Nigel Farage is adept at riding the currents of British politics. When he named Reform after the Canadian party in 2020, it was a statement of intent. Like Preston Manning in the 1990s, he aimed to displace this country’s main centre-right party and refashion it in his image. But where Manning fell short, handing over
I don’t quite see the point of flying Union flags in Tower Hamlets, or complaining about it when the council takes them down. This squalid little fiefdom run by the deeply corrupt Lutfur Rahman is not part of the UK: it is a suburb of Sylhet, with all that such a location might entail. This
Almost a decade ago the Irish academic Liam Kennedy published a tremendous book with the title Unhappy the Land: the Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish? It is a dissection of one of the most curious pathologies in the world: the desire to have been oppressed; a glorying in being repressed. Kennedy, like a few
On reflection, a tradition of shelving many desirable goods within ready reach is extraordinary – especially because the premises in which these wares are invitingly presented provide unfettered access to every passerby. By and large, it’s dead easy to pick up one of these desirable objects – or dozens, should forethought ensure the possession of
A currently fashionable conservatism is militantly against Ukraine and, by more cautious implication, pro-Russia. We who disagree are, I quote Matthew Parris in these pages last week, ‘prey to the illusion that the second world war was a template for future conflict, and Hitler a template for Putin’. Others put it more unkindly, speaking of
News from the High Pay Centre – the revolutionary guard of left-wing thinktanks – that average FTSE100 chief executive pay rose 16 per cent to a record £5.9 million for 2024-25 comes as a double blessing for Rachel Reeves. On the one hand, she can cite executive greed as a pretext for her forthcoming autumn
