Politics & Economics

Hayek suspected that nothing about the vindication of neoliberalism was likely to be straightforward. Some magical thinking would be needed to leaven the mix. He wanted elites properly educated in the...

In 2019, I made several visits to Dhar al-Jebel, a Libyan detention centre better known as Zintan, after the nearest town. Around a thousand migrants, most of them Eritreans, were being held there indefinitely....

Housing injustice, unlike most of the social ills afflicting our atomised society, has the potential to unite and radicalise. Having knocked on doors for Acorn in Tottenham, I’ve seen how swiftly conversations...

Tim Lankester, Thatcher’s private secretary for economic affairs for the first two and a half years of her tenure, describes the monetarist experiment as ‘one of the most unsatisfactory episodes of...

John Pring’s account reveals something of the character of austerity: it isn’t so much that the state withdraws from an involvement in people’s lives, but that its contact with them is degraded....

The Tories, in office, prepared a trap for Labour. It had a large sign on it saying ‘It’s a Trap’ and then next to that another sign saying ‘When We Say, It’s a Trap, What We Specifically Mean...

The immediate effect of Trump’s menaces, and the visit to Nuuk in January of his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, was to highlight the paradox of Denmark defending Greenland’s freedom, when it is Denmark’s...

Where amid this turmoil does neoliberalism stand? In emergency conditions it has been forced to take measures – interventionist, statist and protectionist – that are anathema to its doctrine, yet without...

Trump’s supporters had retrenched during what they call his interregnum; now they were on stage with the national security adviser and the White House deputy chief of staff. The Third Term Project, a...

Having ruled out any large-scale redistribution of wealth, Labour should be putting its changes to workers’ rights, including entitlement to protections from ‘day one’, an end to zero-hours contracts...

Great significance has been attributed to the government of Giorgia Meloni, who became Italy’s prime minister in 2022. For some, it signals the return of fascism in a novel form; for the majority of...

Masayoshi Son seems compulsively driven to invest larger and larger sums so he can call himself the biggest, most significant, most visionary investor in the world. ‘Bill Gates just started Microsoft...

The Holy Alliance presented itself as an intimate spiritual union between the souls and consciences of its signatories rather than a conventional treaty between sovereigns. It thereby encouraged contemporaries...

Trump has provided the CDU with perfect cover to break with the creed of the schwarze Null. Whether the fiscal unleashing comes in the waning days of Scholz’s coalition or has to wait until Friedrich...

Paul Marshall’s emergence as a media magnate has surprised many. ‘I totally get UnHerd. That’s who Paul is,’ one person I spoke to said. ‘But I can’t see the purpose of [owning] the Spectator...

Hamas had been able to take power in Gaza because Israel had failed to circumscribe Palestinian politics within the Oslo boundaries. But in the event, Hamas was useful to Israel's larger strategy of occupation.

The question Trump’s opponents want answered is whether he can get away with it. Will his coalition hold, will his policies backfire, will his party baulk, will his rivals circle, will his cheerleaders...

For several decades, hard-right views offered the moral urgency and dramatic clarity Reagan craved. He regularly warned that welfare statism would lead the US to fall gradually into communism, like ‘overripe...