Category: Statecraft & Culture
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Authority and answerability: no alibis left
The US midterms test Western legitimacy, and open a wider question: on what sure ground does our own authority stand now?
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What is The Good Society?
Civic leadership guest lecture – April 2026 THE SHORT ANSWER to this important question is: A free society, where you and I can be ‘at home’. Two words we skip past very easily, freedom and home. But both are central to the project known as ‘British’. For Britishness must be a shared endeavour to secure…
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UK’s social contract up for renewal… but don’t let the utopians spoil it, as we have the solution already
TRUMP HAS OVERPOWERED US politics, irrespective of November’s presidential election result. How? Encounter, recognition, participation. Great Campaigners offer these in bucket-loads. More immediately a Republican presidency is seen as holing-below-the-waterline the Pax Americana. Teasing that the US will no longer guarantee the Western Alliance. This is the Republican’s ‘pumped-social-contract’, boilerplating anti-statist Jack Reacher-style ‘toothbrush and…
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Harry and Meghan, shaping the British constitution
HARRY and Meghan’s docuseries is the first fully-formed independent critique from within this normally well-managed monarchy. Its impact is inevitable. Largely as the British constitution is discourse-based, and any new narrative will be felt keenly. That is, the constitution is referent to the long-text of British history. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s rostrum, Netflix,…
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Pathways to reform: Economic recovery will rest increasingly on new levels of mutuality and tolerance
ON the morning of 26th July 1945 Britain woke up to the results of the General Election. The Daily Mail newspaper warned the Labour Party to ‘accept an adverse verdict like men and not like spoilt children’. As the day wore on it became clear the Conservative Party was in trouble. Duncan Sandys, Winston Churchill’s…
