Anderson, 3 April 2025

Where amid this turmoil does neoliberalism stand? In emergency conditions it has been forced to take measures – interventionist, statist and protectionist – that are anathema to its doctrine, yet without...

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Diary: At CPAC

Antonia Hitchens, 20 March 2025

Trump’s supporters had retrenched during what they call his interregnum; now they were on stage with the national security adviser and the White House deputy chief of staff. The Third Term Project, a...

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Short Cuts: Labour’s Immigration Policy

Daniel Trilling, 20 March 2025

Having ruled out any large-scale redistribution of wealth, Labour should be putting its changes to workers’ rights, including entitlement to protections from ‘day one’, an end to zero-hours contracts...

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Great significance has been attributed to the government of Giorgia Meloni, who became Italy’s prime minister in 2022. For some, it signals the return of fascism in a novel form; for the majority of...

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