Section: New Statesman (The United Kingdom)
Russia is here to stay – the UK should engage with it
Britain must follow America’s lead and attempt to defuse conflicts with Russia. Russia is here to stay. As the largest country by area, the sixth largest economy, the ninth largest population, and a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, there is simply no denying the power and influence of Europe’s eastern neighbour....
Chernobyl and the ghosts of a nuclear past
A Nobel laureate captures the beginning of the “age of disasters”. “This is not a book on Chernobyl,” writes Svetlana Alexievich, “but on the world of Chernobyl.” It is not about what happened on 26 April 1986, when a nuclear reactor exploded near the border between Ukraine and Belarus. It is about an epoch that will last, like the radioactive...
Nigel Farage tells politicians not to intervene in other countries’ EU debates – then campaigns in Holland
Hypocrite in hypocrisy shock. Oh, Nigel. You raging hypocrite. There was a European referendum in Holland yesterday, which was quite different to ours. But the result did give the EU a bit of a bloody nose by rejecting a new treaty with Ukraine. Nigel Farage loves referendums. He has spent rather a long time campaigning to have one in the UK. And...
The Netherlands just said no to Europe. Will we?
Different countries have different politics, but the Dutch referendum may exacerbate fears about turnout and negative campaigning. We should always be wary of over-interpreting the commonalities between different countries’ politics. As the current convulsions in the US demonstrate in ghastly technicolour, every democracy has its own unique...
7 things you should know about the Panama Papers
At least 12 world leaders are implicated in offshore schemes by the biggest ever leak of financial documents 1. The leak centres on Mossack Fonseca. Mossack Fonseca is a law firm headquarted in Panama but also operating in tax havens such as Switzerland, the British Virgin Islands and the British crown dependencies: Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle...
Tristram Hunt: Leaving the EU would be a self-defeating dereliction of duty and history
Why Michael Gove, and Vote Leave, are wrong about Europe. Michael Gove’s statement in support of leaving the European Union stands out not only as an elegant piece of writing, but is also perhaps the most articulate argument offered so far by all the various ‘Vote Leave’ campaigns. In an echo of Joseph Chamberlain, he sketches out the...
“What if?” history books normally annoy me – but History’s People is an exception
Margaret MacMillan’s selection of neglected voices in History’s People reminds us how individual choices and actions come to shape our world. Counterfactual history – also known as “What if?” history – bores me. Too often, the questions asked are predictable. What if the Spanish Armada had landed successfully in England? Would modern...
Jamala, the singer using Eurovision to highlight the persecution of the Crimean Tartars
Although Eurovision song lyrics are not permitted to be political, the 2016 Ukrainian entry has found a way of bringing an historical injustice into present-day popular culture. “They come to your house / they kill you all and say / we’re not guilty.” These are the provocative lyrics to Ukraine’s Eurovision Song Contest entry “1944”...
Empire’s martyrs: the British obsession with heroic failure
The British take a perverse pleasure in glorious defeat, as Heroic Failure and the British by Stephanie Barczewski examines. In 1799 the Scottish explorer Mungo Park published Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, which described his voyage across Senegal and along the River Niger in Mali, in search of the city of Timbuktu. In 1805 he...
What the untold Soviet history of “Red Africa” reveals about the racism of modern Russia
Artists are attempting to resurrect a piece of cultural history that has been buried, but also highlight the difficulty experienced by black people in Putin’s Russia. Modern Russia has a reputation for being racist. And for good reason. The number of racist acts committed by Russian football fans doubled last season, according to...
