News and Opinion

Our trust in government is eroding, says Parmy Olson We view our government with healthy scepticism. We have a vigorous press, with more than a good handful of newspapers competing with one another to skewer the latest politician for misspeaking or (as recent events have suggested) cavorting with a couple of rent boys. That this […]

The ex-pat family who have taken the ultimate step, but becoming French citizens hasn’t been easy, admits Howard Johnson. I came face to face with the man trying to wreck my life – the man who ultimately made me want to become French – on May 16 this year. I know the date because it […]

Student bodies are carving out small but significant spaces in which nobody is automatically entitled to a stage on which to trumpet their views – even if this upsets and offends them. Student activists are under fire for curtailing freedom of speech at our universities. Highbrow papers sternly warn of a generation of ‘snowflake students’ […]

So Jeremy Corbyn was, entirely un-unexpectedly, re-elected leader of the Labour Party and was feted (and immortalised in verse) by an adoring membership in my old hometown of Liverpool. Like most politically unaffiliated liberal intellectual smart-arses, I am unsure how I feel about this. The major objection one encounters to The Corbyn Project is his […]

Universities have much to gain from membership of the European Union and precious little to look forward to as a result of Brexit, says Martin McQuillan https://twitter.com/TheNewEuropean/status/781146810563829760 University Vice Chancellors are not by nature an outspoken bunch. When it comes to government policy they tend not to voice their concerns in public. Rather, they prefer […]

Never mind the politics of migration, Bonnie Greer gives a deeply personal reflection of the hope and promise it represents 4/16/1944-Italy: Sgt. Charles Glasco, Westchester, PA (l) and Sgt. Audrey Barnes, Chicago, IL, read mail from home in their cave shelters on the Anzio beachhead in Italy. The cave shelters are a refuge against enemy […]

In the wake of the Sam Allardyce scandal, we take a look back at 48 moments of football manager madness 1) Christoph Daum – Germany (almost) 2000. Daum was tipped to become manager of the German national team – until press reports he had engaged in cocaine-fuelled 48 times football managers made you question their […]

Put Cate Blanchett and Keira Knightley together and you can bet the tabloids will be there. Add Kit Harington and Chiwetel Ejiofor in a one-off video special and it becomes irresistible. https://twitter.com/TheNewEuropean/status/777834732667232256 Unless they are calling for more compassion in the treatment of refugees. The four stars have been filmed reading a poem to support […]

Looking at this tweet which just went out the other day, I was reminded of that undoubtedly hot night just this past August in Mississippi, when Nigel Farage strode out on to the stage of a Donald Trump rally. https://twitter.com/prweekuknews/status/775295684178247680 This was one of modern politics’ most beautifully symmetrical moments. Here they were – the […]

It seems to me that certain Brexit supporters presume that they have first dibs on patriotism: an automatic unchallenged monopoly when it comes to being proud to be British; to feeling, as the dictionary definition has it, ‘vigorous support for one’s country’? https://twitter.com/TheNewEuropean/status/777984435568476160 In some quarters, this is commonly even unthinkingly accepted as hard incontrovertible […]

It took me quarter of a century but this year, at long last, I managed to extract Britain from the EU. Hallelujah! I am guilty of gross exaggeration of course, but as a friend put it: ‘No Alan Sked no Ukip; no Ukip no referendum; no referendum no Brexit’. By deciding on my own in […]

‘The Premier League is a world league that just happens to be played on our shores. The clubs are owned by Russians, Chinese, Americans, the Middle East. The managers and players and TV audience come from all over. It’s no longer the English league full of British players that we grew up watching.’ To fans […]

It seems an absurd issue to be dominating discussion in the lead up to an election, but debates over swimwear and the role of the state in governing what individuals may wear are a barometer of a divided France. Although the country’s high court has now stuck down the so-called ‘burkini bans’, images of a […]

‘Trump is reinforcing harmful stereotypes and offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters.’ Those were the words of Hillary Clinton as she called out her Republican rival for the way his campaign is stirring up discord, division and hatred. His has been one characterised by the dog whistle effect – the way in […]

The Vote Leave campaign was without doubt the most cynical, opportunistic and dishonest political operation of my lifetime. The sickly concoction of invented statistics, warped facts and impossible promises was enough to make anyone feel queasy. Tragically, they won the referendum. But all that means is that pro-Europeans should redouble their efforts to hold these […]

Last month, Donald Trump named an unlikely new head for his presidential campaign: Stephen Bannon, executive chairman at the Breitbart News Network, which is probably best known as a leading voice of the dopey, oleaginous lump of outright neofascism and joking-but-not-really-joking meme-based irony that calls itself the alt-right. Breitbart’s website in the US is home […]

The Norway model – of life outside the EU – is one that excites many Brexiteers, and comforts many Remainers. But here, Anne Elizabeth Stie and Jarle Trondal, two of the country’s leading political experts, explain why the Nordic nation is on a path that may satisfy neither side – one that relegates its politicians […]

The London media recently converged on my home city of Sunderland, choosing it as the idea place to rake through the ashes of the post-Brexit fallout. After all, the city’s shock 61pc Leave result was the first real signifier that David Cameron’s gamble was about to seriously backfire. A couple of weeks ago, I inexplicably […]

It’s nine o’clock, family viewing primetime, and I’m watching a young woman bare her huge, surgically-enhanced breasts while she pole-dances for an enthralled roofer who we’re asked to believe is a rising star. He wasn’t before the current barrelscraping series of Celebrity Big Brother. But he is now. Call it the reality TV effect. Warhol […]

When William Hague became Foreign Secretary in 2010 he grandly announced that he would transform the Foreign and Commonwealth Office into a giant trade promotion bureau as the business of diplomacy would henceforth be business. Ambassadors who had turned their embassies into exhibition centres for British goods – the sight of a Range Rover in […]

The hottest book in America right now is a memoir by Silicon Valley executive J. D. Vance. It’s called: Hillbilly Elegy. It is the poignant and eye-opening memoir of a son of what are called in the US ‘white trash’; ‘rednecks’; ‘hillbillies’. They are the descendants of the Scotch/Irish-people who came to America as indentured […]

Aged 13 and newly converted to vegetarianism, the discovery of The Smiths’ album Meat is Murder was genuinely revelatory for me. It kickstarted a nearly 10-year-long obsession with Morrissey, the band’s charismatic and pugnacious lead singer – an obsession that carried on well into my early-20s. Until last year I continued to travel up and […]

Nigel Farage used mob tactics to hijack the vote on the UK referendum to leave or remain in the European Union. Of all the politicians I’ve seen in my lifetime, he is the one that’s changed the country the most, apart from Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill. Farage has turned UKIP into Frankenstein’s monster – […]

In June most of England decided that ‘enough is enough’, that ‘we are full’ and that, infamously, it is at ‘breaking point’. But London didn’t. Along with a handful of enlightened towns and cities across the country from Cheltenham to Manchester and Newcastle, London sent a quite different message out to the world. That we […]

In a career spanning more than 50 years, Britain’s leading economics writer William Keegan has reported on some dark days for the country. Here, he explains why nothing so far compares with what lies ahead In the course of writing about the British economy for half a century, I have covered many a crisis and […]

Barack Obama recently baptised ‘rising inequality’ the defining challenge of our time. A challenge that most commentators widely suggest lies behind the UK’s decision to exit the European Union. It is true that, despite the post-Brexit rhetoric about a north-south divide, across the length and breadth of the nation we are seeing a yawning gap […]

There are five fundamental points that have to be repeated without cease until the folly of ‘Brexit’ is reversed and the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union is reaffirmed. Each point is obvious to Remainers, and has been clearly stated and restated already: but the point is to keep stating them all until everyone […]

Within weeks of its greatest triumph, UKIP is imperilled in its deepest crisis. Here Matthew Goodwin, the party’s leading chronicler, explains how it got here, and what lies ahead. When it comes to chronicling the story of just how Britain came to vote for Brexit, there at the centre will be Nigel Farage, and the […]