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.
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.
The fire at Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017 killed 72 people, 18 of them children. Most died from asphyxiation after inhaling toxic smoke from the cladding on the block, which acted like a coat of petrol on the walls. Some died leaping from the building. Families died together, huddled under beds, having been told to stay where they were. Disabled residents died waiting for a rescue that...
The first time the man heard God, he uprooted his entire life, though he was very old. Then God appeared to him in person, an event which would embarrass later thinkers. God made the man an impossible promise in the shape of a son. His wife was ninety, and she laughed. When the child arrived, it was hardly unreasonable to think it a miracle. They named the child after the laughter.
Then,...
Keir Starmer is now the central fact of British politics. He has achieved an extraordinary majority. His preferences and commitments will shape the country. He has ridden a wave of revulsion at Conservatism into Number Ten. Desire for change wore social democratic dress, but disgust is also anti-systemic: the depressed turnout and the success of pro-Gaza independents, Greens and Reform...
The gambling scandal seems likely to poison the last days of the election campaign and the end of Rishi Sunak’s tenure. It is an appropriate scandal for the last rites of this government: tawdry, sloppy and – most characteristic – small-time.
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...
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...
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.
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.