Section: New Statesman (The United Kingdom)
Remain has lost – it’s time to fight for Return
Is it possible Nigel Farage will go down in history as the great herald of British Europeanism? After all, he did say “a 52-48 result would be unfinished business”. Let’s backtrack to that result. On the morning of 24 June last year, two things were already clear to Labour. The first was that Article 50 was now inevitable,...
Imperial melting pot: how a new book reveals the remarkable history of Istanbul
A Tale of Three Cities by Bettany Hughes shows how kings, emperors and sultans have been fighting over the city for millennia. Eight thousand years ago, the Black Sea was a lake and the land on which Istanbul now sits was not where Europe ended and Asia began. In its place was a ribbon of land, fed by springs and dotted with Neolithic settlements...
Russia’s economy won’t be fixed by the removal of sanctions
It is the country’s capacity to change from within that will determine its economic prospects. Vladimir Putin has probably never looked forward to any year as much as he is looking forward to 2017. With Donald Trump settling into the White House and Europe in political disarray, the Russian President will feel that his decision to face down...
Britain’s new foreign policy is putting the country on collision course with powerful enemies
Downing Street is betting a great deal on being able to win over Donald Trump. One of the more fact-retardant memes in Westminster is that Theresa May is cautious or indecisive. That George Osborne and Michael Gove are not in the Cabinet but are part-timing at BlackRock and the Times respectively ought to be all the evidence you need of that....
Theresa May’s Philadelphia speech sets British foreign policy in new directions
May’s speech has big repercussions for British foreign policy, and not just towards the United States. Theresa May gave a remarkable speech last night that was far more complex and nuanced than the pre-briefed extracts suggest. It also contained a few major shifts in British foreign policy that have not been fully discussed, some of which...
Theresa May’s speech to Congressional Republicans
This is the full text of the speech delivered by British Prime Minister Theresa May to the Republican Party ‘Congress of Tomorrow’ conference in Philadelphia on January 26, 2017 There’s an interesting balancing act in this speech, so I’ve uploaded it here in case it should be 404’d and for ease of reference later....
How board games became a billion-dollar business
A new generation of tabletop games escaped the family table – and fuelled a global industry. In Birmingham not long ago, I watched a political catastrophe take place. A cabal of academics was clamouring for a liberal manifesto and an anti-capitalist government agenda. The working classes were demanding authoritarian rule with fewer socialist...
“By now, there was no way back for me”: the strange story of Bogdan Stashinsky
Serhii Plokhy’s The Man with the Poison Gun is a gripping, remarkable Cold War spy story. On the morning of 12 August 1961, a few hours before the supreme leader of East Germany, Walter Ulbricht, announced the sealing of the border between East and West Berlin, a funeral took place for a four-month-old boy at the Rohrbeck Evangelical...
Leader: Trump and an age of disorder
Mr Trump’s disregard for domestic and international norms represents an unprecedented challenge to established institutions. The US presidency has not always been held by men of distinction and honour, but Donald Trump is by some distance its least qualified occupant. The leader of the world’s sole superpower has no record of...
Is Russia hacking democracy?
As Putin’s relationship with the rest of the world grows ever more significant, what destabilising powers does his regime really have? Whether the bombing of Aleppo, the hacking of Democratic Party’s email servers or the threat of incursion in the Baltic states, Vladimir Putin is readily framed as the West’s public enemy number...
