Writing about how (not) to commit fraud by Walter Benjamin, Deborah Friedell, Daniel Soar, Vadim Nikitin, Steven Shapin, Pooja Bhatia, James Lasdun, Bee Wilson, John Lanchester and Robert Marshall-Andrews.
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.
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 . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .
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 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.
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.
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.
The government has stopped short of explicitly declaring war on the poor, but how different would the situation be if it had?
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...
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...
That capitalism unobstructed by public regulations, cartels, monopolies, oligopolies, effective trade unions, cultural inhibitions or kinship obligations is the ultimate engine of economic growth...
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.
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....
Writing about how (not) to commit fraud by Walter Benjamin, Deborah Friedell, Daniel Soar, Vadim Nikitin, Steven Shapin, Pooja Bhatia, James Lasdun, Bee Wilson, John Lanchester and Robert Marshall-Andrews.
Writing about political corruption from the LRB archive by Peter Geoghegan, Paul Foot, Deborah Friedell, Conor Gearty, Eliane Glaser, Perry Anderson, Simon Jenkins, Jenny Diski, Uri Avnery and Sidney Blumenthal.
We hear David's thoughts on why so many people - including podcasts like this one! - keep calling elections wrong.
Worst-case scenarios for democracy - especially since Trump's victory - hark back to how democracy has failed in the past. So do we really risk a return to the 1930s?
We catch up with Gary Gerstle and Helen Thompson about the state of the Trump presidency, from impeachment and cover-ups to Syria and Ukraine.
David, Helen and other Talking Politics regulars gather the morning after the Tory triumph the night before to discuss how they did it and what it means.
James Meek argues that the Robin Hood myth has been turned on its head by the wealthiest and most powerful, so that those who were previously considered 'poor' are now accused of wallowing in luxury.
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....
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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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