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Gaby Hinsliff

Gaby Hinsliff

The Guardian

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Liz Truss has kindly offered to ‘save the west’. But who will save her from her delusions?

So it wasn’t just a bad dream, then. Liz Truss really did become prime minister, and that brief ensuing moment of madness really did happen. It must...

previous day 80

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

The real question isn’t what Angela Rayner did – it’s why the Tories are so set on targeting her

Angela Rayner has never, to the best of my knowledge, advocated eating people. Nor has she publicly insisted on her right to wear a colander on her...

12.04.2024 100

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

All hail the ‘mimbys’: the open-minded voters who might just save Labour’s housing plans

There are few things most politicians hate more than a crude yes-or-no question. But when asked last autumn if he was instinctively a yimby rather...

05.04.2024 30

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

If you really want kids to spend less time online, make space for them in the real world

Three-quarters of children want to spend more time in nature. Having spent the Easter weekend trying to force four resistant teenagers off their...

02.04.2024 10

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

Britain’s universities are in freefall – and saving them will take more than funding

Imagine a beach before the tsunami. Out at sea, the wave is gathering force, yet on the sand people are still sunbathing, blissfully unaware. That’s...

29.03.2024 100

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

How do climate scientists look after themselves?

22.03.2024 7

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

The Garrick row is not about women getting in – it’s about the dinosaurs desperate to keep us out

This week, the woman likely to become Britain’s first female chancellor was invited to give a lecture at the heart of the economic establishment....

22.03.2024 20

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

Boarding schools can do tremendous harm. Charles Spencer’s bleak memoir proves it

Charles Spencer was just eight when he was sent away from home. Even before being packed off to boarding school, he was largely raised by nannies, in...

19.03.2024 30

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

The threat to MPs is real. But Michael Gove’s empty extremism plans will do nothing to tackle it

Before the 30-year-old MP Zarah Sultana walks into any public meeting, she pauses to record her location and the time. It’s a security precaution...

15.03.2024 20

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

AI could be an extraordinary force for good. So why do our politicians still not have a plan?

Four weeks ago in San Francisco’s Chinatown, an empty self-driving taxi was mobbed and set on fire. It’s still not clear whether the crowd...

08.03.2024 10

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

What makes today’s teens so pessimistic about the future? Perhaps it’s the present

Youth is fearless. Or, it’s meant to be, anyway. Half the point of being young is to feel invincible, not ground down like your boring old parents:...

05.03.2024 40

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

I read the Couzens report expecting evidence of rank misogyny. What I found was almost worse

Cliff Mitchell is a serial rapist. He was caught and charged with multiple offences only after attacking a woman at knifepoint last year, blindfolding...

29.02.2024 7

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

First Dog on the Moon The world’s oldest (wild) platypus was born 10 years after Taylor Swift. So much has changed since 1999!

23.02.2024 7

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

Britain can play a role in bringing peace to Gaza, but first leaders have to get serious

On Wednesday in Rafah, the Gaza border town now transformed in effect into a vast sprawling refugee camp, airstrikes reportedly killed more than a...

23.02.2024 7

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

No sympathy for striking doctors? Watch ITV’s Breathtaking and ask: have we paid our debt to them?

When Dr Rachel Clarke first started writing down her experiences of working on a Covid-19 ward, she never meant to make them public. Scribbled at her...

20.02.2024 200

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

Learn this from the Rochdale debacle: society faces peril when smart people believe dumb things

What kind of idiot falls for a conspiracy theory? Somebody gullible, you might imagine: at best someone vulnerable or mentally unwell, and at worst...

16.02.2024 80

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

Brianna Ghey’s parents met hate with love, and Sunak chased cheap laughs. That says it all about him and his party

Rishi Sunak had been warned that Brianna Ghey’s bereaved mother would be watching. If he hadn’t initially expected Esther Ghey to be in the public...

08.02.2024 7

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

It’s not about ‘woke’ or foreign students – the truth is that UK universities are starved of cash

What is the biggest problem bedevilling universities right now? Talk to academics, students or parents, and there’s no shortage of contenders....

06.02.2024 60

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

I was puzzled by younger women’s reaction to Barbie. It turned out Gen Z men held the answer

Taylor Swift is many things. But she did not, at least until recently, look like the battleground on which an election could be fought. Though on...

02.02.2024 100

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

London mayor Sadiq Khan says what Labour dares not: the wafer-thin Brexit mandate cannot hold forever

It’s just a flicker of light at the end of a long, dark Brexit tunnel. But in the dead of winter, frankly we’ll take what we can get. Which is why...

22.01.2024 20

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

The latest casualties of Britain’s rental crisis? Youthful joy – and the buzz and vibrancy of city life

Once upon a time, BrewDog used to be cool. That was a while ago now admittedly, but at its peak it rode that punky, vaguely Californian craft...

11.01.2024 5

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

The Guardian view on strikes and protests in Germany: this is no time for austerity

For several decades, German politics and society have been shaped by two fundamental features – both of which have contributed to an enviable aura...

09.01.2024 10

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

A TV drama is finally triggering action for Post Office victims. Why did it take so long?

When Alan Bates ploughed his savings into buying a rural Welsh post office, he was hoping for a quiet life. He would have time to walk the hills of...

08.01.2024 10

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

The junior doctors’ strike is becoming Labour’s problem – and it has no easy answers

Wash your hands. Wrap up warm. If you think you’re coming down with something, kindly avoid spreading it to others. It may sound alarmingly basic,...

05.01.2024 5

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

Jurors convicting Brianna Ghey’s killers didn’t need to know why they did it. But we do

Brianna Ghey was a fearless child. In saying so, her parents do not necessarily mean that she was not afraid, but that she was brave enough to pursue...

22.12.2023 20

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

If a woman can be raped in broad daylight on a train, there are tough questions for all of us

It was broad daylight, and there were other people in the tube carriage. She should have been safe. She’d fallen asleep, missed her stop, and ended...

15.12.2023 200

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

Nigel Farage to swap the jungle for the Tory party? At this point, why not let him at it

On Sunday night, Nigel Farage was buried alive with a writhing tangle of snakes, before losing an election. Or to put it another way, he now has a...

11.12.2023 10

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

Far from cleaning up Boris Johnson’s Covid mess, Rishi Sunak is drowning in it

Towards the end, Boris Johnson looked exhausted. He was a marathon runner staggering through the finishing tape, a boxer slumped against the ropes....

07.12.2023 5

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

Whatever your view of the Israel-Hamas war, rape is rape. To trivialise it is to diminish ourselves

There is no such thing as a perfect victim, but a million ways to be an imperfect one. She was drinking. Her skirt was too short. She went willingly...

01.12.2023 200

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

Keir Starmer is keen to tell you that there are no easy answers on immigration. Well, here’s one

For months now, Keir Starmer has been at pains to tell the country that there are no easy answers to our problems. There is no magic money tree. We...

28.11.2023 30

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

There’s no right thing to say to people who are grieving, but the worst thing is fearing to speak at all

You desperately want to say the right thing. The magic thing, the elusive words that will make the unbearable somehow bearable after all – the...

24.11.2023 30

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

The Gaza vote was a win for Keir Starmer – defending it will be harder

What is the Labour party for in a time of war? The left has struggled with that question for decades, but the conflict between Israel and Hamas...

17.11.2023 6

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

How has it fallen to the king to fight the cost of living crisis?

King Charles has a landmark birthday today. And as one does when one lives in a palace, he will be spending it visiting a food bank. The trip is a...

14.11.2023 40

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

A home secretary actively undermining public order feels like a dangerous step into Trump territory

It reads, with hindsight, uncannily like a prophecy. Long before Suella Braverman became home secretary, when Mark Rowley was enjoying a brief career...

09.11.2023 8

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

Macho posturing costs lives: another lesson from the Covid inquiry

Sorry to bother you. Would you mind terribly? No worries if not! It isn’t only women who pepper emails with self-effacing phrases like this, of...

03.11.2023 3

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

The English rental market isn’t just cracked, it’s falling down

Pack up your life into a pile of cardboard boxes, and move on. Unpack it all, dare to relax and buy a few houseplants, and before long you’ll...

31.10.2023 30

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

If we’re forbidden from looking history in the eye during this horrific war, we’re doomed to repeat it

Never again. When the United Nations was originally founded from the ashes of the second world war, it was at least in part to give more solid meaning...

27.10.2023 100

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

When the fog of war envelops everything, we owe it to those who suffer to admit doubt

Death has climbed in through our windows; it has entered our fortresses. Throughout these days of unbearable stories, from the slaughter of small...

19.10.2023 10

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

The British hard right will exploit this war to claim multiculturalism has failed. They are wrong

It is many years since I heard Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, sung. But the haunting sound of British Jews singing it inside a synagogue at...

17.10.2023 4

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

Sewage in rivers, crumbling schools – what next? No room in prisons for rapists and burglars

Don’t send criminals to jail, because the jails are already full to bursting. It almost beggars belief that judges were offered this advice at a...

13.10.2023 3

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

Sunak is right to phase out cigarettes – but without tackling vapes his public health strategy will go up in smoke

O nce upon a time, a crafty fag behind the bike sheds was the mark of a teenage rebel. But not any more, which is why the vast majority of British...

05.10.2023 3

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

As the war in Ukraine grinds on, western support is beginning to crack

The blue and yellow flag still flies high over Britain’s town squares and public buildings, signalling our unwavering and enduring solidarity with...

03.10.2023 5

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

Reducing women to meat live on air? GB News is no longer a joke

I t sounds at first like what Donald Trump once called “locker room banter”. Just two guys, unwittingly taped having the kind of conversation that...

28.09.2023 7

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

Murdoch brainwashed Britain. That’s the comforting tale the left tells itself. But is it true?

‘W hat are you going to do about the Sun?” It was the first question Neil Kinnock asked, when a bunch of eager young political advisers setting up...

24.09.2023 7

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

Junking green policies, junking investment: scorched-earth Conservatism is all Sunak offers now

A fter all the turmoil of recent years, you might think British politics had lost its capacity to shock. But a week in which some of the angriest...

22.09.2023 20

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

You’re right to be angry about Russell Brand – and the establishments, old and new, that gave him his power

R ussell Brand has always invited outrage. It was what he did, his shtick and his selling point: a willingness to cross the line that – when...

18.09.2023 6

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

All hail My Mum, Your Dad: great TV – and Britain’s overdue love letter to older, single parents

L ove isn’t just for the young and taut of buttock. That’s the obvious yet still somehow revolutionary premise of My Mum, Your Dad, ITV’s new...

15.09.2023 30

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

Councils, sewage, school buildings: Britain has neglected the dull but vital stuff – and is paying a heavy price

B irmingham was booming. It was a city on the up, or so everyone said, anyway; and certainly that was easy enough to believe, if you came once a year...

07.09.2023 6

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

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