It was hard not to detect a defensive, even plaintive, tone in Mark Zuckerberg’s open letter to Facebook users this weekend. “After the election, many people are asking whether fake news contributed to the result,” he acknowledged. But that’s not what they were asking at all, and Zuckerberg knows it. Yes, Facebook (and the internet […]
Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary, defined the vote as “the instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country”. In the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory on Tuesday night, there will be many Americans who entirely agree. The obvious parallel for the anti-establishment […]
And now it gets interesting. In a piece written on the eve of the election, I argued that a Trump victory would be a “peasants’ revolt”, given that it could only come from turning out an overwhelmingly number of white men (and women) without college degrees, who had flocked to his banner even as the […]
The most fascinating match-up in today’s presidential election isn’t between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. It’s between Donald Trump and Mitt Romney. That may seem an odd thing to say, given that Donald vs Hillary has been one of the most extraordinary political spectacles in US electoral history, with their every sentence and every action […]
It’s one of Edmund Burke’s most famous lines. “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment,” he told the electors of Bristol in 1774. “And he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” But there’s another line, just below, which ought to be equally well known. Parliament, […]
There has been great excitement among the Remain camp today after the Government was told by the courts that it did not have the power to trigger Article 50 unilaterally. Lord Kerr, the author of the article in question, has even popped up to argue that Brexit is still not an inevitability. The truth is, […]
Justice for Orgreave! The call comes with one voice from those on the Left. Amber Rudd may have ruled out a new inquiry, but the campaigners are not giving up – and nor is Jeremy Corbyn along with many other senior Labour figures, who have pledged that they will continue the fight. The confrontation at Orgreave, […]
The American people are, like Bernie Sanders, sick and tired of hearing about Hillary Clinton’s damn emails. And of hearing about Donald Trump’s tax returns, and his sex life, and his ideas about the election being rigged. In fact, they’re sick and tired of this election, full stop. With a week to go before the […]
There are journalists who master economics, and economists who master journalism. But few bridge the gap with quite such fluency as Tim Harford. As the Financial Times’s “Undercover Economist”, as well as a BBC radio presenter and prolific author, Harford has a gift for explaining economic theories and findings in the most accessible way possible. […]
Call me a dupe. Call me a patsy. Call me a sucker. Above all, call me wrong. In the days before the EU referendum, I wrote a long essay about why I’d ultimately decided to vote Remain. I was, I said, fully persuaded of the case against the EU. But I couldn’t convince myself to […]
The response of much of the Western media to the demolition of the “Jungle” refugee camp in Calais has been a symphony of sympathy. There have been heart-tugging pieces about the desperate refugees who were forced to accept this pallid substitute for a home, and have now lost even that. There have been stories of children, […]
The proposed merger between AT&T and Time Warner is the biggest of big news – and not just in business circles. Bernie Sanders is already fulminating against the deal, with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton not far behind. At $86 billion, the planned tie-up between America’s largest telecoms company and one of its largest media […]
It’s not exactly news that capitalism has an image problem. Say the word “capitalist” and the image that comes to mind is of a rapacious, self-interested robber baron – less Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett, more Charles Montgomery Burns. Among young people, the problem is even more severe. For the generation who came of age […]
Having been sent sprawling after an “altercation” with his Ukip colleagues, Steven Woolfe has landed a knockout blow of his own. The surprise departure of the runaway favourite to succeed Nigel Farage has tipped Ukip – already in a state of disarray after the Diane James fiasco – into full-blown crisis. Woolfe attributes his departure to the […]
Yesterday, on the morning before the second presidential debate, I found myself at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida. Amid the wonderland of steel and wooden planes, parked on the floors or dangling from the ceiling, I noticed a small exhibit devoted to President George H. W. Bush. It reminded visitors of how […]
It’s not exactly news that Donald Trump is a fan of Twitter. Indeed, his handlers must often wish that they could tear the keyboard from his hands, as they wake up to find that their insomniac candidate has been firing off messages urging the world to check out a Miss Universe’s candidate’s (non-existent) sex tape: […]
This article was taken from CapX’s weekly briefing email. Sign up to get the most interesting stories of the day delivered straight to your inbox This week on CapX, we’ve been arguing about inequality. Are the global rich pulling away from the global poor? And if they are, how do we stop it? We’ve had contributions […]
‘Crash Bang Wallop: The Inside Story of London’s Big Bang and a Financial Revolution that Changed the World’ by Iain Martin (Sceptre) In 1986, at the height of the greatest deal-making frenzy the City of London had ever seen, the US brokerage giant Salomon Brothers was in advance negotiations to buy the venerable British firm […]
Tomorrow, Jeremy Corbyn will be re-elected as leader of the Labour Party. It is a sentence – and a turn of events – that still boggles the mind. If the initial election of Corbyn as leader confirmed that Labour had lost contact with electoral reality, his reappointment confirms that the party has lost contact with […]
The death of filmmaker Curtis Hanson will inevitably have people talking first and foremost about his detective noir masterpiece, LA Confidential. But the film of his that sticks in my memory most is a more contemporary affair: 8 Mile. A perfect fusion of grim and gritty urban drama and superhero origin movie, it saw Eminem, […]
