Opinion

WILL SELF on the mundanity of tech. Sympathetic magic is usually conducted using what the pioneering structuralist anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, termed “a symbol set”: bundles of herbs, fetish objects, dolls in the likeness of the relevant parties. Feelings are brought to a focus then beamed across space and time; remote and mystic causes create very […]

One month on, its obvious faults have already emerged. More worrying though is the way Brexit has consolidated its backers, says NICK COHEN. The comforting thing to say about Boris Johnson is that he is a laughable idiot. And not just a village idiot. But an idiot for all seasons, an idiot who bestrides the narrow world […]

When the Yorkshire Post ran an accurate story about vaccines being diverted to other regions Tory ministers and MPs rounded on the newspaper. JAMES MITCHINSON, its editor, says their response raises several questions. You may not recall it. There have been so many, you may not even have seen it. Early June last year health minister […]

Without Scotland and Northern Ireland, England and Wales will need its own campaign to rejoin the EU. There us a simple requirement for a new political party with one objective: for England and Wales to rejoin the EU. (Scotland is going to do under its own steam, Northern Ireland has not left.) This is urgent […]

Readers are sceptical momentum behind Rejoin will come before the 2030s. I have just finished reading the excellent Brexitland by Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford (recommended in TNE some weeks ago). It provides an analysis, often of survey information over decades, of why the UK divided, and continues to divide, into two camps over Brexit. […]

PAUL KNOTT on the reasons behind Brussels’ stuttering vaccine rollout. Alarm bells are ringing loud across the European Union about the slow rollout of its Covid-19 vaccinations. Brussels opted for a characteristically centralised vaccine process in order to reduce tensions between countries, but may have ended up inadvertently stoking them. The original decisions that partly caused this unsteady […]

Yes, schools must return as soon as possible. But to reduce the damage their closure has done we must look far further into the future, says JAMES BALL. Almost 11 months into the battle with coronavirus the UK’s political and media establishment are agreed on one – and perhaps only one – thing: we need […]

Much maligned and under attack from ministers – but more important than ever. Media studies doesn’t deserve the ‘Mickey Mouse’ tag, argues Martin McQuillan. In last week’s New European Ian Dunt gave us 15 bold steps to fix Britain. Top of his list was making media studies mandatory in schools. He suggested that equipping school children to approach […]

An excursion to film a new BBC show provides some escape from politics… but not much. I virtually unplugged from politics for a whole day last week, and felt a lot better for it, until the day ended, and I caught up with what had been happening in my absence. Just another day in the […]

FIONA MILLAR on the devastating long term consequences of keeping schools shut. If only it were simple to calculate the impact of Covid on our young people. If we could say definitively that in five years’ time the gap in outcomes between the best and worst off children would be x, or in ten years’ […]

Podcasts have been with us for a few years now. But during the pandemic something has happened with this genre – a paradigm shift. A sea-change of massive proportions. Lately, I’ve been trying  to  understand what exactly is going on. And if what is happening is a kind of paradigm shift. A sea-change of massive proportions is […]

TIM WALKER remembers a meeting with Malcolm Muggeridge, an encounter which has haunted him since revelations about the journalist and broadcaster later emerged. Malcolm Muggeridge – St Mugg, as he was known in his day – admitted to me that he had been an actor all of his life. His credits included I’m All Right Jack and Heavens […]

He’s only been gone a week, but what are the prospects of a return for Donald Trump in 2024? Last week, as he took to the podium one last time as president, Donald Trump hinted at his return: “We love you. We will be back in some form.” The question now is just what form […]

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, […]