Section: New Statesman (The United Kingdom)
Miss USSR UK – the beauty pageant for a country that no longer exists
Everyone looks stunning. Just don’t mention the Crimea. When I arrive at the beauty pageant “Miss USSR UK”, several women smile rehearsed smiles at me and tell me I look “amaaaaazing”. A voice coach tries to convince me that the presentation of what I say is potentially as important as the content of what I’m saying. But I...
A decades-old paper war: how the Roma are fighting bureaucracy
Romania still hasn’t come to terms with its role in the Holocaust. Less than a mile from the trendy bars of central Bucharest, Florica Stuparu is gently ushering out the four small children who have gathered around her bed. This is where the 78-year-old sits now, day in, day out, since she had a stroke. “I have nothing to give to the...
The Deep Dive podcast: Mandates and Manifestos
The New Statesman’s Deep Dive podcast. Ian Leslie and Stewart Wood return for another episode of the Deep Dive. This time they’re plunging into the murky world of election promises with Catherine Haddon, resident historian at the Institute of Government. Together they explore what an electoral mandate means, what a manifesto is for,...
John Bew: the Gibraltar row shows “the balance of power” is back in European affairs
Those troublesome 1980s have reared their head again in a diplomatic storm in a teacup over Gibraltar. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.” So said Barack Obama to Mitt Romney during the 2012 race for the US presidency when Romney suggested that Russia was America’s “number-one geopolitical foe”. Like many of...
David Blunkett compares Labour membership to failed revolution “from Ukraine to Egypt”
The Labour peer and former home secretary says new members need a “meaningful political education”, and accuses unions of neglecting their “historic balance”. There are three sorts of opposition. There’s the civil society opposition, with people campaigning in their own specific areas, people who’ve got an interest group or are...
Faith, flag and football: how the Polish game developed a white supremacist fringe
Among the colours and badges of Polish football clubs is a banner declaring, “Death to the enemies of the fatherland”. Poland’s Catholic churches rarely want for colour, but even the gaudiest frescoes and stained-glass windows struggled to compete with the sea of striped hats and scarves on show at the 14th-century Jasna Góra Monastery, as...
“calm rhythm” – a poem by Myroslav Laiuk
Translated from the Ukrainian by Alan Zhukovski moss expands and stuffs with itself the lower layers of the air silver engagement ring grows black and the subterranean brooks in the caves below run full of hoary trout one small step away from voice a soldier of an unknown army fell here to the bottom of the fog horses of an unknown coat color ran...
The world has entered a new Cold War – what went wrong?
Peter Conradi’s Who Lost Russia? How the World Entered a New Cold War traces the accumulation of distrust between the West and Russia. In March 1992 an alarmist “secret” memo written by Richard Nixon found its way on to the front page of the New York Times. “The hot-button issue of the 1950s was, ‘Who lost China?’ If Yeltsin goes...
What’s it like to be a human rights activist in post-Pussy Riot Russia?
It is five years since the feminist punk collective crashed Moscow’s Cathedral in a performance that got some of them jailed. On 21 February 2012, five brightly-dressed members of Russian feminist punk collective Pussy Riot took to the alter of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour to protest links between the Russian Orthodox...
What makes Europeans terrified
Voters have the jitters. But what keeps them up at night may be real – or fantasy. “France is scared,” Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right Front National declared this week, as she stood on the promenade in Nice where a terrorist ploughed into revellers on Bastille Day last year. A new report from Demos charts this turbulence. As the...
