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Aditya ChakraborttyThe Guardian |
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...
The 1983 Mental Health Act provides for some extraordinarily coercive powers. A person with acute mental illness can be detained without their...
Since we’ll hear a lot, again, about “populism”, let’s remember, again, that 19th-century US populism had a healthy strain of leftwing...
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...
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...
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...
Reams of commentary will be written about the battle for the Tory leadership, because newspaper pundits confuse blowing hard on cold ashes with real...
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...
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...
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...
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....
Not long before the 1979 general election the Labour prime minister, Jim Callaghan, privately and soberly predicted his own downfall. “There are...
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...
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...
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...
In 1951, the county of Durham condemned 114 villages to a slow death. The older, smaller coalmines were approaching exhaustion, which meant, officials...
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...
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...
How does a great institution die? In the same two stages as Hemingway believed people went bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. Entire decades may pass...
Rishi Sunak is in thrall to just two syllables: small boats. Plunging wages, extortionate heating bills, collapsing public services – such trivia...
“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...
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...
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,...