Britain’s Broken Economy Broke Liz Truss

Liz Truss has announced her resignation after only a few weeks as Britain’s prime minister. Truss’ premiership has been on life support since the announcement of her mini-budget last month spooked the currency and bond markets. Truss sacrificed her finance minister, the former chancellor of the exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng, in order to delay her own departure, but it barely slowed down the inevitable. Once her successor is selected and in office before the end of the month, Truss will be left as the equivalent of a political trivia question: the shortest-serving British prime minister who left office alive. 

Why Britain Is Broken

‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.’  

That’s from George Orwell’s dystopian future Britain in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The words are spoken by the novel’s inner party inquisitor O’Brien, and they could be wryly altered to fit our times: ‘If you want a picture of Britain’s future, imagine waiting, unsuccessfully, for a doctor’s appointment— forever.’   

Britain Is Falling Apart

There’s a macabre joke in Britain these days that my friends and family also play. We compete to see who has had to wait the longest for medical treatment. It starts relatively innocuously. People talk of the ordinary things: like having to wait days to get an appointment with a doctor. They call up in the morning at 8 a.m., only to be told that all of the slots are gone. Best of luck tomorrow.

Misunderstanding Turkey and Islamism

Understanding Turkey since the dissolution of the Ottoman empire has proven difficult for westerners. The decaying magnificence of the Ottoman years was a vivid adornment to past debate. Nineteenth century diplomatists like David Urquhart defended the Sublime Porte as a reasonable counterbalance to Russia, and publicity-minded moralists like Gladstone decried Ottoman atrocities, all while the empire became more visibly moribund and threadbare.

Usbat al-Thairen: The New Iran-backed Militia on Iraq’s Block

On March 11, rockets struck Camp Taji in Iraq, which houses troops from several countries. Two US soldiers and one British reservist were killed.

Waiting for the Virus

Cavafy wrote a poem over a century ago with a title from which my heading is taken.

The Culturally Rich Get Richer

Allow for a moment this flash of irritation. It does have the ghost of a point.

Why can the success of others arouse such annoyance?

Undiplomatic Wrangling and Aid to Idlib

Just as the UN aid mission to the rebel- and Islamist-held enclave around Idlib province in northern Syria was about to collapse, the movement of aid was reapproved – now in a reduced form.

Turkish ‘Forced Medicine’ for Europe’s ISIS Problem

Hundreds of fighters flocked from all over the world to join Islamic State (ISIS), lured by the promise of a utopian society. But now they find themselves in squalid jails and refugee camps while the world worries about what to do with them.

China’s Data-Driven Dystopia

Despite its vast power, Chinese communism apparently feels itself dogged by enemies, internal and external.

Some of these are the states who do not conform to China’s economic and geographic ambitions. Others are portions of China’s population, notably the inhabitants of Hong Kong, who protest and, this week, voted for their rights to remain uninfringed by Beijing.