Politics & Economics

In 1966, as election day approached, Labour dispatched MPs and ministers to Hull, including Tony Benn, Tony Crosland, George Brown and James Callaghan. The newly appointed minister for transport, Barbara...

The ghost of the industrial revolution haunts Britain. The language of today’s politicians, of unlocking and unleashing the industrial heartlands, is the language of a seance promising communication...

What would politics be like in an age where one empire continued to hold sway over the ‘international community’, as it had done for three or four generations, but had to react to its power weakening...

Just as Big Oil has repeatedly failed to deliver on pledges to begin decarbonising, so too the promises of plastics companies have been hollow. This is not to suggest that consumers aren’t a big part...

Are we doomed to die out? We find ourselves at the only point in the history of the species when the rate of population growth has dramatically slowed and is about to go into reverse. So maybe there is...

I had been back​ in Nairobi for a few days when I heard that Raila Odinga, the towering opposition figure who played a crucial role in Kenya’s return to multi-party democracy, had died at a clinic...

Thousands of people each year are detained and questioned under Schedule 7, the majority of them from ethnic minority backgrounds. To be held without charge and questioned under threat of criminal prosecution,...

If it were a national economy, cybercrime would be the third largest in the world, behind only the United States and China and growing by 15 per cent a year. By 2027 scams are expected to cost the world...

It’s​ striking how thoroughly Latin America’s contemporary right has absorbed neoliberalism. Earlier cohorts entertained a range of economic philosophies, depending on what best served their interests...

The main road west from El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, was abandoned by travellers during the war in the region twenty years ago. The needle-like jebels – volcanic hills – were redoubts for...

The notion that democratic elections are supposed to allow voters to make a real choice between candidates, or even kick out the bums in power, sits uneasily with the combination of untrammelled redistricting...

Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s rise to prominence since 2015 has often been compared to the contemporaneous if more ephemeral success of Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Bernie Sanders in the United States. But to...

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...

What exactly was Tony Benn’s significance? He was certainly an unusually clear analyst and critic of the distribution of power in Britain. ‘We live in a strange country,’ he said in his final Commons...

Reform has been accused of lacking policy: its critics say it’s a party of Farage and his epigones, with few firm plans for running the country. This isn’t entirely true. An overarching Reform theory...

To understand the intellectual coordinates of Trumpism requires us to look in less conventional places and to pay more attention to less obvious moments and rhythms. We may also need to reckon with the...

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...

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...