On 3 April we mark 1,500 days since Russia invaded Ukraine; on 11 June, the conflict will have lasted longer than the first world war. At that point in 1918, the German army was in complete collapse amid the success of the final Allied offensive, as the Kaiser’s disillusioned troops were forced back through the
You might describe it as the Polanski paradox. The party which calls itself Green, which has concern for the environment as its raison d’être, has never been more popular. Four Green MPs returned at the last general election. Victory in the recent Gorton and Denton by-election. Local election gains in May predicted to be sweeping.
Donald Trump may be the volatile leader of an unstable coalition. America’s numerous interventions in the Middle East may have been marked by chaos, inconstancy and the erosion of western prestige. Nato, and even more so the European Union, may be militarily anaemic and economically sclerotic. And the war in Iran may well have intensified
George III has not been well remembered on either side of the Atlantic. Despite reigning for almost 60 years, in Britain he is known, if at all, for losing the Thirteen Colonies and his madness in his later life. But in America, he is the villain of the national story; in Thomas Jefferson’s phrasing, the
Economic forecasting was created, J.K. Galbraith said, to make astrology look respectable. It is not difficult to imagine what the great Keynesian economist would have thought of Rachel Reeves’s Spring Statement this week. It was pure -crystal balls. The statement was redundant on delivery – redundancy being one of the few areas of growth in
When self-styled ‘Money Saving Expert’ Martin Lewis gate-crashed Kemi Badenoch’s Good Morning Britain interview to reprimand the Conservative leader over her plans to cut the interest on student loans, he failed to mention that she was addressing a crisis for which he carries a little of the blame. For years, Lewis has encouraged prospective students
‘Shape without form, shade without colour. Paralysed force, gesture without motion.’ T.S Eliot’s lines from ‘The Hollow Men’ sum up in 11 words the emptiness of Sir Keir Starmer’s administration. Nowhere is the shade darker and the force more paralysed than in our government’s defence policy. At the Munich Security Conference last weekend, the Prime
Wes Streeting is known to be a Spectator reader. Pinned on the Health Secretary’s office wall, as he revealed in an interview last Easter, is a leading article of ours asking whether he was ‘the Hamlet of the Health Service’. Streeting was ‘so riled’ by our suggestion of inactivity that he put it up to
Ask ChatGPT to write a Spectator leader about the risks of AI and it begins like this: ‘There are two kinds of people talking about artificial intelligence today. One group is exhilarated, convinced that AI will usher in a new era of abundance, productivity and human flourishing. The other is distinctly alarmed, warning of mass
It’s been almost a full decade since Britain voted to leave the European Union. Inside Labour, whatever words are muttered about accepting the referendum’s result, the consensus remains that Brexit was a mistake. Ministers compete to see who can flirt most openly with re-entry, despite their party manifesto pledges not to rejoin the single market
In the summer of 1643, as the dispute between Charles I and parliament raged on, Sir William Waller wrote to his friend Ralph Hopton to lament with ‘what a perfect hatred’ he detested ‘this war without an enemy’. The hardening of hearts between the Conservatives and Reform UK resembles a similarly self-defeating civil war –
Are Jews safe in Britain? To even have to ask the question is extraordinary. But a recent survey has found that half of British Jews feel they do not have a long-term future in the UK and 61 per cent have considered leaving. Those figures are shocking, but not surprising. Since 7 October 2023, anti-Semitism
Donald Trump’s rendition of Nicolas Maduro was a brilliantly executed coup. It was also an exhibition of America’s hard power, power that has underpinned the rules-based international order that protected America’s allies for decades. Now those allies fear that the rules-based order is as much a smoking ruin as Maduro’s Caracas compound. European hysteria is,
In 1956, Malta held a referendum on joining the United Kingdom. Since the islands were economically reliant on the Royal Navy, it was unsurprising that three-quarters of those voting believed their future lay in integrating with their colonial masters. But after a lukewarm response from the British government, the referendum result was never implemented and
A meeting planned in secret. A message deemed subversive. The authorities both antagonised and confused. The gatherings of the early Church in the time of the Roman Empire? Or Tommy Robinson’s proposed carol concert at an as yet undisclosed London location, proclaimed as the event to put ‘Christ back into Christmas’? To draw even the
Last week, our political editor, Tim Shipman, revealed a recent meeting between Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, the Chief of the Defence Staff, and the three heads of the services to discuss the defence investment plan. This plan governs the day-to-day armed forces’ budgets and follows the recent Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR),
Why are jury trials so precious? According to one prominent alumnus of Harvard Law School, who was writing in protest at proposals to drop them during the Covid pandemic, they are ‘a fundamental part of our democratic settlement’. In a separate report, the author noted that, by deliberating ‘through open discussion’, juries deter and expose
Follow the Science. The Science is settled. Two phrases which invoke the power of open inquiry to close down open inquiry. Science is not a body of unalterable doctrine, a chapter of revealed truths. Science is a method. It is a means of arriving at the best possible explanation of phenomena through thesis, testing, observation
Labour: the clue should be in the name. In March, Keir Starmer branded Labour the ‘party of work’. If ‘you want to work’, he declared, ‘the government should support you, not stop you’. Even as his premiership staggers from crisis to crisis, that mission remains. If Labour doesn’t stand for ‘working people’ – however nebulously
The New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was that rare figure in politics – a progressive who followed the facts. The contrast between his grown-up moral clarity and the adolescent ideological posturing of New York City’s latest Democrat darling, Zohran Mamdani, could not be starker. Moynihan was a welfare reformer who knew that incentivising work,
