I was in Baghdad in 1998 during US airstrikes, watching missiles explode in great flashes of light as they hit their targets. There was some ineffectual anti-aircraft fire, the only result of which was pieces of shrapnel falling from the sky and making it dangerous to step outside the building we were in. To my... Read More

I was six years old in 1956 when my parents decided to return to Ireland from London, though a polio epidemic was in full swing in Cork city thirty miles from where we lived. They thought we would be safe in our house deep in the countryside and were encouraged by the fact that there... Read More

Twenty years ago, a novelist went to see his publisher to discuss his proposal to write a dystopian novel set in Britain in 2020 when newspaper columnists have taken power and are running the country. These opinion-makers, sometimes called the Commentariat, had for years been expressing outrage at the failings of the government and everyone... Read More

Britain is failing to cope with the Covid-19 epidemic as well as other countries in Europe and East Asia have. Out of 62,000 excess deaths in the UK, says former chief medical officer Sir David King, “40,000 excess deaths could have been avoided if government had acted responsibly�. The failure is devastating: on a single... Read More

China's coming National Security Law, which will give the mainland the right to engage in counter-espionage against foreign intelligence operatives organizing riots in Hong Kong, has been met with indignation by the governments of America and the United Kingdom. The irony is especially rich in Britain's case. During the country's 2019 general election, UK intelligence... Read More

The US and UK are the nation states that have performed worst in the world in coping with the coronavirus pandemic. Americans and Britons make up more than a third of the 300,000 people worldwide who have died from Covid-19. They have paid the ultimate price for their governments’ slow and incompetent response to the... Read More

In the summer of 2011, riots erupted all over London and television screens and newspapers were filled with pictures of blazing buildings and looted shops. People swiftly noted that among those not present in the capital was the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who was with his family in a camper van in the Canadian... Read More

I constantly receive such letters; letters which repeat, again and again, year after year, basically the same thing: “If only we would have an opportunity to vote out our damn system!� Such letters, emails and messages keep coming to me from the United States, but also from the United Kingdom. Particularly, after certain events, like... Read More

I live in Canterbury, where the Labour MP Rosie Duffield increased her slim majority tenfold in the general election. Given Labour’s defeat in almost all of the rest of the UK, it’s worth considering why this happened,. A prime reason Duffield retained her seat is that that Labour had the support of a rickety but... Read More

Fresh from his triumphal "Get Brexit Done!" campaign, Prime Minister Boris Johnson anticipates a swift secession from the European Union. But if Britain secedes from the EU, warns Scotland's first minister Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland will secede from the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland, which voted in 2016 to remain in the EU, could follow Scotland out... Read More

After an election dogged by the weaponization of anti-Semitism, the victorious UK conservative party has announced a new legislative push that would prevent the public sector from working with any individual or organization that supports a boycott of Israel’s government. JERUSALEM — Following the results of the recent UK election, the victorious Conservative party has... Read More

The Brits cast their votes. They had a choice between Nationalist - hard capitalism and a socialist manifesto that promised a four day workweek, free broadband, free higher education, saving the NHS and equality ahead. The election results couldn’t be more definitive: When people are asked to choose between hard capitalism and socialism, capitalism wins.... Read More

I suspected from the moment the general election was called that the result would be a large Conservative majority, a calamitous defeat for Labour, and a decisive victory for Brexit. To prevent myself getting too depressed by this grim prospect, I picked out and read two books on crises that were far more dire: one... Read More

Above, screenshot of the NYT's before and after map.[U.K. Election Results Map: How Conservatives Won in a Landslide, by Allison McCann, Lauren Leatherby and Blacki Migliozzi, December 13, 2019] Left Twitter is in shock this morning after Boris Johnson won a crushing majority, utterly routing Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. There are the usual... Read More

I have no idea what you will be thinking or doing on 12th December, but efforts are being made to determine how UK citizens will vote on that day. Why the fuss? A rational approach to elections is to read the party manifestos, judge the personal and societal impact of the proposals, calculate the probability... Read More

Britain is becoming more and more like Northern Ireland. This should be a comfort to Arlene Foster and the DUP as they rue their betrayal by Boris Johnson over the Irish border. Northern Irish politics have always been dominated by the competing agendas of the Catholic/Irish nationalists and the Protestant/Unionist communities. In practice, both the... Read More

Britain is experiencing a slow-moving coup d’etat in which a right-wing government progressively closes down or marginalises effective opposition to its rule. It concentrates power in its own hands by stifling parliament, denouncing its opponents as traitors to the nation, displacing critics in its own ranks, and purging non-partisan civil servants. Some describe this as... Read More

On 8 May 1987 a Provisional IRA unit of eight men attacked a police station in the village of Loughgall in county Armagh 15 miles from the Irish border. One man drove a digger with a bomb in its bucket towards the building, half of which was destroyed in the explosion. But British forces had... Read More