‘T here is no magic money tree,’ Theresa May said during the election campaign when confronted by a nurse complaining about low pay. Yet now that the Conservatives need the support...
A bout ten years ago, my great-uncle spent a month in a coma. Afterwards, the only thing he could remember was a dream – it wasn’t clear whether it had lasted the whole month or...
In recent decades, the EU has helped to ease tensions at national borders as well as serving as a safety net for devolution. Some kind of substitute – or, more likely, an array of alternatives...
O ne of the better arguments for Britain’s leaving the EU was that it might reinvigorate and liberate national politics, stifled for too long by the absence of real choice at election...
Brexit voters can’t be divided into two – Hannanites on one side and Faragists on the other. The voter who was impressed by the financial argument – Vote Leave’s extra £350...
Person after person told me that growing support for extremist factions in Gaza does not emanate from political or ideological belief – as these factions may claim – but from people’s...
I n 2014 , when migration into Europe via the Mediterranean reached unprecedented levels, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) opened a transit centre in the Saharan city of...
In its primary use, the verb ‘to starve’ is transitive: it’s something people do to one another, like torture or murder.
W hen Donald Trump nominated Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon, as secretary of state, Robert McNally found the choice unremarkable. ‘The closest thing we have to a secretary of state...
J eremy Greenstock was the UK ambassador to the United Nations during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and then the special envoy for Iraq, based in Baghdad during the occupation. Obviously...
What this general election offers in Vauxhall is a choice between voting for the party that helped the Tories introduce the austerity regime which is still blighting lives seven years on, or voting for...
I s living through a process enough to know it, if you don’t know how others experience it? Those in the middle of historical events most people only know from TV can feel they missed...
In theory, a redesigned Franco-German engine could run better, but look more closely at what the engineers have in mind, and the motor is more likely to stutter.
Labour’s problem is not that it has become too left-wing, but that Corbyn can’t express these policies in a way that appeals to a sufficiently large part of the electorate and allays their...
T alk with Brexit enthusiasts for long enough and you begin to perceive the outlines of an unusual political philosophy. It makes use of the concepts you would expect – freedom,...
The British government’s Prevent programme, clumsy and laughable on so many levels, is extraordinarily efficient on others. It divides Muslims (practising or not) from the rest of society; black...
A fter Brexit , the public face of criminal justice will look much the same as it does now. The UK has resisted many of the European Union’s moves towards harmonisation of substantive...
The place is in ruins. A mangled refinery is now a playground, municipal buildings and schools have been flattened, but the people keep moving, and the killers – insurgents, soldiers, militias,...