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Aditya Chakrabortty

Aditya Chakrabortty

The Guardian

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Chronic pain and ravaged mental health: this is the brutal reality of Britain’s new working class

If journalists visit Mansfield at all these days, they come for one thing: the cliches. They want the market town where 70% backed Brexit, the “red...

22.11.2024 50

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

Ella Baron on Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election – cartoon

06.11.2024 10

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

The Guardian view on fixing the Mental Health Act: an overdue return to dignity

The 1983 Mental Health Act provides for some extraordinarily coercive powers. A person with acute mental illness can be detained without their...

06.11.2024 10

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

Why did voters abandon Kamala Harris? Because they feel trapped – and Trump offered a way out

Since we’ll hear a lot, again, about “populism”, let’s remember, again, that 19th-century US populism had a healthy strain of leftwing...

06.11.2024 20

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

At last, a government willing to spend – but this budget will expose it to two great dangers

Change. That’s what Keir Starmer promised, isn’t it? In white letters against a bright red background, on the cover of his election manifesto, and...

31.10.2024 40

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

This is the future for Kamala Harris: unless she solves this economic mystery, Trump wins

The defining question in US politics was asked 44 years ago this month. One week before the 1980 presidential election, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter...

10.10.2024 100

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

Britain wants spending and a better NHS, not this obsession with growth. That’s why there’s big trouble ahead

To grasp the real threat to Keir Starmer, ignore the chat about freebie specs or Sue Gray. Tune out the now shuttered party conference, with its...

26.09.2024 100

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

Two tribes are at war for the Tory leadership. How to choose? Let me help

Reams of commentary will be written about the battle for the Tory leadership, because newspaper pundits confuse blowing hard on cold ashes with real...

12.09.2024 80

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

If Starmer and Reeves think they have a foolproof strategy – wait until winter comes

When writing profiles on Rachel Reeves, eight out of 10 journalists like to record her past as a chess champion, largely as a pretext for chuckling...

30.08.2024 90

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

The cynical spectre of Osbornomics is haunting the Labour party

A spectre is haunting Rachel Reeves. It has the tonsure of an abbot and a jawline kept taut by intermittent fasting, but any trace of asceticism is...

01.08.2024 100

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

It was a landslide election but this much is clear: neither Labour nor the Tories stand on solid ground

Don’t forget that the word landslide has another meaning, freighted with danger. Soil comes loose and the ground fails. Solid land turns semi-liquid...

11.07.2024 80

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

Euphoria felled by reality and scant ambition – I have seen what could be Labour’s future

Take what follows as a parable, then a warning. An arm of British government has been in Tory hands for more years than residents care to remember....

02.07.2024 70

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

Drill into the policy, ignore the puffery: this is a Starmer manifesto more than a Labour one

Not long before the 1979 general election the Labour prime minister, Jim Callaghan, privately and soberly predicted his own downfall. “There are...

15.06.2024 100

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

Don’t underestimate Faragism this election. He’s a virus infecting UK politics

Oh, it’s only Nigel, the politician who’s always standing because he never gets a seat. It’s only Clacton: practically Ukip-on-Sea. It’ll only...

06.06.2024 100

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

Both feted and gilded, Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak are two sides of the same rotten politics

Say this for Keir Starmer: he’s lucky in his enemies. From Rebecca Long-Bailey to Liz Truss to Humza Yousaf, they flop as heavily as solo projects...

25.05.2024 100

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

Lies, confections, distortions: how the right made London the most vilified place in Britain

I have been reading about the most abysmal place. It is a land where children, red-faced with their own radicalism, march alongside bearded Islamists...

25.04.2024 60

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

To understand Britain’s malaise, visit Shildon – the town that refused to die

In 1951, the county of Durham condemned 114 villages to a slow death. The older, smaller coalmines were approaching exhaustion, which meant, officials...

11.04.2024 100

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

Sam Bankman-Fried will grow old in jail. But don’t forget those who basked in his orbit

Later today, a man who has recently turned 32 will be hauled in front of a Manhattan judge. Already convicted of huge fraud, he knows he’s going to...

28.03.2024 90

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

One simple change could restore faith in local democracy. But nobody is talking about it

This year is only eight weeks old, yet we can already write a brief history of the near future. In Coventry, victims of sexual violence will no longer...

01.03.2024 100

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

So this is how the Royal Mail ends: killed by lying politicians, lousy managers and ruthless moneymen

How does a great institution die? In the same two stages as Hemingway believed people went bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. Entire decades may pass...

01.02.2024 300

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

The Tories are right, we should stop the boats. Just not the ones they’re talking about

Rishi Sunak is in thrall to just two syllables: small boats. Plunging wages, extortionate heating bills, collapsing public services – such trivia...

18.01.2024 10

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

Heading isolated and paranoid into the night, these are the voters our politicians created

“You talkin’ to me?” One of the most famous speeches of the past half-century is delivered with only a mirror for an audience. Alone in his...

04.01.2024 90

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

The miserly tale of how a university took its staff’s wages – and the public paid the price

In this season of quizzing, here’s a real head-scratcher. Can you name the big British employer that punished staff for boycotting a small fraction...

22.12.2023 70

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

How do young Britons see the massacre in Gaza? These Luton students will tell you

Two minutes before the hour, and only a handful of friends had turned up. The student organisers looked at each other in dismay. Would their protest,...

07.12.2023 8

The Guardian

Aditya Chakrabortty

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