Politics & Economics

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...