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.
If the ITV debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer was exceptional, it was only for its inanity. Two men, neither of them with much stage presence or prone to thinking on their feet, traded prepared barbs and crowbarred in their key messages. Each made sure to name audience members, Janet – or was it Paula? – as an empathetic consolation prize for dodging their actual questions. Be honest about when – or if, or how – we’ll fix the NHS? Not on your life.
It is difficult to explain Sunak’s decision to call an election now. The Conservatives’ chief electoral strategist has stressed the ‘enthusiasm gap’ for Labour. But it takes some elaborate self-deception to read that voters despise you more than they like the other guy and take it as good news. Sunak must know he is going to lose. Perhaps he just wants it all to be over.
Section 114 notices used to be rare. They’re described as council bankruptcies: when a local authority is on the verge of making unlawful expenditure – that is, spending more than its income – its chief financial officer is required to issue a notice and the council starts, inevitably, to cut its services further and sell off assets. Central government often sends its men...
On a cold evening in early February 2011, a small group of activists spilled out of a squat in a Georgian townhouse on Bloomsbury Square. The building – recently purchased by a presenter on Antiques Roadshow – was then home to a loose collective running the Really Free School (RFS), a ramshackle series of political talks, film screenings and discussions. It was a natural hub for...
On 26 October more than 150 trade unionists and Palestinian solidarity activists blockaded the main entrances to a factory site in Sandwich, Kent. The factory is operated by Instro Precision – a subsidiary of Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest privately owned weapons company – and produces military surveillance and targeting devices. The picketers were responding to a call...
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...
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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