Politics

When was the last time a new U.S Vice President gave a truly memorable speech? The post has traditionally been regarded as being ‘not worth a bucket of warm spit’. But JD Vance is now changing all that, after two striking speeches in as many days. First, there were his comments in Paris on the EU and AI. Then, yesterday, he shocked the Munich Security Conference, by lambasting Europe’s record on free speech. Delegates arrived, thinking they would hear Vance address the key question of America’s involvement in European security, after a week of confused messaging by his cabinet colleague Pete Hesgeth. Instead, he delivered a double-barrelled assault on various

Liberalism, as Michael Lind has argued, is under attack because it cannot deliver the promised self-correcting markets that provide for free and fair economic competition, political renewal and cultural reconciliation. The malign reality is it consolidates winners, economic monopolies, politically entrenched divides, canyons of class, geography, education and cultural echo chambers where opposition is cancelled.  The remedy is to dismantle concentrations of economic, political and cultural power and challenge meritocratic arguments that help reproduce them. This might involve new anti-trust initiatives, attack on sites of monopoly political power, such as in universities, and confront woke culture In terms of ‘postliberalism’, I get the frustrations with a liberalism conditioned by liberal

On Wednesday evening, a man threw a fragmentation grenade into a café in Grenoble, leaving 15 people injured. The following day, an Afghan shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ drove his car into a crowd in Munich and injured more than two dozen. The previous week in Brussels, two men strolled through a metro station firing bursts from Kalashnikovs – one of several shootings that day in the Belgian capital, which wounded three people. It is believed that Wednesday’s attack in Grenoble was the latest in the drugs war being fought across the country by rival cartels from North Africa. Last year, I described Grenoble as ‘one of the most dangerous places in