‘I admired the force of his writing, even when I often didn’t support what he wrote, and he was always warm when we met.’ So wrote John Simpson, the veteran BBC foreign affairs correspondent, on news of the death of the campaigning journalist John Pilger on 30 December at the age of 84. Those who […]
Jeremy Corbyn was a disastrous Labour leader and one reason was his inability to hide his true beliefs. Asked on Times Radio yesterday by John Pienaar whether he admired the Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, Corbyn refrained from giving the obvious answer. Instead, he proffered the non sequitur that he had ‘never met him’. To the […]
Vladimir Putin’s regime invaded Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, and has illegally annexed Crimea. It has in addition launched cyberattacks against both these states and against Estonia, shot a civilian airliner out of the sky, and conducted a brutal war through proxy forces in the territory of Donbas. It has now amassed 100,000 […]
Among the trivia of modern politics is that, since its recreation in 1955, the constituency of Leeds East has had only three MPs, all Labour. I find it a pleasing antisymmetry that the first was Denis Healey, who possessed one of the most formidable intellects in British public life, whereas the seat is currently held […]
In the late 2000s, Tony Blair’s name was being touted as a potential president of the European Council. It never happened but I made a short film for Andrew Neil’s late-night BBC politics programme arguing that it would be a good thing if it did, and that the European cause and Britain’s own interests would […]
Back in 1984, Labour had barely started to recover from a devastating general election defeat the previous year. The party presented to the electorate an ugly face of extremism and intolerance. And it had one more potential public relations disaster that year when the national student Labour conference, held at Hull University, was abandoned after […]
“Labour’s support for the UK’s nuclear deterrent is non-negotiable. The matter is settled.” These were the words of John Healey, Labour’s shadow defence secretary, in a speech to the Royal United Services Institute in February. He also said that Labour’s commitment to Nato (which as a backbencher in 2012 Jeremy Corbyn had argued should be […]
As Labour’s national executive committee met yesterday, a motley crew of discontents paraded outside. They included Piers Corbyn, the prominent conspiracy theorist and Covid denialist, and a handful of people who either have already been expelled from the party or sympathise with far-left organisations that the NEC has now proscribed. Pleasingly, the protesters vigorously fell […]
The BBC went through immense soul-searching 12 years ago when it invited Nick Griffin, then leader of the British National Party and an MEP, to appear on Question Time. I think its decision was defensible and the programme turned out to be a disaster for Griffin, who was attacked afterwards even by his own party […]
I wrote this piece in March 2020, to draw attention to the issue of online harassment. The subject of the article, David Lindsay, had just been convicted at Durham Crown Court of malicious communication and perverting the course of justice. As described in the article, he had sent an anonymous death threat to 57 Labour […]
Boardroom pay stokes passions. Having lost the 2017 election by less than pundits (including me) had predicted, Jeremy Corbyn felt emboldened to attack a “broken economic system” and call for an end to “greed-is-good” capitalism. Though the market economy is in fact resilient rather than broken, its defenders are forever being accused of advocating avarice. […]
There is a strong intuitive appeal to calls to “Buy British”. What patriot could possibly demur? And as the Government urges that all government buildings fly the Union Jack and retains strong support in newly won northern constituencies, you can understand why the Labour Party would wish to burnish its own credentials as the party […]
John Lewis is a fine company. The range and quality of the goods it sells have improved many homes and lives, and it is known for customer service and keen pricing. But it’s in difficulty. This week it announced its first ever annual loss and indicated that it does not expect all of its stores […]
In his classic essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ (1963), Richard Hofstadter noted: “Notions about an all-embracing conspiracy on the part of Jesuits or Freemasons, international capitalists, international Jews, or Communists are familiar phenomena in many countries throughout modern history.” He was right, of course, but there is an under-remarked common aspect of these […]
Dr Robert Rines was a self-styled American zoological expert who became briefly famous in the 1970s as a hunter for the Loch Ness monster. Underwater equipment deployed by his organisation, the Academy of Applied Sciences (despite its name, a purely private and non-academic body), took three photographs of what appeared to be a large unknown […]
The impeachment of Donald Trump is clearly merited. Short of treachery in the service of a foreign power, there can be no greater abuse of office than encouraging insurrection against constitutional government. It may seem odd, therefore, that the comparatively inconsequential issue of banning Mr Trump from social media should excite comment. Yet it ought […]
“We rely on imports too much,” tweeted Jeremy Corbyn yesterday. “Let’s grow and make more at home.” I’m making it up, of course. These were the words not of Mr Corbyn but of Sir John Redwood, twice a candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party. Yet they do bear a resemblance to the views […]
The conservative tradition in political thought has a great deal of wisdom, even if sometimes it’s well-hidden. It’s certainly hard to find any redeeming feature of comments this morning by Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, in an interview with LBC radio. Williamson declared that “we’re a much better country” than France, Belgium and the United […]
If you were running a shady cabal dedicated to controlling the world, it’s unlikely you’d advertise it on a website. But perhaps that’s just me: according to a loose assemblage of anti-vaccine campaigners and conspiracy theorists, and given a platform by Russian state propaganda, that’s exactly what’s happening. Their strain of thinking alleges that the […]
The Labour Party has committed unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination. It breached equality legislation through the acts of its agents. These acts included the use of antisemitic tropes and suggesting that complaints of anti-Semitism were smears. This is not merely my opinion. These are conclusions of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the […]
