Short Cuts: Voter ID

James Meek, 4 May 2023

In the absence of a plausible explanation, the list of acceptable ID seems to be a clumsy effort to favour the older, Conservative-tending voter at the expense of the younger and more Labour-inclined....

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The Big Con

Pankaj Mishra, 4 May 2023

The neglected details of Gautam Adani’s frictionless rise show how, after their calamitous romance with Russia’s oligarchy, Western politicians, journalists and bankers have facilitated the ascent...

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Diary: In Tbilisi

Andrew Cockburn, 4 May 2023

The Ukrainian authorities ‘wanted Saakashvili to be in power’, so that he would ‘start a war against Russia and join Ukraine, involving Georgia in the war’. The opposition calls this scaremongering,...

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Short Cuts: In Melilla

Ben Ehrenreich, 13 April 2023

The reason last June’s massacre at Barrio Chino caused a scandal wasn’t that so many died there, it was that Spain can’t credibly distance itself from the deaths. That isn’t a problem when the...

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Puny Rump: Sick Notes

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, 13 April 2023

Statutory Sick Pay in the UK is particularly ungenerous, replacing less than 20 per cent of average earnings; among advanced economies, only the US and South Korea offer something worse: no mandatory sick...

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Cloudy Horizon: Constitutional Business

Stephen Sedley, 13 April 2023

It would be naive to ignore the vulnerability of an organic constitution such as the UK’s to capture or erosion from within, when government contempt for both constitutional propriety and legality is...

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Why is there no ‘natural rate’ of profit, poverty or inequality beyond which we shouldn’t go? To say that economics is political isn’t to say it is conniving or ill-willed, but merely that, like...

Read more about Keynesian in a Foxhole: The Monetarist Position

In my horror and despair, in those first weeks, particularly when the systemic cruelty of the Russian military showed itself – not just towards civilians and the Ukrainian military, but towards its own...

Read more about ‘That’s my tank on fire’: Video War

But how? Capitalist Democracy

David Runciman, 30 March 2023

The problem is that democracy and capitalism don’t much like each other any more. Their underlying affinities have got lost in the miserable business of coexisting day to day. Businesspeople don’t...

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Not Much like Consent: Crisis at the Met

Daniel Trilling, 30 March 2023

Corruption is ‘endemic in policing across the world’, the 2021 report into Daniel Morgan’s murder states. It takes root, efforts are made to tackle it, then attention moves elsewhere and it takes...

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Ships are abandoned when their owners take on too much debt, or when they deliberately let the ship’s condition and licences slip, or when they fail to pay the crew’s wages. If they leave the ship,...

Read more about Agent Untraceable, Owner Not Responding: Abandoned Seafarers

Diary: Rewriting the Marcos Years

Sheila S. Coronel, 30 March 2023

Which archival sources are used and whose voices are silenced? The Marcoses have – for now – claimed the archive and seized the narrative. They tell the story of a golden age followed by a fall and...

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In Time of Schism

Fraser MacDonald, 16 March 2023

Kate Forbes’s evangelical supporters appeal to plurality of thought, to liberty of conscience, even to protected characteristics, though they are not always known for extending these considerations within...

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You didn’t have to work in the financial services industries to be a yuppie, but the most famous cultural depictions were from that sector. Even their clothes and accessories acquired a broader audience....

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Short Cuts: Libel Tourism

Peter Geoghegan, 16 March 2023

If you have enough money, even being sanctioned by the British government is no impediment to using London’s courts to silence your critics. The Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018 explicitly...

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What might it mean​ for the way we think about abortion if we take seriously the problem of what fictional narrative – novels and stories and films – says about it, or doesn’t say, what it makes...

Read more about Quickening, or How to Plot an Abortion: The Abortion Plot

Short Cuts: Israel’s Liberal Bubble

Tareq Baconi, 2 March 2023

Palestinians understand that Israel is a democracy for Jews and an apartheid regime for non-Jews. But just like the Green Line, this is a false separation, since the Jewish democratic system itself is...

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Diary: In Beirut

Charles Glass, 2 March 2023

When I returned last year, the garbage was piled so high on the pavements that pedestrians had to compete with lunatic drivers for right of way. The private electricity generators were mostly quiet –...

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