Ed West writes the Wrong Side of History substack
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So Austria has a new leader. The radical leftist Alexander Van der Bellen, a former Green party leader running as an independent, has just edged out radical right-wing politician Norbert Hofer in one of the closest elections in European history. After postal votes were counted, Van der Bellen had 50.2 per cent and Hofer 49.8 per cent
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I hate Facebook, mostly because it’s full of other people’s happiness. I appreciate this makes me a terrible person, but it’s a bit like being at the wedding of a contemporary whose life has panned out perfectly, leaving you to reflect on your own inadequacies and failures. I know half the happy people on Facebook
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Is Donald Trump the Leicester City of US politics, the 5,000/1 outsider who took everyone by surprise? That was Piers Morgan’s opening question to the likely Republican presidential candidate on ITV last night. The obvious response might be that the Donald is more like Chelsea – loads of money, everyone sorts of hates them, some
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The city of Palmyra, recently liberated from Isis, has seen a return to civilisation and culture with a performance by a Russian orchestra. The concert, conducted by a ‘close associate’ of Vladimir Putin, was of course a propaganda exercise – but what a propaganda exercise! It fills me with genuine sadness that no western power would
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There have been many hyperbolic headlines about Donald Trump these last few days and weeks, so I’d like to add my own – can America survive the Donald as president? I don’t mean that, as chief executive, he’s going to become a dictator and begin world war three, although as this week’s leader points out,
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It’s safe to say that last week was a good one for the Remain camp, thanks in large part to the endorsement from President Barack Obama. Despite what people in online conservative echo chambers may believe, Obama remains fairly popular in Britain and his opposition to Brexit may well count for something. His tactic was to play on
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Quietly, patiently, tentatively, scientists are revolutionising the way we see human nature, a breakthrough that may be as earth-shattering as Darwin’s discovery 150 years ago. Or to put it this way, scientists went looking for genetic influences on human behaviour – and what happened next will blow your mind. Last month psychologist Oliver James published
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The flags are at half-mast in Westminster in a show of solidarity with Brussels, one of those ceremonies Europe seems to be getting used to. We’re long used to the statements of shock by politicians (why the shock?) as well as the platitudes about this having nothing to do with any particular religion. After that
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On the radio this morning the subject of high-rise housing was being discussed, the hook being the new film adaptation of JG Ballard’s High-Rise. Tower blocks are widely considered to be a disaster today; they took largely working-class populations out of often sub-standard (but potentially very nice) terraced houses into technically better housing that was
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Germany is on its feet again; the country’s answer to Ukip, Alternative Für Deutschland, made huge gains at the polls, winning a presence in three state assemblies. The shadow of Auschwitz looms over all European politics on the subject of immigration and race, but obviously more so in Germany, and many people are worried. Their
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I don’t know whether men blessed with enormous manhoods are more likely to make effective leaders; social scientists probably lack the necessary data to draw any correlations between length and girth, and things like GDP per capita or the underlying rate of inflation. A few newspaper articles recently suggested that Hitler had a micropenis, but
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How come so few big business leaders signed up to David Cameron’s letter in favour of remain? As the Daily Mail reported this morning: High street shops including Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Next and banks such as Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland did not put their names to the letter published today. It had been suggested
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Steven Pinker famously observed in The Blank Slate that ‘Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which all loose ends are tied and everyone lives happily ever after. Yet when it comes to the science of human beings, this same audience says: Give us schmaltz.’ The same is true of the politics
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I love Twitter. Just like the historian Dan Snow, I find the social media site to be an overwhelmingly positive experience, and a great place to make friends and acquaintances and share ideas. Sure, most of the friends I’ve made are as politically insane as I am, but that’s the inevitable result of any service
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For those people already bored with the interminable European question, Radio 4 might get unbearable over the next few months. Yesterday morning the subject was being discussed, in the context of David Cameron’s ‘deal’, and someone from Brussels was explaining that ‘more Europe’ was needed to solve the migrant/refugee crisis. She never got to explain
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If I was in charge of the Home Office I’d employ someone whose sole area of expertise was Hitler’s Germany and whose only job was to keep an eye out for any vague echoes of Nazism, however fatuous, in the working practices of the government or its contractors. This would have avoided Monday’s controversy over asylum
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While watching MPs in the House of Commons debate banning a politician they find disagreeable, my first thought was to wonder how this chamber once ruled one-quarter of the globe. If Trump becomes president we could not ban him from visiting; if he doesn’t, he doesn’t matter anyway. Either way, having controversial or even obnoxious
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Ross Douthat’s 10 points about immigration is recommended reading for anyone sitting on the fence or who tends towards the open border position; even if you disagree, you’ll at least have an idea of what the opposition believe. Personally I agree with it all anyway and my opinions on the subject are as frozen in aspic
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One of the things that repeatedly comes up with David Bowie fans talking about their hero is how much he meant to people living in small towns or suburbs. For adolescents who felt confined by stuffy suburban mores and maybe felt themselves a bit different, Bowie must have felt like a lifeline. Personally I grew
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I consider myself to be bad at making predictions, but one of the obvious things about the migrant crisis last year was that public sympathy for the Syrians, spurned in particular by the image of the drowned 3-year-old boy Aylan Kurdi, would soon evaporate. A large number of men from war zones moving into an
