Labour does not lack popular policy initiatives. What it lacks is a purpose.
Syriza is the most successful product so far of the left that stayed at home.
One of the services Twitter provides for misogynists and stalkers is anonymity.
Into the doldrums of Obama’s second term, freshman Senator Tom Cotton has trotted forward as the GOP’s new mascot of ostentatious warmongering. He’s the author of the letter...
In the first half of the 19th century radical reformers argued that Britain needed three things if it was ever going to become a real democracy: secret ballots, universal suffrage and annual...
The exposure of the Western world’s surveillance networks has heightened the feeling that democratic institutions aren’t functioning as they should, that, like it or not, we are living in the twilight...
I always thought that Nemtsov would make it, that he would be shielded from the vengeance of the system in part because he was Nemtsov.
My first encounter with the dark net was in Rio de Janeiro in 2006. I was interviewing a public prosecutor about the changing nature of organised crime in Brazil. His office was in Barra, an...
What can be said about a country whose electoral options run from bad to worse, from xenophobia to all-out racism?
In 1969, three years into the Cultural Revolution, China was not only poorer than most African countries but suffering from a massive famine. Mao Zedong and his colleagues decided to import...
We have a situation in which a lecturer cannot speak her mind, universities bring in the police to deal with campus protests, and graduate students cannot write publicly about what is happening.
Laws governing how much money individuals and organisations could give to politicians were prophylactics, designed – however imperfectly – to prevent corruption by limiting how much money could change...
For the last ten years GPs have been paid, by the taxpayer, to deliver ‘general medical services’ through a scheme based partly on incentives. ‘Quality of care’ is...
Last August, speaking at an international forum on development in Tibet sponsored by the Chinese government, Neil Davidson, a Labour peer and former advocate general for Scotland, criticised...
Large categories of work, especially work that is mechanically precise and repetitive, have already been automated; technologists are working on the other categories, too.
The particular lure of selling student loan accounts is that it would allow the government to swap repayments scheduled to come in over the next 35 years for cash today.
One of the things Cameron and Obama have in common is that they both owe their rapid political ascent to a single, shortish speech. Obama gave his in 2004 at the Democratic Convention in...
Roughly every other night for the past two months, my phone has rung at around 11 p.m. Most of the time I don’t answer, as I don’t speak any of the caller’s language and he...