Tag: politics
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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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Where will the West turn for its survival?
WALKING DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN craning the Twin Towers in the summer of 2001, capitalism had won, and won big. Mid-70s to the fin de millénaire, democratic nations doubled in number. From Portugal’s Carnation Revolution to Eastern Europe’s assimilation. Liberalism lifted the world, crushing hellscape communism and fascism. Back in Britain that year, a mid-Atlantic drawl was…
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MAGA-ultras’ blue-collar economic nationalism might survive market turmoil, but will it arrest the ‘unscrupulous optimism’ of runaway meritocracies in Britain and Europe?
THE TARIFF BLITZKRIEG has done its random act of violence. Like a B-17 dropping iron bombs over an open sight, one hit the runway, another Mr McGregor’s greenhouse, the rest slugged into the quagmire. But the message has been sent. Technical dashboard politics should give way to nation-state leadership. On the sidelines traditional conservatives remain…
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TRUMP II’s existential politics: MAGAdom versus the university men and women’
THE TRUMP II administration is on its Gulliver’s Travels, re-sizing US international relations. A return to seignorial power politics. And to borrow from Norman Mailer, will MAGAdom bring the existential experience that ‘university men and women’ cannot? Many feel a generation’s progress is lost, and argue it is Buggins’ Turn carpetbaggers, the beige elite, who…
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An ironic by-blow: the nation-state wriggles out of European modernity
AS THE JOKE GOES, Britain has left the EU, when will it leave the US? Exiting the EU was more than retreating from the Pax Europaea, the post-war settlement of ‘let’s stop fighting and get on’. It was a slipping out the back door from European modernity, without a bye or toodle-pip. François Hollande, in…
