Socialism
The man who’s destroying Spain
Madrid In the mid-1990s, Spain’s socialist prime minister Felipe Gonzalez saw his political career collapse under the weight of a…
Four disparate intellectuals
Of Wolfram Eilenberger’s four intellectual heroines, Simone Weil alone really counts as a ‘visionary’, forsaking philosophy for a kind of saintly mysticism
An alternative way of living
It’s been a century since the heyday of the Bloomsbury group, and now Nino Strachey, a descendant of one of…
Can Spain save its dying villages?
In a little village on the Spanish Meseta, I once asked an old lady about the next village some three…
Why the far-right flourishes in East Germany
A spectre is haunting Germany — the spectre of the AfD. Having come to prominence on a wave of anti-migrant…
Momentum’s cunning plan would keep the Tories in power forever
Momentum, the Labour campaign group dedicated to keeping Corbynism alive, this week demanded that Keir Starmer commit to introducing a…
Spain’s anarchists are rioting
Michael Bakunin, the 19th century revolutionary Russian anarchist, identified Spain as the place where his creed was most likely to…
Fascism: the most abused term in America
A well-dressed young man walks down the Potsdamer Straße in Berlin, days before the end of March in 1933. He’s…
Coronavirus shouldn’t be used as an excuse to expand the state
Since this is the nearest most of us have ever got to living under the Blitz, I’ve been re-reading George…
The rise – and disastrous fall – of the kibbutz
Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are part of a breed of socialists who argue that this time will be different.…
The eve of the Bernie-Warren online battle
The great ‘Bernie vs. Warren’ online wars have yet to fully commence, and the current state of affairs resembles something…
The next election will be a referendum – on Corbynism
The next general election will have been precipitated by, and will inevitably be fought over, Brexit. Yet it will also…
Rise of the comrade babies
If you elected to build a library dedicated to the subject of Human Folly, the place would end up as…
Let’s choose our politicians by random selection
Athens Standing right below the Acropolis, where pure democracy began because public officials were elected by lot, I try to…
Of course the young like socialism – they’re taught to
It beggars belief that Jeremy Corbyn can, with a straight face, announce that capitalism has failed and we’d all be…
Venezuela’s great socialist experiment has brought a country to its knees
Imagine if Theresa May suddenly announced that her government was going to devalue the pound by 96 per cent; increase…
The poorer I get, the more capitalist I become
‘What a fabulous tan, where did you get it? said one of my fellow lunch guests as we entered the…
The mystery of socialism’s enduring appeal
One of the mysteries of our age is why socialism continues to appeal to so many people. Whether in the…
India in a day
Bold programming by the powers-that-be at Radio 4 meant it was possible to listen to all seven episodes of Ayeesha…
The winged rabbit who made me a Tory
His father’s dental cast, writes Graham Greene near the beginning of The Power and the Glory ‘had been [Trench’s] favourite…
Revolution now and then
Maxim Gorky was trumpeted as ‘the great proletarian writer’ by Soviet critics, who considered his novel The Mother one of…
Lessons from Utopia
Thomas More’s 1516 classic is a textbook for our troubled times, says William Cook
Socialist Cluedo
What a load of manipulative, hysterical tosh is An Inspector Calls. It wasn’t a work with which I was familiar…
The right choice
When election day dawns, it’s worth bearing in mind that two million more people will be going to work than when…
The British public is about to make a big mistake
On the weekend of 25 April 2015 I started to believe that the party I supported might not win an…
