James Bloodworth is one of the few writers around who is as committed to human rights abroad as he is to economic democracy at home. In fact, he’s for both everywhere. This marks him out among a commentariat which, depending on ideology, will either neglect…
It looks as if Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is a “moderniser” after all, having apparently been influenced less by Machiavelli than by Martin Scorsese. Whatever the truth of the gruesome “bone saw” rumours, it’s a moral certainty that journalist Jamal Khashoggi was…
This article was originally published on politcs.co.uk on October 5th, 2018. According to the 1987 film The Lost Boys, a vampire may only enter your home if you invite them in. Two august institutions nearly failed that test recently, when the Guardian‘s offices in London…
In the 1962 film The Music Man, con artist Harold Hill dupes and fleeces River City, Iowa, using only his charm and wit. Jeremy Corbyn has managed to do the same to the Labour Party with neither. Corbyn’s total mastery of the party is clear…
In Vladimir Nabokov’s 1947 novel Bend Sinister, a simple-minded supporter of the fanatical Average Man party, which has just taken power, describes the corruption and hypocrisy of the old regime: “Well, firstly, we were made to pay impossible taxes; secondly, all those Parliament ministers and…
It’s easy to laugh at the pathetic cover story offered by Russian heavies Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov for why they were in Salisbury at exactly the same time a former Russian spy was being poisoned with a deadly nerve agent. In Britain, their interview…
The ongoing fracas over anti-Semitism in the Labour Party – currently swirling around its efforts to redefine the disease – continues to have a definite element of the surreal. While column inches and Twitter threads are devoted to ever-more sophisticated discussions about anti-Semitism’s Left-wing and…
The newly revamped Firing Line on PBS has in common with other TV and movie “reboots” the benefit of a familiar name and the burden of meeting expectations. Sadly, the new show, hosted by political commentator Margaret Hoover, is more hampered than helped by its…
This article was originally published on politcs.co.uk on February 14th, 2018. The main point of interest in the Telegraph‘s recent attack on philanthropist George Soros is not whether its authors are antisemitic, but what it tells us about the growth of the paranoid style in…
This article was originally published in Progress magazine on November 29th, 2017. It is a sign of our shallow times that despite the ubiquity of the word ‘populism’ over the last two years, so little attention has been paid to the movement which gave it…