What to do about overseas aid has long been a problem for the Conservatives. The Department for International Development (DFID), set up by the Blair government in 1997, is widely seen as a success. To...
In February 1947 the Ministry of Labour had sent officials to recruit displaced people languishing in camps in Germany, including Balts, Latvians, Poles, Ukrainians and Lithuanians. The programme was bizarrely...
If you’re over the age of 50, the odds are that you’re happy with how it’s all worked out. If you’re under the age of 50, the odds are that you’re not, and if you’re under the age of 30, you...
Watching Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on 4 February, I felt that we had crossed a line. This president was setting up as the benevolent ruler of – it wasn’t...
What is clear above all is that this prime minister does not even pretend, as previous prime ministers have usually pretended, to be merely primus inter pares. He is the Capo, the Duce.
The day I arrived in Lahore, two stories dominated the newspapers’ front pages. The Supreme Court had declared the Ministry of Railways the most corrupt department in the country. No...
Despite abundant evidence from around the world, many people still find it hard to accept that flagrant lying is no longer a disqualification in public life, and that it might in fact be an attraction.
Corruption and hypocrisy tend to be systemic: if you see them at the top you’re sure to encounter them at the bottom. Liberia has been rebuilt with impressive speed; the road networks are now even better...
Perhaps Soviet dissent was always less remarkable as an actual political movement in the domestic context than for the magnified reflection it gained in international media.
It may be satisfying, though it isn’t terribly surprising, to find that the Economist has mostly come down on the side of capital in the major political conflicts of the past. More interesting would...
On 14 April 1988, right at the end of the Iran-Iraq War, a US navy frigate, Samuel B. Roberts, hit a mine and was badly damaged. Ten of the crew were injured. The US blamed Iran – even...
Negotiations, as Trump and Pompeo see it, are for sissies; Iran only understands the language of force. As neoconservatives used to say at the start of America’s invasion of Iraq, ‘Boys go to Baghdad:...
Accidents are likely to happen, as demonstrated by what appears to have been the unintentional shooting down of a Ukrainian passenger plane. At the same time, Trump and his administration are peculiarly...
Bin Laden’s wives and daughters were excluded from leadership on grounds of their gender, but their brothers were unsuitable for other reasons. Siham’s son, Khalid, doesn’t seem to have had his sisters’...
Corbyn’s four years as Labour leader have transformed the party and it will not easily return to supporting neoliberalism and foreign wars. The leadership candidates are all aware of this fact. Even...
Given the outcomes to which we collectively acquiesce, and the levels of uncertainty involved, it isn’t hard to excuse many of those who – deliberately or otherwise – contribute to current patterns...
In the 1960s, when the children of the Windrush generation were arriving with their parents, there were no issues with their entry to the ‘mother country’: they were travelling internally within the...
An article published in the Times just after the 1922 election suspiciously lists some of the things organised by the Independent Labour Party: ‘Socialist study circles, socialist economics classes,...