If political advantage were the only consideration, you would expect the government to quickly settle disputes where the strikers have public support. A poll at the end of last year suggested that 66 per...
To accuse Henry ‘Chips’ Channon of snobbery or social climbing is almost absurd: society was what gave his life meaning, and it’s thanks to his fascination with the rich and the grand that he left...
Secrets tucked into trench coats miss the point of the Five Eyes and obscure its political implications. The history of Anglo-American surveillance matters, from its late imperial beginnings to the contemporary...
The primary product sold by all management consultants – both software developers and strategic organisers – is the theology of capital. This holds that workers are expendable. They can be replaced...
Why were supporters of the Democrats – including seasoned election-watchers – so easily persuaded by Republican triumphalism? The polls were one reason, of course. But susceptibility to Republican...
Official refugee resettlement programmes – often held up by Western politicians as the alternative to smuggler routes – only take ‘measured sips’ from the world’s displaced populations. To be...
COP27 took place in the vast grounds of the Tonino Lamborghini convention centre. The presidency occupied the permanent buildings and most of the rest of the conference was held in temporary structures....
What the Anglosphere and Europe wanted was a revolution of democratic liberalism catalysed by Western technology companies. Leave out social media, and this was much the same story that was told about...
All in all, this new government looks much more like a continuation of the first six years of post-New Labour Tory rule than the last six years of post-Brexit Tory rule. There is, however, one glaring...
Many of the constitution’s social provisions – among them access to healthcare, free public education and making water (currently privatised) a public good – are broadly popular, even among those...
We live in a world, as Stuart Hall put it, in which one can be just as ‘committed’ a revolutionary as Marx or Lenin, but ‘every now and then – Saturday mornings, perhaps, just before the demonstration...
Dr Song continues: ‘As we all know, Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era is a huge ideological system.’ He has said ‘as we all know’ three times so far. If...
Liz Truss has shepherded no major piece of legislation or reform into existence; her tenure at the Foreign Office was marked by enthusiastically bellicose if underinformed confrontations with Sergei Lavrov...
In Riga this summer I went to a ceremony at the Freedom Monument to commemorate the deportations of 1941, when Soviet authorities removed 14,000 citizens in less than 24 hours, sending many of...
Sea power isn’t just a matter of building a bigger navy. Nor is it reducible to the skill of admirals. Even the best ships with the ablest captains will struggle without conveniently located ports and...
Where there are signs of chaos to rival the ‘winter of discontent’ – the twenty-mile queues of trucks waiting to get through the port of Dover, the six-hour waits at A&E, the missed holidays...
Why did something as colossal as the industrial revolution fail to shift the balance of British political power decisively towards industry and the North? The organic ‘levelling-up’ achieved by the...
Volkswagen didn’t need to pay any attention to what regulators thought, because it knew better than the people who made the rules. We are the car people; we want to make diesel engines; our diesel engines...