All Politics Is Global

Donald Trump tweeted something strange last week. In itself, that’s nothing unusual. The President certainly has form when it comes to outlandish and whacky pronouncements.

But amid his calling the Mueller investigation ‘a rigged witch hunt’ and attacking his former lawyer Michael Cohen, Trump said something else. He revealed he had instructed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ‘to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers’.

Is Evacuating Syria’s White Helmets Little More Than a Token Gesture?

Every so often governments undertake acts of unarguable good. These moments are rare, and they are frequently small, justifiable less in terms of their large-scale consequences than their own morality or merit. But governments must still be induced to act in this way. And good ought to be recognised when it is done.

A Betrayal of the Left

The Left in Britain used to be in favour of secularism and against the politicisation of religion. The lives of Thomas Paine, Bertrand Russell and many others attest to this proud history. They campaigned against and opposed the domination of any one religious group – and they did so even when it was dangerous, both to their careers and even their lives. (The burning down of Joseph Priestley’s laboratory was not an entirely isolated event; and the sentiments expressed were not those of a minority. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in his “Religious Musings”, ‘priests idolatrous / By dark lies maddening the blind multitude / Drove with vain hate’.)

Jeremy Corbyn and Britain’s Apologists for Terror

Many hundreds of British citizens – most of them young men, but a significant number among them women, young children and even the elderly – have left these islands with the intention of joining the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The motivations and stories of these individuals and their tragic desire to reject civilisation are all well known, but there are other British apologists for tyranny and terror – and they are afforded a great deal more in respect and status than those who travel halfway across the world to fight for and serve in the fascistic theocracy establishing itself in the Levant.

The Corbyn Conundrum

Suddenly, the Labour leadership election is wide open. What had been expected to be a bland and uneventful contest has become a serious spectacle, prompting furious comment, hysterical front pages, and – perhaps surprisingly – genuine political introspection. The man who has caused this unexpected course of events is Jeremy Corbyn, a longstanding and formerly little-known Labour MP who has represented Islington North since 1983. His newfound success is remarkable; some polls suggest that he will win the election on first preference votes alone. The reaction to this – from both the Left and the Right of the Labour Party – has been tremendous. Some Labour MPs, for example John Mann, have even called for the hustings to be suspended due to an apparent threat that communists would join the party and vote for Corbyn en masse, thereby tipping the balance in his favour.