Politics

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Headed for the canon: Withnail and I, at the Birmingham Rep, reviewed

From our UK edition

After nearly 40 years, Withnail has arrived on stage. Sean Foley directs Bruce Robinson’s adaptation, which starts with a live rock-band thumping out a few 1960s hits. The musicians take cameo roles as maids and coppers. The show needs a larger cast especially for the tea-room scene – ‘We want the finest wines available to humanity’ – which calls for a big crowd of crumbling old crocks. Never mind. The production would have thrilled diehard fans. As for newcomers, they would probably have been better to start with the film. This production of Withnail would have thrilled diehard fans – newcomers less so Robert Sheehan delivers a glitzy, karaoke version of Withnail which is all surface and very little inner torment.

Katy Balls

Inside Labour’s fight with the unions

From our UK edition

By the end of the year, Britain may be one of the few countries in the democratic world where the right is losing. In America, Donald Trump is the favourite to win. Ahead of next month’s European Parliament elections, momentum is with Germany’s AfD, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and Austria’s Freedom party. Migration is the most pertinent issue pushing Europe rightwards, but many voters are also turning to insurgent right-wing parties as a rebellion against the cost of net-zero policies. Labour sees an electoral benefit in sticking to its green energy plans to stop voters defecting to the Greens In the UK, the future of green scepticism looks somewhat different.

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

The cunning of the Democrats’ lawfare

It saddens me to admit it, but the evidence is too overwhelming to dismiss: Democrats are significantly more cunning than Republicans. I say “Democrats,” but that is an imprecise, even a misleading, designation. Party affiliation is not now, if it ever was, a really accurate predictor of ideological coloration. What I mean are those people, most of whom happen to belong to the Democratic Party, who have been bitten by the bug of extremism, who are fired by revolutionary fervor, who regard every opponent, every contrary opinion, as a “by-any-means-necessary” fire alarm. It is an attitude that has stirred their creativity, also their vindictiveness. Hercules had to undertake twelve supposedly impossible labors. Donald Trump is fast catching up.

Democrats

Tuesday

Philip Hensher

Exploring the glorious literary heritage of Bengal

From our UK edition

The first time I went to India, nearly 30 years ago, I was sent as a young novelist by the British Council. Unusually, my first encounter with the country was Kolkata, a city I loved instantly. At the first event, after I had finished reading, an audience member gently asked if I liked Indian novels. I thought I was prepared, and mentioned R.K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai and Vikram Seth. The questioner smiled. ‘Those are all writers in English,’ he said. ‘What about writers in Indian languages?’ I was stumped. Perhaps many people of generous reading habits have the same block without knowing it.

Tuesday

Michael Arditti

A timely morality tale: The Spoiled Heart, by Sunjeev Sahota, reviewed

From our UK edition

Who would have thought that the battle between champions of old-school socialism and contemporary identity politics for the post of General Secretary of Unify, a fictitious British trade union, would make for such riveting reading? Nayan Olak and Megha Sharma have little in common save their skin colour. He is the son of corner shopkeepers, who started work on the factory floor at 16 and is now the union’s Head of Workplace Disciplinary Actions. She is the daughter of a non-dom property magnate and recently appointed Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.  Their political priorities are neatly encapsulated in their job titles.

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

The rise of reverse gaslighting

We live now in an age of reverse gaslighting. Ordinary gaslighting — the term was popularized by the 1944 movie Gaslight — describes a process of psychological manipulation whose goal is to make ordinary people question their sanity. Reverse gaslighting, by contrast, aims to convince us that insane realities are perfectly normal. Imagine: practically the entire population quarantines itself because a couple of government bureaucrats tell them to. Everyone starts wearing little paper masks as patents of their capitulation and, secondarily, as badges of their virtue.

gaslighting
Israel
Daniel McCarthy

Israel and the making of nations

A little more than five years ago the Israeli intellectual Yoram Hazony published The Virtue of Nationalism. Its final chapter was particularly poignant. After World War Two and the Holocaust, Hazony explained, two opposing views arose as to how such evils could be prevented from happening again. One side pointed toward the creation of the European Union and held that nationalism must be repudiated and condemned. The other endorsed the creation of Israel as a nation-state for the Jewish people, with a nationalism of its own. Israel is a test case for the survival of nationalism everywhere. That may sound like an exaggeration — surely nationalism has demonstrated ample staying power.

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Scrawled outpourings of love and defiance

From our UK edition

To come across dates and names carved into a choirstall or ancient tree is to experience a momentary frisson, a startled connection with the past. Yet this practice of making ‘unauthorised’ personal graphic statements in public spaces is often thought of as antisocial, something to be erased immediately. Unless of course they are by Banksy, whose spray-painted outpourings cost local councils a great deal to clean off before they came to be regarded as valid documents, articulating the thoughts and imaginings of the disaffected. In her ingenious new book Writing on the Wall, the art historian Madeleine Pelling has chosen to use these often transitory pieces of historical evidence as a way of illustrating the huge cultural changes that took place in the 18th century.

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week: hate crimes, surprise knighthoods and flaming rickshaws

From our UK edition

Home The Hate Crime and Public Order Act came into effect in Scotland, making it a crime to communicate or behave in a manner ‘that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive’, with the intention of stirring up hatred based on age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex. The Scottish government offered online training to 500 Police Scotland ‘Hate Crime Champions’. The author J.K. Rowling named ten people who call themselves women that she called men. Police Scotland said complaints had been received about her, but that but no action would be taken. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said: ‘We should not be criminalising people saying common sense things about biological sex.

James Heale

Could Sadiq Khan lose London?

From our UK edition

With Labour 20 points ahead in the national polls, a lot of Tories have already written off next month’s mayoral contest in the capital. London, they maintain, is a Labour city that occasionally votes Conservative. But supporters of Sadiq Khan and his Tory challenger Susan Hall agree: it’s going to be closer than many think. The mayor’s image is as likely to be found on Conservativeleaflets as on Labour ones Three factors are held by both camps to be at play. The first is the incumbency factor versus ‘time for a change’. Khan’s re-election team has consulted other campaigns which won three in a row; all agreed this was the hardest contest to win. A hat-trick eluded Ken Livingstone, who lost in 2008 despite nearly a decade of prosperity for the city.

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

In defence of forgiveness

From our UK edition

It is often the small constants in the culture that give the game away. Much of the news today is not about anything significant, but rather a sort of lower gossip. Every day, some new scandal bubbles along. Someone is found to have said something once, often a long time ago. The culprit is shamed and condemned. Take the case of Frank Hester, a donor who has given an estimated £10 million to the Conservative party. Few had heard of him until recently. Then it was reported that at a meeting at his company headquarters in 2019, Hester said that Diane Abbott MP made him ‘just want to hate all black women because she’s there, and I don’t hate all black women at all, but I think she should be shot’. Cack-handed, and unfunny, this comment was an easy one to condemn.

Thursday

Sam Kriss

How depressing when people over-identify with their ethnicity

From our UK edition

I am a Jew. I live in a council estate in London where considerably more than half of my neighbours are Muslims. These people aren’t my friends, but we get along fine: I pick up their parcels; we coordinate complaints to the council about the strange, blue-tinged fluid that sometimes drips from everyone’s ceilings, as if someone in the penthouse had decided to fill their flat with jelly. Elsewhere, our distant cousins are doing terrible things to each other. It’s increasingly hard to imagine a world in which these distant cousins can live together, intermingled but mostly minding their own business – but that’s exactly what we do every day in London. Over the past six months I’ve started feeling extremely grateful for that.

The Spectator

What does Rachel Reeves stand for?

From our UK edition

As the world discovered when she was caught lifting other people’s work for her book on women in economics, Rachel Reeves is not the most original of thinkers. But she has political talents. She has cultivated her image as an uninspiring technocrat in order to present herself as someone who will not spring surprises or take risks as chancellor. She thinks the state is inefficient and taxes are too high. She believes in ‘securonomics’, which sounds like a pleasing contrast to years of Tory policies. It is easy to preach fiscal discipline, but in office Labour would find it very difficult to contain spending Polls show that voters now think Labour are more likely to lower taxes than the Conservatives, so Reeves has already achieved something significant.

Sunday

Ben Domenech

Where is the clarity in modern center-right foreign policy?

When Ohio senator J.D. Vance arrived at the Munich Security Conference in February, he had a clear message meant for the world: the Republican Party was no longer the party of Ronald Reagan. Standing outside the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, he informed reporters that he did not believe American support for combat against authoritarian regimes should extend to Ukraine — and that he would continue to oppose efforts to “increase the supply of weapons in Ukraine because we’ve already expended so many of our munitions and resources” to achieve a victory that he does not foresee. Vance’s bootstrap story is well-known — he’s a Marine veteran turned Yale Law grad turned venture capitalist made prominent by his bestselling Appalachia memoir Hillbilly Elegy.

foreign policy

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Putin may seem confident – but Russia’s future is bleak

From our UK edition

How old will you be when Vladimir Putin’s next presidential term ends in 2030? Which of today’s world leaders will still be in office? By that time Putin will have been in power for 29 years, and just under half the population of the Earth at that time will have been born during his reign. On current form, Putin is set to see in at least two more US presidents – or more, if he chooses to stay in power until 2036. Putin has made a fetish of defending a Russian national sovereignty that no one had attempted to destroy When Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022 many dared to hope that defeat on the battlefield would force Russians to finally accept that they are no longer a great global superpower and confront their imperialist assumptions.

Thursday

Toby Young

Joe Biden’s dog is out of control

From our UK edition

I was shocked to read about the behaviour of Joe Biden’s dog, Commander. According to a CNN report based on freedom of information requests, he bit US Secret Service agents on 24 separate occasions between October 2022 and July 2023. There were also numerous other incidents involving the White House staff. These were not playful nips, either. The agents reported being bitten on the wrist, forearm, elbow, waist, chest, thigh and shoulder, with at least two bites requiring stitches. On one occasion, an agent was bitten so badly that tours of the White House had to be suspended for 20 minutes while a janitor mopped up the blood.

Anshel Pfeffer

Permanent stalemate in Gaza suits Netanyahu

From our UK edition

Jerusalem After midnight on Thursday is dead-time for the Israeli media. The weekend editions have gone to print (newspapers don’t come out on Shabbat) and the Friday night TV news shows have been pre-recorded. The country’s journalists are yearning for respite from a long week covering the war. Benjamin Netanyahu chose that black hole of news, 2 a.m. last Friday, to leak his ‘Day after Hamas’ plan for post-war Gaza. There was no speech. No briefings. Just a page and a bit, double-spaced, presented to his cabinet for discussion. The plan has not been designed to end the war in Gaza. It is about Netanyahu’s own political survival But the plan is not a plan.

Katy Balls

The Trumpification of the Tory party

From our UK edition

Anthony Scaramucci, Donald Trump’s former director of communications, has a phrase that sums up his old boss’s effect on political debate: ‘the universe bends towards him’. In the US, discussion about this year’s election is all about Trump. But he is exerting the same gravitational pull in Britain, both on the Tories as they face opposition, and Labour as it mulls the likely dilemmas of government. Trump is resentful of those who have been ‘nasty’ about him: this includes nearly everyone in the Labour party Theresa May offers a case study in how not to deal with Trump. She hoped to befriend him and acquire some kind of post-Brexit trade deal.

Thursday

Katy Balls

Could Britain have a farmers’ revolt?

From our UK edition

Nine years ago, when Rishi Sunak was campaigning to be the Conservative candidate for Richmond in Yorkshire, he knew his background wouldn’t work in his favour. Here was a millionaire City slicker – fresh from a spell in Silicon Valley – standing in a rural safe seat against local rivals. William Hague, who was retiring from the seat, told him he’d need to do a crash course in country living. Sunak replied that he’d milk some cows right away. Now, the Prime Minister takes great pride in his familiarity with rural issues. He cites hill farming as a passion and boasts to friends of his ‘deep knowledge of sheep’. The Prime Minister cites hill farming as a passion and boasts of his ‘deep knowledge of sheep’ The hope in No.

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

The course of the American empire

In the 1830s, the English-born American artist Thomas Cole painted an ambitious sequence of five large rectangular canvases delineating “The Course of Empire.” He began with “The Savage State,” which depicts the rude life of humans before the advent of letters, domestication and permanent architecture. “The Arcadian or Pastoral State” is marked by harmony and some early accoutrements of civilization. “The Consummation of Empire,” at fifty-one inches by seventy-six inches, is a third larger than its fellows. Here we see a sun-drenched landscape transformed by a panoply of classical architecture counterpointed by bustling commerce and a triumphal, if overripe, stateliness. Next comes “Destruction.

empire