The Labour Party has a problem of trust with British Jews, and the fault lies entirely with the party. Yesterday, in adopting a new code of conduct on antisemitism, it rejected an established working definition of the term that is accepted by governments around the world and by most Jews. Under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour has […]
President Trump’s triviality and boorishness are exemplified in his predilection for coining silly and insulting nicknames. It’s not the worst aspect of his administration, but still lamentable, that his sycophants have adopted the same puerile behaviour. In an interview on Fox News yesterday, Peter Navarro, the president’s trade adviser, lambasted “bad faith Justin Trudeau” and […]
Marie Colvin, the Sunday Times war correspondent, was killed in 2012 in a rocket attack on a media centre in the rebel-held city of Homs in Syria. A legal case being brought by Colvin’s family is now being heard in Washington. It alleges, on the basis of testimony from highly placed defectors, that the Assad […]
The British government is responsible for the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, then falsely accusing the Kremlin of the crime and killing two guinea pigs in order to cover up the damning evidence. Meanwhile, a purported chemical attack on civilians in the Syrian city of Douma was a hoax concocted by British […]
Theresa May told the Conservative conference in 2015 that there were “millions of people in poorer countries who would love to live in Britain, and there is a limit to the amount of immigration any country can and should take”. To the then Home Secretary, this will doubtless have seemed an easy route to popularity […]
An attack using a nerve agent in a British city is worse than an unspeakable crime. Amid domestic political disasters, the prime minister got the tone right in her statement to the House of Commons yesterday. It was a direct attack by Russia against this country using a powerful agent that is not known to […]
Madeleine Albright, US secretary of state in the Clinton administration, famously described America as the indispensable nation. Her supposed vaingloriousness has been criticised but she was right. In the absence of a supranational authority capable of exercising sovereignty, the task of guaranteeing global public goods like regional security and a reserve currency falls to the […]
On general election night in 1997, Paddy Ashdown memorably described the outgoing prime minister John Major as a decent man at the head of a truly appalling party. The same might be said now of Jeremy Corbyn, apart from the first bit. Since Corbyn became Labour leader in 2015, the party has not only lost […]
Labour has never in its history been a socialist party. It was founded for the instrumental reason of representing workers’ interests in Parliament (hence the “Labour” Party, rather than the “Socialist” Party). For all its failings and idiosyncrasies, it’s accomplished important and even noble things in government, as a party of social reform and liberal-democratic […]
Ratko Mladic was sentenced yesterday to life imprisonment for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Under his military command, Bosnian Serb forces massacred 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995. Mladic’s paramilitaries also laid siege to Sarajevo for longer than the Nazis blockaded Leningrad, and shelled and shot the city’s […]
Over the Christmas week, CapX is republishing its favourite pieces from the past year. This was first published on June 11. Theresa May lost her election gamble and her majority, and Britain is the better for it. Unfortunately the election has simultaneously left in place three severe weaknesses in the body politic. Offered the opportunity […]
Ratko Mladic was sentenced yesterday to life imprisonment for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Under his military command, Bosnian Serb forces massacred 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995. Mladic’s paramilitaries also laid siege to Sarajevo for longer than the Nazis blockaded Leningrad, and shelled and shot the city’s […]
Vladimir Putin’s regime murders critics, harasses opposition parties, poisons dissidents, locks up protesters, assassinates journalists, represses gays, invades neighbouring states and annexes their territory, shoots civilian airplanes out of the sky, interferes in the electoral processes of democratic states, and aids the unspeakable campaign of civilian slaughter waged by Bashar al-Assad in Syria. With a […]
Some years ago, I took part in a BBC radio documentary by John Sweeney titled Useful Idiots. With contributions from such notable figures as the Nobel laureate Doris Lessing and the Russian scholar Donald Rayfield, the programme traced the baneful history of the Left’s attachment to repressive regimes. The Western propagandists for Lenin, Stalin, Mao […]
Theresa May lost her election gamble and her majority, and Britain is the better for it. Unfortunately the election has simultaneously left in place three severe weaknesses in the body politic. Offered the opportunity to confirm that they wanted a hard (or rather, dogmatic and ideological) Brexit, the voters sensibly demurred. The election has thrown […]
The Conservative election campaign is not being run by a sympathiser with Nazi Germany. The Liberal Democrats apparently aren’t employing the organisational services of a supporter of Mussolini. The Scottish Nationalists haven’t retained any known ally of Pol Pot. It will sound fantastical but Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party falls short of a comparably minimal test […]
Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to the English Language. Oliver Kamm, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, RRP £9.99 Tim Harford, presenter of the Radio 4 programme More or Less, used the word “decimated” on-air a few weeks ago. He meant it in the sense of “destroyed in large part”. He sensed what was coming next, and […]
Denis Healey’s life of public service was long and vibrant. As International Secretary of the Labour Party and a confidant of Ernest Bevin, he played an important role in anchoring Britain’s security in the transatlantic alliance. He was a highly effective Defence Secretary, a giant of postwar politics, and a man of culture and learning. […]
There is no lonelier place than the human mind when its capacity for reason is impaired. If there’s one encouraging thing about debate over healthcare in Britain, it’s that the main parties now recognise the urgency of finding and funding effective treatments for mental illness. Yet suddenly a group of mental health professionals has picked […]
