Politics & Economics

Margaret Thatcher with William Whitelaw and Peter Kirk at a referendum conference on Europe, 3rd June 1975.

Britain’s Europe Problem

David Runciman

9 October 2025

From Macmillan to Wilson to Heath to Thatcher to Major to Blair to Cameron, a succession of prime ministers persuaded themselves that their country was somehow different from the rest: it could pick and choose from the menu of European options in the way that suited it best. They were all mistaken. 

Read more about Down the Rabbit Hole: Britain’s Europe Problem

Mélenchon’s Ambitions

David Todd

9 October 2025

On​ 21 April 2002 Jean-Marie Le Pen became the first leader of a far-right party to reach the run-off of a French presidential election. France was astonished. For two weeks, daily anti-fascist demonstrations . . .

Reform’s Disaster Capitalism

Peter Geoghegan

25 September 2025

Reform UK​ held its first conference in October 2021. The party was polling in the low single digits. Only a few hundred people turned up. Richard Tice, who had replaced Nigel Farage as leader seven . . .

Tony Benn’s Beliefs

Andy Beckett

25 September 2025

Whenever Britain​ is about to bomb another country, or is openly considering it, an old video will start doing the rounds on social media. It’s a clip a couple of minutes long from a speech by Tony . . .

Pre-MAGA

William Davies

25 September 2025

The​ sociologist Monika Krause, in her book Model Cases (2021), shows that social scientists have tended to base their concepts and theories on a surprisingly limited range of shared empirical instances . . .

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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Goodbye to Grangemouth

Ewan Gibbs, 11 September 2025

Any form of ‘just transition’ – managing the move to a greener economy while also protecting workers and communities – seems implausible in the context of spiralling energy costs, failed climate...

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The winners in an autocracy have little in common with the losers, but putting on aviator sunglasses or a leather jacket and watching UFC seems to build gender solidarity. It remains unclear whether young...

Read more about Do you feel like a failure? In the Manosphere

The Mask Is Off: Bukele’s Prison State

Tom Stevenson, 11 September 2025

Calling himself the ‘coolest dictator in the world’, the restorer of the state monopoly on violence has replaced the state and seized the monopoly for himself. Giving the US access to El Salvador’s...

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Biff-Bang: Tariffs before Trump

Ferdinand Mount, 14 August 2025

It is the least convincing cliché of the age that ‘globalisation has passed its sell-by date.’ On the contrary, tariff mania seems like a frantic attempt to resurrect the past, not unlike those nostalgic...

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In Evin Prison

Amir Ahmadi Arian, 14 August 2025

More than an hour after the bombing of Evin Prison, the guards finally came out of their offices. From behind a locked door they began shouting at the prisoners in the women's ward. ‘See?’ they yelled....

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Berlin Diary

Adam Shatz, 14 August 2025

Throughout my stay in Berlin, I kept hearing from Germans quietly critical of Israel that ‘cracks’ had begun to appear in Staatsräson. These cracks sometimes assumed unsettling forms, notably a relief...

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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...

Read more about Short Cuts: What is the meaning of support?

For a long time, it had seemed that Assad might outlast everything. Then, almost overnight, it was over. And with his fall came the possibility, however fragile, of accountability. Yet high-ranking officials...

Read more about ‘We were tricked’: Assad and the Alawites

Graeber seems to have had most fun as an outsider, a movement anthropologist wending his way among anticapitalist militants, arguing and taking field notes. He would arrive with his notepad, ready to...

Read more about Baseline Communism: David Graeber’s Innovations

I believe there is a moral case for disarming the machinery of war that is killing innocent civilians in Gaza with the complicity of the British government. I believe that damaging and destroying weapons...

Read more about Short Cuts: Who’s afraid of Palestine Action?

Short Cuts: Gaza under Siege

Tareq Baconi, 10 July 2025

Humanitarian aid has long served as cover for Israeli crimes. Under the Geneva Conventions, an occupying force is charged with caring for the population under its control. Yet rather than compel Israel...

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Austerity is a choice. The protection of the family at the expense of other ways of living is a choice. The transfer of public wealth to private wealth is a choice – it’s a choice to make housing a...

Read more about ‘I appreciate depreciation’: Dynastic Capitalism

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: 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...

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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

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