The commemoration of martyrs is an enduring British pastime. This week a memorial statue of Princess Diana will be unveiled outside Kensington Palace, presumably because the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain in Hyde Park was too cryptic. Also this week, the country marked the five-year anniversary…
Picking at the carcass of the local elections, one faction in British politics is on hand to guide the way for the Labour Party. As the results trickled in, with news Labour had lost Hartlepool for the first time since the seat was created in…
Watching Boris Johnson’s temper tantrum at this week’s PMQs, I was struck by the thought that I’d seen this before. In a video clip from November 2014, the then Mayor of London responds to some mild heckling from Andrew Dinsmore, a Labour member of the…
First published on Medium on July 9th, 2020 For those who found the slogans “Take Back Control”, “Get Brexit Done”, and “Stay at Home” too challenging, this government has just the thing. A triumph of brutality, the Prime Minister’s recently unveiled slogan “BUILD, BUILD, BUILD”…
These columns were published on Lit during 2020. Labour & Tory Political Ill-health Left Us At COVID’s Mercy – November 20th, 2020 Trump’s Bizarre Convention Is The Natural End-Point Of Tory Culture Wars – August 31st, 2020 Conspiracy Corbyn Is Still Wasting Labour’s Time. When…
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…
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 on politics.co.uk on November 20th, 2017. When Alex Salmond was interviewed about his new show on RT UK by Channel 4 News anchor Jon Snow last week, he accidentally flagged up a sinister reality about his latest venture. “It’s edited…
This article was originally published in Open Democracy on November 11th, 2017 (Remembrance Sunday). For the German painter Otto Dix, the First World War really was “all over by Christmas” – only it was Christmas 1918, after he had spent four years on the front…
Review of Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle, originally published in Medium on October 19th, 2017. Is there something about the internet which brings out the worst in people? It’s a question one has reason to consider every day. But a new book by Angela…