Opinion

TIM WALKER remembers his old friend Ronald Harwood, a writer who left judgement to others. Ronald Harwood was fascinated by how individuals responded to stark moral dilemmas. He never, however, judged, and preferred to etch out his characters in shades of grey – rather than blacks and whites – and that’s what made his plays and […]

A route to rejoining the EU is possible, says reader Mark Sullivan. Judging from your readers’ letters, they are being too pessimistic on our rejoining the EU. Just because you can’t see the immediate pathway unfolding, doesn’t reduce the inevitability of market forces which resolutely point to this conclusion. How many commentators for example predicted […]

Readers analyse Brexit’s progress one month on and question whether it was worth it. As Mitch Benn humorously points out, in the face of incontrovertible evidence that Brexit is deeply damaging Britain, Remainers and Leavers must now be asking themselves what was the point of it all. Take the Brexit mantra ‘Taking back control’. It’s actually […]

Readers have their say on the EU vaccines crisis – and what it all means for the bloc. I think Paul Knott with his column was particularly prescient in his views about this ongoing debacle. As readers of this great paper are committed Remainers, it is really hard to reconcile the EU’s recent actions about […]

The SNP should not resist the prime minister’s visits to Scotland. Surely Nicola Sturgeon should have welcomed Boris Johnson’s visit to her patch? It’s difficult to think of anything more likely to further bolster support for independence and alienate more Scots. Maybe this is his first shot, and he’ll be back for a booster in […]

As Britain’s vaccine rollout gets further through the population, it’s challenges are going to mount, explains JAMES BALL. In this long, grey, lockdown winter there is only one real hope of a sustainable way to open up during the spring: the mass rollout of coronavirus vaccines. The comforting fact is there is a lot of […]

The prime minister of the Netherlands took responsibility for his government’s mistakes. Boris Johnson says he takes full responsibility for our 100,000 Covid deaths. Robert Jenrick says he’s proud of the many things the government has achieved in response to the pandemic. Really? Let’s just list a few of the arrant failures: to heed the […]

Last week was Holocaust Memorial Day, when we remember the millions murdered under Nazi persecution. This year marks 75 years since vital evidence of this was first presented at the Nuremberg war crimes trials alerting a largely unknowing world to the horrors that had occurred in concentration camps. Our great grandfather David Maxwell Fyfe was […]

The trading drama over GameStop has exposed a powerful new line of attack on financial institutions, say James Bowden and Edward Thomas Jones 

CATHRIN SCHAER on how the continent sees its vaccine troubles. While Brexit fans were busy trying to shout “I told you so” across the Channel as loudly as possible, following the recent AstraZeneca stoush, Europeans were – as they so often are – more worried about their own backyards than being in a race with Britain. There […]

IAN DUNT on his recent battle with Covid. I tested positive for Covid two weeks ago. The first sign that something was wrong was a hazy feeling of impending flu, which I brushed away. Two days later I was in bed with fever. It was ferocious: your skin either boiling or freezing, no position bearing […]

The EU has survived previous crises. But it is not guaranteed to get through the next one, says JOHN KAMPFNER. “All of us are responsible for the crisis, and all of us have a responsibility to resolve it.” “We cannot shoulder this alone in the long term. We need a European solution.” So said Donald […]

MATT KELLY on big changes coming to The New European. This week, The New European begins a new chapter in its own peculiar story. What began as a four week pop-up experiment, run by Archant, a local media company based in Norwich, to chronicle the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit vote soon became a small but […]

Readers hope lessons will be learned from Donald Trump’s time in the White House. I have just read A Promised Land, the first part of Barack Obama’s autobiography. Time and time again, his refusal to countenance actions which do not reflect his values – those he set out very clearly during his election campaign – […]

LIAM KENNEDY on Joe Biden’s inauguration message – and what it really means. The election of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States was received across much of the world with a mixture of relief and exuberance, though often laced with apprehension. A common theme in news headlines and Twitter feeds was […]

The influence on English of the Old Norse language of the Vikings is still up for debate, says PETER TRUDGILL. When people are learning English as a foreign language, it is generally very useful for them to learn three main forms of every verb: the present tense, the past tense, and the past participle. Past participles occur […]

MITCH BENN on how Remainers are now accused of revelling in the adverse impacts of Brexit. There’s always an element of ‘preaching to the choir’ when it comes to print journalism in this country; pretty much every newspaper on the stands has, to varying degrees, a political standpoint of which its readers are aware and, presumably, endorse. So […]

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 […]