Who holds the welding rod?

James Meek: Our Turbine Futures, 15 July 2021

... on the Kintyre peninsula in Scotland, made towers for Hornsea One. But it shut down in 2019 after its owners said they couldn’t turn a profit. In a small town with diminishing opportunities, a hundred people lost their jobs. It’s a familiar story: small British firm loses out to cheaper products made by low-paid workers overseas. Then again it ...

In the Shallow End

Conor Gearty, 27 January 2022

... Robert​ Reed became president of the United Kingdom Supreme Court on 13 January 2020, succeeding Lady Hale. By the end of 2021, the Supreme Court had produced 111 judgments since his appointment, 53 in 2020 and 58 in 2021, with Lord Reed himself sitting in 56 of these cases. These decisions give us an opportunity to assess how his Supreme Court is performing in the current malign political atmosphere ...

In Clover

Laleh Khalili: What does McKinsey do?, 15 December 2022

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm 
by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe.
Bodley Head, 354 pp., £20, October 2022, 978 1 84792 625 8
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... mismanaged and looted by Zupta front organisations. The airline declared bankruptcy in 2019.Strategic consultants at McKinsey & Company were also implicated in the undermining of South African Airways. Among the charges levelled by the Zondo report is ‘the use of external service providers when there were already ably qualified and skilled staff ...

Saintly Outliers

Vadim Nikitin: Browder’s Fraud Story, 5 October 2023

Freezing Order: A True Story of Russian Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath 
by Bill Browder.
Simon and Schuster, 328 pp., £9.99, February, 978 1 3985 0610 7
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... by Russian human rights activists who investigated the circumstances of Sergei’s murder’.In 2019, Der Spiegel published an article by Benjamin Bidder, its former Moscow correspondent, headlined ‘The Case of Magnitsky: Questions Cloud Story behind US Sanctions’. ‘Ten years after his death,’ Bidder writes, ‘inconsistencies in Magnitsky’s story ...

Fever Dream

William Davies: Fourteen Years Later, 4 July 2024

... and declining life expectancy in the most deprived parts of the United Kingdom. Between 2012 and 2019, austerity was responsible for an estimated 335,000 excess deaths. The rate of prescription of antidepressants in England has doubled since 2011: nearly 20 per cent of adults now take them. The average height of children who grew up under austerity fell ...

Unfair Judgments

Ed Kiely: Lethal Cuts at the DWP, 17 April 2025

The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence 
by John Pring.
Pluto, 292 pp., £16.99, August 2024, 978 0 7453 4989 3
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... incapacitated from any form of work?’ Tony Blair demanded. The green paper published in January 2006 decried the ‘perverse incentives’ – claimants got more cash the longer they stayed on Incapacity Benefit – that ‘trap people into a lifetime of dependency’. It proposed that Incapacity Benefit should be replaced by a new Employment and ...

Bloody Furious

William Davies: ‘Generation Left’, 20 February 2020

Generation Left 
by Keir Milburn.
Polity, 140 pp., £9.99, May 2019, 978 1 5095 3224 7
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... When​ Britain left the EU on 31 January, led by a prime minister commanding a fresh eighty-seat majority in the House of Commons, a line (of sorts) was drawn under the most turbulent period in the country’s recent political history. The past four years have witnessed one historic referendum, two general elections, two major upsets at the ballot box, three prime ministers, the birth of the Brexit Party and multiple anti-Brexit groups, a Supreme Court judgment that the prime minister had behaved unlawfully, and much else along the way ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: On failing to impress the queen, 5 January 2023

... 5 January 2022. Sent a brochure for Venice, as we regularly are, in which the Orient Express figures prominently, emphasising the luxury side of the journey (and its huge cost). What it isn’t any more is an adventure. Venice by train used to feel like Life, crossing the Channel and boarding the Paris train at Boulogne, getting a seat in the dining car before going round Paris on the ceinture and finding one’s sleeping car ...

Yanqui Imperialismo

Lucy Delap: Compañeras, 1 July 2021

Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women’s Rights after the First World War 
by Mona Siegel.
Columbia, 321 pp., £30, January 2020, 978 0 231 19510 2
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Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement 
by Katherine Marino.
North Carolina, 339 pp., £25.95, August 2020, 978 1 4696 6152 0
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... On​ 21 January 2017, five million people gathered in more than six hundred locations around the world to demand an end to impunity for harassers and abusers of women. The Women’s March was a response to Donald Trump’s comment about grabbing women ‘by the pussy’, but the protests weren’t confined by their Trumpian origins ...

Diary

Maaza Mengiste: Ethiopia’s Long War, 4 February 2021

... of Ethiopia’s opening up politically as America descended into Trumpism wasn’t lost on me.In 2019, Abiy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the twenty-year conflict with Eritrea; within a year, he was in the middle of a new clash with the TPLF, a struggle between the former political power and its successor. After gaining office, Abiy dissolved ...

Short Cuts

Tony Wood: Javier Milei’s Agenda, 14 December 2023

... the integrity of the coming vote, no doubt hoping to spark protests à la Bolsonaro or 6 January if the count was close. But on the day, they pronounced themselves fully satisfied – their confidence as good an indication of the outcome as any exit poll. Massa saw the writing on the wall early, conceding before the results were even announced.One ...

Burning Questions

Fraser MacDonald: Home Fires, 5 January 2023

... log tongs and a Stihl chainsaw (apparently I use the same axe as Lukashenko, a Fiskars X25). Last January, my reserves were replenished by Storm Malik, which brought low my neighbour’s forty-foot Leylandii. I missed the crash but the aftermath was a joy. Aside from the additional daylight, a little negotiation afforded me the trunks and the chance to build ...

Knives in Candlelight

Adam Thirlwell: ‘Our Share of Night’, 16 March 2023

Our Share of Night 
by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell.
Granta, 725 pp., £18.99, October 2022, 978 1 78378 673 2
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... the police or the army, who kept a brutal watch over the highways.’ The opening is subtitled ‘January 1981’, somewhere towards the end of Argentina’s Dirty War, so it’s reasonable to assume that the dangers hinted at are crimes of dictatorship, the same crimes that have been censored out of the newspaper Juan picks up that morning in a breakfast ...

‘Rip their skin off’

Alexander Clapp: Montenegro’s Pivot, 25 April 2024

... implosion to Milošević, whose days in power were numbered.When I met Đukanović in Podgorica in January, he said that he had no option but to turn on the man who had put him in power: ‘Milošević considered us something that rightfully belonged to him.’ Đukanović now operates out of the former Yugoslav Republic Institute for Urban Planning and ...

Prejudice Rules

LRB Contributors: After Roe v. Wade, 21 July 2022

... are forced to travel to England – as many still do from Northern Ireland where, despite the 2019 decriminalisation, provision of services has been repeatedly blocked by the health minister, Robin Swann. As in the US, there are long-standing efforts to erode the legal protections that exist for abortion in Britain. The Tory MPs Nadine Dorries, Jeremy ...