America

Wednesday

Mary Dejevsky

The UK’s very American political realignment

The speed and scale with which voters, mainly but not exclusively in the north of England, have switched their allegiance from traditional Labour to Conservative has been described as unprecedented. Professor Tony Travers of the LSE called it ‘amazing’ and spoke of ‘a massive shift of tectonic plates’. Nor can the results of last week’s elections be dismissed as a one-off. The breaches in the so-called ‘Red Wall’ began well before the Conservative landslide in the 2019 General Election and what happened last Thursday is unlikely to be the end. Labour voters, it appears, were released from their life-long loyalty to the party by the Brexit referendum, and then transferred

Thursday

Niall Ferguson

The China model: why is the West imitating Beijing?

‘There’s an osmosis in war, call it what you will, but the victors always tend to assume the… the, eh, trappings of the loser,’ says one of the officers in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. ‘We might easily go fascist after we win.’ Americans have long been haunted by the notion of the osmosis of war. Throughout the First Cold War, a recurrent theme of liberal and conservative commentary was that there was a kind of convergence taking place, causing the United States to resemble — at least in some respects — its Soviet antagonist. That all nuclear superpowers would end up as slave states had been George

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

The true cost of make-believe money

I like Bill Maher. He’s a rare practising left-wing comic who’s actually funny. But last week, his routine on cryptocurrency hit eerie harmonics. ‘I fully understand that our financial system isn’t perfect, but at least it’s real,’ he began. By contrast, crypto is ‘just Easter bunny cartoon cash. I’ve read articles about it. I’ve had it explained to me. I still don’t get it, and neither do you’. Bitcoin is ‘made up out of thin air’ and is comparable with ‘Monopoly money’. As for conventional legal tender: ‘We knew money had to originate from and be generated by something real, somewhere. Cryptocurrency says, “No, it doesn’t” … Or as another analyst put

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Covid retreats, raves resume and a £165,000 squid

Home ‘I think we have got a good chance of being able to dispense with the one-metre-plus from 21 June,’ Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, remarked. By the beginning of the week, 29 per cent of the adult population had received both doses of coronavirus vaccination; 65 per cent the first dose. In the seven days up to the beginning of the week, 107 people had died, bringing the total number of deaths (within 28 days of testing positive for coronavirus) to 127,534. Maldon in Essex reported three cases per 100,000 people, which meant only two people in the whole district. Care home residents in England were allowed to make

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

The curious rise of cottagecore

Cottagecore, not to be confused with cottaging, is an aspirational lifestyle trend. The word is relatively new —although you’ll find it used all over TikTok — but the idea isn’t. If you have ever dreamt of leaving behind the urban sprawl for something more bucolic, or donned a cheesecloth dress and flower crown in the hope that it will make you seem a little folksy, you’ll understand the aesthetic. Cottagecore is the eternal search for a pastoral idyll, updated for the Instagram generation. It is hardly surprising that such a romantic movement has been revived during a time of pestilence and isolation. Throughout the pandemic, many of us have felt

Sunday

Joanna Williams

America, Britain and two very different realities on race

‘If people in Wales had access to as much media coverage of decisions that affected Wales as they do of US domestic news we’d have a better election campaign.’ This statement, tweeted by Welsh government minister Lee Waters shortly after 10 p.m. on Tuesday evening, just as the verdict in the George Floyd murder trial was about to be announced, sparked outrage. ‘Rancid,’ ‘horrific’ and ‘ignorant’ were just some of the comments directed at Welsh Labour’s deputy minister for transport. Fellow Senedd members rushed to join in the condemnation. A Plaid Cymru spokesperson declared, ‘Lee Waters’ tweet was highly inappropriate, ill-judged and thoughtless.’ The Welsh Liberal Democrats, not wanting to

Saturday

Mary Dejevsky

George Floyd was a victim of American gun culture

The triple guilty verdict on Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd was greeted with general relief across the United States. The massed ranks of police and National Guard waiting in the wings for possible disturbances were mostly stood down, and President Biden said that Chauvin’s conviction ‘can be a giant step forward in the march toward justice in America’ while insisting ‘we can’t stop here’. The point has been made that a white police officer being found guilty of murdering an unarmed black man is a rarity in the United States. But it is also worth noting that the conviction, indeed, the fact that anyone was tried at

Thursday

James Forsyth

Putin’s on manoeuvres – are we ready?

‘What follows plague?’ I asked a medieval historian at the start of the pandemic. ‘War,’ he replied. In recent days, this remark has seemed worryingly prescient: 120,000 Russian troops are massing on the border with Ukraine, China is aggressively increasing military activity across the Taiwan Strait and Iran has responded to Israel’s successful sabotage of its nuclear facility by declaring it will enrich uranium to close to the level required for a nuclear bomb. The West — and specifically the new US President — is being tested. Those who want an end to the western-led rules-based system are pushing to see what they can get away with. British foreign policy

Dot Wordsworth

What’s so great about ‘super’?

‘Wizard,’ said William. ‘Super,’ said Ginger, in William and the Moon Rocket (1954). More recently we have had Alex Salmond, the leader of the new Alba party (a grand coalition embracing albinos, Albanians, albatrosses and Albigensians) declaring that it can achieve in Scotland ‘a supermajority for independence’. Is a supermajority even a thing? (This form of question, with thing, has been asked by the Americans since about the year 2000, according to the OED.) The Guardian has found evidence that the term supermajority is puzzling voters. How big is it? Does it have a legal effect? Again, it is America that came up with supermajority. In Congress, a two-thirds majority

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

The case against reparations for slavery

Last week, a bill cleared the US House Judiciary Committee that would establish a 13-person commission to consider federal reparations for slavery. Although similar legislation has been introduced in every Congress since 1989, this is the closest such a bill has ever advanced towards a full vote in the House. The President’s support for this pet far-left project is unsurprising. A reparations commission featured in Joe Biden’s campaign platform. Advocating the establishment of this commission is a hop, skip and a jump from advocating reparations, full stop. The UK’s proliferating parliamentary inquiries often function to kick sensitive subjects into the long grass. But an American panel convened to address such

Tuesday

Hardeep Singh

Why Sikhs are worried about the Indianapolis mass shooting

Last week, the New York Times mapped the location and number of casualties of mass shootings that have occurred on US soil in 2021. It’s a ‘partial’ list, but remarkable, nevertheless. March alone saw the senseless killing of ten people in Colorado, four in California, eight in Atlanta, four in Indianapolis and another four in Maryland. More remarkably still, the shootings occurred unabated throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown. Last Thursday saw yet more mindless carnage in America, with the third mass shooting in Indianapolis this year. A FedEx facility was targeted, and half the victims were local Sikhs (there is a 10,000 strong community across Indiana). Whilst the authorities continue to

Thursday

Matthew Lynn

Money to burn: shoppers, not the state, will lead our recovery

Compared with the United States, the UK has so far been relatively cautious about launching stimulus programmes to kick-start the economy. And yet perhaps it doesn’t need to. People are paying off their credit cards, putting some money into the stock market, buying new houses, as well as finally booking a restaurant and getting back to the shops. A lot of money is about to be unleashed on the economy, even if this stimulus is largely invisible now. The interesting question is this: where will all the money go, and which sectors will be the big winners? It may at times seem as if Rishi Sunak is spending like crazy.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Duke of Edinburgh dies, Covid retreats and questions for Cameron

Home The Duke of Edinburgh, who was married to the Queen for 73 years, died at Windsor Castle, aged 99. The Queen was said to feel ‘a huge void’. Union flags flew at half mast; gun salutes were fired. For a day the BBC cancelled television schedules and broadcast the same programmes on all its channels. Parliament was recalled a day early. No laws would be passed until after the funeral on 17 April at Windsor, to be attended by no more than 30, in compliance with coronavirus legislation. As a mark of respect, the Prime Minister thought better of being photographed drinking beer in a newly liberated pub garden,

Daniel McCarthy

Joe Biden’s party is over

Washington, DC The Democratic party is dying. That may be hard to believe since Democrats control both houses of Congress and won the last presidential election with a record 81 million votes. But the exiguous margins of their hold on the House and Senate, with fewer than 51 per cent of the seats in either chamber, tell another story, as does the desperation of their struggle to abolish the filibuster and federalise election law. Those policy aims are of a piece with dreams of ‘packing’ the Supreme Court with left-liberal justices — and packing the Senate too, by turning tiny Democratic bastions into new states. The left wing of the

Gabriel Gavin Gabriel Gavin

Biden and Putin sue for uneasy peace

In 2001, US President George W. Bush stared into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and said he saw his soul. Joe Biden, on the other hand, famously claimed to have told the Russian leader, ‘I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul.’ Now the new incumbent of the Oval Office might have a second chance to check again in the flesh. On Tuesday, Biden held a rare and, by all accounts cordial, telephone call with his counterpart in Moscow to discuss the increasingly tense situation on the border with Ukraine. For months, Kiev’s forces in the Donbass region have clashed with troops loyal to two Russian-backed breakaway

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

America isn’t speaking our language

I haven’t yet read the report published by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. But, looking at the recommendations, I think there is one missing detail. We also need some loose agreement on terminology attuned to the conditions of British English as distinct from American English. Let me explain. I would not dare to pronounce on what is acceptable terminology in Spanish, for the simple reason that I do not speak the language and certainly don’t understand the context. Without context, you can’t fully understand meaning. So I truly do not know whether ‘negrito’ is offensive or, as many claim, a term of affection. Perhaps it can be both.

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Why fear a society that’s tearing itself apart?

In my teens, rubbishing the implacable edifice of the United States felt like kicking a tank in trainers. Richard Nixon’s ‘silent majority’ was patriotic. Railing about my country’s disgraceful historical underbelly — slavery, the Native American genocide — seemed edgy. Fast-forward, and in the West trashing your own country has become a central preoccupation of the ruling class. University administrators, corporate board members and media pundits compete with one another over who can denounce their disgusting society with more fervour. Shame, or what passes for it, is the new ostentation. America’s own President decries his country’s ‘systemic racism’. Far more than singing along with ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at a football

Dominic Green Dominic Green

How Prince Harry became celebrity frontman for a very questionable industry

Prince Harry is now chief impact officer for BetterUp, a Californian corporate consultancy whose ‘mission’ is to sell online life coaching with — in his words, — ‘innovation, impact and integrity’. Harry may not realise it, but he is the latest celebrity frontman for the rapidly growing, broadly unregulated and frequently dubious corporate ‘coaching’ industry. And you might not realise it, but Harry, Duke of Malibu is your future, because California’s today is America’s tomorrow and Britain’s next week. BetterUp is one of a group of Californian companies on the growing, corporate edge of life coaching. Its competitors have names like Workbot, Hone and Clear Review and they all claim

Joan Collins

After London lockdown, LA is like Disneyland

When I arrived a month ago, one wouldn’t believe LA was suffering a major pandemic. The roads were still busy with fast cars, the freeways choked when we ventured on to them, all vehicles seeming to be dodgem cars, zooming across the lanes with ferocious abandon. There was a major accident recently in front of my building. I looked out of my window at a speeding sports car, which had been careening down the boulevard at 120 mph and had crashed into another expensive car (as well as a few others on the way). It had been cut in half and exploded into flames. Both drivers died. Sadly, there’s an

Thursday

Andrew Sullivan

In America, politics has become a form of religion

When I finally head back to church this weekend, after a year of Covid-avoidance, it is going to feel a little strange. These past 12 months constitute the longest stretch of time I’ve been away since I was born. And I’m not going to lie, part of me liked the sudden plague-long dispensation. I’ve become used to the lazy, empty, gently unfolding Sundays. They’ve grown on me. I could live like this, it occurs to me — as so many others do, all the time. So why go back? When I ask myself what exactly I’ve missed, I realise it isn’t a weekly revelation. I don’t expect to feel something