Politics & Economics

Gulf Contracts

Peter Talbot

26 June 2025

In aerospace, engineering, technology, construction, health and defence, the rush is on to grab as many fat contracts as possible. Companies from these sectors, and others, are jumping into bed with regimes that operate outside the rule of law and with disregard for human rights and labour conditions. My company is conducting expensive charm offensives on sheikhs and emirs and committing to deliver vast projects to deadlines it knows it cannot meet.

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Ready for War?

Tom Stevenson

26 June 2025

On​ 2 June the British government finally published its Strategic Defence Review on the state of the UK armed forces. When it was commissioned, in July 2024, Keir Starmer described it as ‘first of . . .

Faragist TikTok

William Davies

26 June 2025

In​ the mid-2010s, the Chinese technology company ByteDance studied the leading video clip-sharing platforms, such as Vine and Musical.ly, and identified some crucial weaknesses. The clips were not well . . .

Is this fascism?

Daniel Trilling

24 May 2025

One​ way of thinking about fascism is to see it as historically specific: a reactionary mass movement produced by the economic and social chaos that engulfed Europe after the First World War. Fascism . . .

Defence Tech

Laleh Khalili

24 May 2025

You may remember​ Palantir as the company that was given access to all of NHS England’s data in November 2023, in order to create a Federated Data Platform. The cost was £330 million – the largest . . .

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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John Hume on the end of the Unionist veto in Ulster

John Hume, 2 February 1989

In recent times in Ireland we have been reminded of a lot of anniversaries. Remembering the past is something of an obsession here. The future, discussing it or shaping it, doesn’t seem...

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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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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

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....

Read more about Unfair Judgments: Lethal Cuts at the DWP

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...

Read more about ‘Everything is possible’: In Greenland

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...

Read more about Short Cuts: Labour’s Immigration Policy

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...

Read more about No one is further right than me: Mussolini to Meloni

I am Genghis Khan: Shoring Up SoftBank

Laleh Khalili, 20 March 2025

Masayoshi Son seems compulsively driven to invest larger and larger sums so he can call himself the biggest, most significant, most visionary investor in the world. ‘Bill Gates just started Microsoft...

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The Holy Alliance presented itself as an intimate spiritual union between the souls and consciences of its signatories rather than a conventional treaty between sovereigns. It thereby encouraged contemporaries...

Read more about Steampunk Terminators: Europe’s Holy Alliance

Trump has provided the CDU with perfect cover to break with the creed of the schwarze Null. Whether the fiscal unleashing comes in the waning days of Scholz’s coalition or has to wait until Friedrich...

Read more about Goodbye Black Zero? Germany without Washington

Making Media Great Again

Peter Geoghegan, 6 March 2025

Paul Marshall’s emergence as a media magnate has surprised many. ‘I totally get UnHerd. That’s who Paul is,’ one person I spoke to said. ‘But I can’t see the purpose of [owning] the Spectator...

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