James Butler is a contributing editor at the LRB. He co-founded Novara Media in 2011 and hosted its weekly radio show for several years.
One of the Labour Party’s least attractive peculiarities is its restlessness when deprived of opportunities for self-flagellation. Last week’s by-elections saw the party achieve a staggering swing to overturn a 20,000-vote majority in Selby and Ainsty, and come tantalisingly close to taking Uxbridge and South Ruislip, where the Tory majority is now only 495. The Liberal...
After the fall of the National Government in 1931, R.H. Tawney wrote an essay titled ‘The Choice before the Labour Party’ in which he claimed that the party was fundamentally unclear about its purpose and priorities, allowing socialism’s ‘radiant ambiguity’ to obscure its muddle of contradictory views. The result, in power, had been paralysis. In its...
One of Labour’s least attractive peculiarities is how restless it gets when deprived of opportunities for self-flagellation. It could have greeted last Thursday’s by-election results simply by stressing the obvious – that the country is repulsed by the Conservatives, for whom these elections were a disaster – and reciting the usual pieties about the need to supplicate further in suburbia. Instead the party has erupted in hopeless overreaction.
Italo Calvino has an image problem. He has been pigeonholed as an Italian Queneau or a knock-off Borges. His admirers proselytise – not always helpfully – about The Joy of Semiosis. Reviewers have tried to account for his interest in narrative at both the level of theory and pleasure by calling him a ‘storyteller’, meaning that he wrote books that are both compelling...
After the grovelling, thousands of troops processed in armed celebration. Somewhere beyond the cordon, the Metropolitan Police arrested a few republicans for precrime. Commentators purred that this, after all, is what Britain does best.
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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