Politics & Economics

The sort of city government Rahm Emanuel champions has only been made possible because the nation-state now exists to shoulder much of the burden of warfare and finance. It is one of the luxuries of the...

Many of the secrets uncovered weren’t particularly significant or indeed very secret. In themselves they don’t explain the degree of rage WikiLeaks provoked in the US government and its allies....

I replied no to each question and then asked: ‘What if someone hides this information?’ Without looking up she said: ‘Nobody can hide. Everything is under control.’

Throughout his presidency, Trump has had a favourability rating of around 40 per cent. (He is the only president never to have gone above 50 per cent.) Now, despite the tens of thousands dead and the tens...

In late March, Yonas heard that another rescue boat, the Alan Kurdi, was on its way to Libyan waters. But he didn’t manage to get on board. On 7 April, the boat, crammed with 150 migrants, headed...

According to Thomas Piketty, history demonstrates that the means deployed to address the problem of legitimacy are only ever partly material. The more important means are ideological: at the very least,...

As his country’s grand strategist, Mussolini’s incurable delusion was that a highly staged military parade, with the same tanks turning up again and again, was proof of actual military capabilities...

Priyamvada Gopal’s focus isn’t on the ways colonial subjects negotiated, resisted and reclaimed the empire, so much as on the ways in which imperial crisis awakened dissent at the metropolitan...

Independence is not inevitable, but it is now the engine of Scottish electoral politics, giving shape to its party system, providing motivation for its activists and guaranteeing a constant flow of controversy...

Early on it became clear that millions of workers were employed on contracts their employers regarded as temporary. Employers were perfectly willing to dismiss these workers, in some cases even refusing...

The government is now keen to claim it was never prepared to tolerate high levels of infection in order to achieve herd immunity, but while it was defending the mitigation strategy it was prepared to argue...

On 15 March – two days before Netanyahu was due to appear in court, the first time in Israel’s history that a sitting prime minister would go on trial – the justice minister announced...

Nigel Lawson once said, with the hint of a sneer, that the NHS is ‘the closest thing the English people have to a religion’. There seems every likelihood that the NHS will become the defining...

Extinction Rebellion has come under fire for suggesting, as Roger Hallam has, that prison isn’t such a bad experience. Eda Seyhan, a lawyer and civil liberties campaigner, delivered a blistering...

It isn’t a secret that China’s debt bubble, Europe’s divisions and America’s irrational political culture pose a challenge to the functioning of what we know as the world economy....

My city is at a standstill and the smog has cleared. The sky at night is a revelation.

Like sturgeons and swans in medieval England, public information began as royal property. Today, we understand more vividly than ever before that information is also a commodity: I have it, you don’t;...

There is a difference between a politician deciding your fate and its being left to impersonal chance. But it isn’t a dif­ference that matters much when lives are on the line. When something...