James Butler is a contributing editor at the LRB and the host of the podcast On Politics. He co-founded Novara Media in 2011 and hosted its weekly radio show for several years.
The Misery Index, a crude measure of economic discomfort, was thought up by Arthur Okun, a neo-Keynesian who chaired Lyndon B. Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisers in the late 1960s. Okun’s formula simply added together the unemployment rate and the rate of inflation. A good Misery Index might be about 5 (2 per cent inflation and 3 per cent unemployment); Britain’s...
Keir Starmer is in trouble. ‘Phase two’ of his government launched on 1 September and was immediately derailed by Angela Rayner’s tax dodging and resignation as deputy leader. Then Peter Mandelson’s long-enduring friendship with the deceased American sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein blew up in the government’s face. The denials are unconvincing.
This month’s elections in England were significant without being surprising. They were dire for the Labour Party and cataclysmic for the Conservatives: neither has ever lost such a high proportion of the seats it was defending. The day belonged to Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, which took 30 per cent in projected national vote share. Labour narrowly lost the Runcorn by-election to...
Francis assumed the papacy in 2013 in the teeth of a crisis. His predecessor, Benedict XVI, the first pope in centuries to resign, was strongly associated with theological and ritual conservatism. His resignation was widely interpreted as an admission of defeat by proliferating sexual abuse scandals, which had shattered the moral authority of the priesthood, even among many of the faithful....
Last Thursday evening, more than twenty Metropolitan police officers broke down the doors of the Quaker meeting house in Westminster to arrest six young women. The women were attending a welcome meeting of Youth Demand, a small, non-violent activist group currently dedicated to action against climate change and the genocide in Gaza. None has been charged.
Andy Burnham recently said that the government is ‘in hock to the bond markets’, and the political turbulence of the past few years, not least the downfall of Liz Truss following her ‘mini-budget’,...
In this first episode of a new strand in the LRB Podcast, host James Butler talks to former Labour MP and minister Chris Mullin, columnist Andy Beckett and journalist Morgan Jones about whether Labour...
James is joined by Tony Wood and Camila Vergara to discuss why the Pink Tide governments in Latin America failed, where the new brand of right-wing politics comes from, and whether the revolutionary energy...
In the run up to the local elections, and following his recent piece on the care crisis, James Butler joins Tom to discuss some of the other problems facing the UK, and what the two major parties are promising...
James Butler and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite talk to Tom about Britain's new monarch and Prime Minister.
James Butler joins Tom to consider the fall of Boris Johnson, the candidates hoping to replace him, and what the next few years of British politics might look like.
Geoff Mann talks to James Butler about the economic models developed by William Nordhaus and others, widely used by governments around the world as a tool to tackle climate change.
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