Opinion

It is no exaggeration to say that the next Scottish Labour leader will play a pivotal role in deciding whether Scotland becomes independent. MAURICE SMITH reports on a party still coming to terms with the scale of the task ahead. Anas Sarwar must be a glutton for punishment. The 37-year-old has been tipped for Labour Party stardom […]

Readers have their say on how to fix Britain after Brexit. I think Ian Dunt’s list has some excellent ideas  (“15 ways to fix Britain”). However, I take exception to the idea that the only issue with British ‘citizenship’ is its prohibitive cost for new applicants. The fact is, that having now ceased to be […]

At the age of 13, Chaim Herszman escaped from a Nazi ghetto by killing a guard. CHARLES CLARKE, the former home secretary, says his story – published in a new book – is one that many in Britain still do not fully understand. July 28th this year will be the 70th anniversary of the signing in Geneva of the United Nations […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a writer who brings home the strange attraction that hotels have for us, and what it is exactly he is missing most about them. I had an e-mail from a friend the other day that felt like it came from another era. She had, she told me, just booked a long weekend in Bucharest […]

Salvador Dalí’s talent for self-publicity was exceeded only by his gifts as an artist, says CHARLIE CONNELLY. On the evening of Wednesday July 1, 1936, Salvador Dalí prepared to address a crowd gathered at the New Burlington Galleries in London’s Mayfair. The three-week International Surrealist Exhibition was in its final days and had already caused quite a […]

PETER TRUDGILL on how similarly-sounding words can come to have such different meanings. A word with two or more different meanings is technically a polyseme. An English example is wood, which can refer to wood as a material as well as to a tree-covered area of land. Neck is also polysemous: it refers to the part of the […]

TIM WALKER remembers a somewhat frosty encounter with Sir Anthony Quayle, who was unwilling to be drawn on his political views. All actors have areas of their lives that are off limits and it was no different with Sir Anthony Quayle. The year was 1986 and the grand old man of the stage was about […]

Manchester’s musical conveyer belt has been responsible for some outstanding acts over the years. SOPHIA DEBOICK tries to join the dots between them. “My childhood is streets upon streets upon streets upon streets.” So Morrissey – once the master of ironic kitchen sink portraits of Mancunian life – opened his memoirs, evoking the endless terraces […]

Alastair Campbell’s article asking “What more could Remainers have done” (TNE 226) continues to prompt letters… Do not give up! A single pro-EU unified pressure group (not linked to any political party) is needed, ideally with a charismatic figurehead (but not a divisive politician). We need to attract massive funding (I am sure many in […]

A rethink is already needed over the government’s free trade agreement. It is already becoming obvious, less than a month in, that the current free trade agreement is not sustainable. As one example, Northern Ireland is severely disadvantaged in terms of goods imported from the rest of the UK and a number of hauliers and […]

One reader takes exception to John Bercow’s column on Donald Trump. I must take issue with one statement in the otherwise excellent article by John Bercow on ex-president Trump. Mr Bercow credits the SNP (among others) with recognising Trump as a malign force and calling him out for his bigotry from day one. Fake news, […]

It has been tested like never before, but our sense of society has received a boost rather than a blow from Covid, says ZOE WILLIAMS. I had volunteered to help with corona testing admin at a local secondary school, and they wanted to do an interview first. Weird, I thought, as I already had a […]

IAN DUNT offers a radical and thought-provoking list of changes he argues would make Britain better. Do you agree or disagree? Make media studies mandatory in school Every year or so, a right wing columnist does a piece mocking media studies as a soft subject for intellectual deadbeats. They were never right, but they’re even more […]

If Brexit really was about winding up ‘Radio 4 types’ like MITCH BENN, there were easier ways to go about it. The more the effects of Brexit make themselves felt, the harder it gets to understand what the point of it was in the first place. During what for want of a more descriptive term […]

GLEN O’HARA assesses the Labour leader’s performance since he took the reins, and his ultimate prospects. Sir Keir Starmer has spent nearly a year now presenting himself as a diligent, calm and intelligent leader – a kind of ‘Mister Competence’, in contradistinction not just to the prime minister, Boris Johnson, but also to his immediate predecessor, Jeremy […]

Westminster’s tumultuous scenes of recent years have underlined a need for change in the way parliament operates. MEG RUSSELL and DANIEL GOVER offer a solution. The last few years have been turbulent ones in the House of Commons. First over Brexit, then over Covid-19, tensions between the government and parliament have run exceptionally high. This was […]

Liana Semchuk on whether Alexei Navalny’s reappearance in Russia could galvanise change in the country in the same way as Lenin just over a century ago. Political commentators both inside Russia and around the world are comparing Alexei Navalny’s return to Moscow with Vladimir Lenin’s ‘sealed train’ journey from Switzerland to St Petersburg in April 1917. It […]

Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, which ended its initial run 35 years ago, is often explained as a response to the unemployment and social unrest brought about by Thatcherism. It may tell us more about Britain’s relationship with ‘Europe’ today, suggests TOM DRAPER. For a television series supposedly about the great changes forced upon Britain in the 1980s […]

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL compares the recent resignation of the Dutch cabinet with the lack of scrutiny and accountability of our own leaders. It is now almost a quarter of a century since I jumped the journalistic fence into frontline political combat. By the time another quarter of a century is done, assuming I survive that long, […]

When David Attenborough finally stops making shows, they will have to reinvent the wildlife genre entirely, says Jean-Baptiste Gouyon.  At a recent event on the history of wildlife documentaries, I was asked a question that has popped up regularly in my 15 years of research: “Who, do you think, will replace David Attenborough?”  Now that Sir […]

WILL SELF on the unwarranted sense of awe so many Britons have towards US politics. Towards the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1959 spy thriller, North by Northwest, the protagonist and his love interest find themselves trapped on Mouth Rushmore by the evil foreign agents. Embodying Madison Avenue advertising executive, Roger Thornhill, with his characteristically blousy […]

Social media won’t the same again without Donald Trump, says LIZ GERARD. But the issues he raised online have not gone away. We’ll miss him now he’s gone. Not from the White House, but from Twitter. Mad, bad and dangerous, maybe. But @realdonaldtrump brought us smiles as well as sighs. Who could forget “Covfefe” or […]

The US has entered the post-Trump era. But don’t expect things to get much smoother, says JAMES BALL If the last few years had been a movie, then Wednesday of this week would surely be the last, triumphant scene. Yes, the bad guys had been winning for most of the running time – and the pandemic gave us […]

The effect of time dragging through the pandemic is another indication of how we no longer see progress as inevitable or incremental, says WILL SELF. Time, eh – it just keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future, as the Steve Miller Band so percipiently observed in their 1976 chart-topping ditty, Fly Like an Eagle. […]

Not all pro-Europeans think Keir Starmer got his position wrong on the Brexit deal. Desmond Fitzgerald (Letters, TNE #226), thinks that Starmer should be ashamed for whipping Labour MPs to vote for the Brexit deal, but I think Starmer was right: 1. The vote wasn’t Leave or Remain, it was between a bad deal (terms […]

Are Remainers right to move to campaign to rejoin the EU? Readers discuss. At 11pm on December 31, Twitter was again flooded with #FBPE Tweets. For some, it was a last act of defiance. For others, 2021 marks the start of a long term campaign to rejoin the bloc. To my fellow former Remain supporters, […]

Ian Dunt says this is the most severe and unforgivable example of government failure that we have seen in our lifetime. The UK Covid death toll now stands at more than 80,000 people. By the time it is over, it’ll almost certainly hit 100,000. Every afternoon, the same terrible bell tolls announcing the number of […]

BONNIE GREER reports on the US Capitol riots and what they tell us about modern populism. Was the storming of the US Capitol by the supporters of Donald Trump the beginning of the end of populism? Was this the lethal highpoint, the death knell for the crusade that went under the banner ‘Make America Great Again’? With the banning […]

This is the time when I traditionally look back on the shows I’ve reviewed over the previous 12 months and select the ones I’ve most enjoyed. I have, however, a practical problem that will no doubt soon be confronting the judges of the big theatrical awards: there isn’t an awful lot to choose from. I […]

JASON WALSH reports on Europe’s varying fortunes on vaccination roll-outs. The European Union performs many roles for its citizens. The most important – if one of the least-discussed – is to keep them safe from harm. And that is the issue causing grave concern across the continent right now, as the EU and its member states try desperately […]

Former Commons speaker JOHN BERCOW on the US president, the British politicians who indulged him, and the Trumpian tactics which have spread to the UK. The chorus of execration of the Capitol rioters, and president Trump’s evil incitement of them, has been loud, eloquent and justified. Global media outlets have simply reflected the overwhelming sense […]

Trump’s refusal to accept the end of his presidency was predicted by Mitch Benn in 2017… because he had seen it foretold in Game of Thrones.  Here’s the thing: I’m not an expert. On anything. I know a fair bit about a fair few things, but the capacity to store and retrieve biggish reserves of […]