The inevitable has happened. On 22nd June, Sir Keir Starmer stepped up to the podium outside No.10 and delivered a speech much of the country had been anticipating for months. Once again, the familiar image of a crestfallen prime minister appeared before the assembled press corps and television cameras. Starmer accepted “with good grace” that Labour MPs no longer wanted him to lead the party into the next general election, continuing Britain's recent revolving door of prime m

“FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY”, a marking found on the M18AI Claymore, a Vietnam era mine, reads the shirt of team USA star catcher Cal Raleigh. Robert O’Neil, the Seal Team leader who claims to have killed Osama Bin Laden, was called in to give a motivational speech. This was the United States at the 2026 World Baseball Classic – a sporting event recast as a military operation. Team USA was now exporting the same hard power at the WBC that had led to the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro

Last month, former Prime Minister Tony Blair provoked a media storm by penning a 5,000 word essay titled: “The Labour Party Is Playing With Fire Over Its Future and the Future of the Country”, in which he bemoaned the current government’s lack of understanding of the seismic changes that will shape the UK and the world over the coming years. This set off a wave of essay responses from then potential challengers for the Labour leadership, Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting, along

In Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, the film’s titular subject, Donald Trump, has his political mythology, by turns, dissected and distilled into a brutal education in winning; attack first, concede nothing, and, above all, declare victory even when facts may indicate the opposite. The film’s dramatisation of Trump’s rise under the impervious tutelage of McCarthy-allied lawyer Roy Cohn presents deal brokering as more a matter of domination than negotiation. Cohn’s lessons are in

Carnage. I think that is the best way to put it. Massive council wins for Reform and an evisceration of Welsh Labour, epitomised by First Minister, Eluned Morgan, being ejected at break-neck speed from her Senedd seat, has rubbed salt into Labour’s backbench anxiety. The threshold for triggering a leadership challenge against the PM, the elusive and seemingly far-fetched 81 MPs, has been surpassed within the space of 48 hours. The only element that’s missing is a leader of th

Shortly after October 7, New York Governor Kathy Hochul visited Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. On her trip the Governor stated, “The community feels, in Israel and in New York, that my going during these times will be the most significant symbol of their importance to us than anything else we could do.” However, the Governor’s office maintains no jurisdiction over foreign policy. New York State is home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, with approximately one in fiv

On the surface Andy Burnham’s victory in Makerfield is unremarkable, if anything the 20% gap over second-placed Reform is a shining example of how Labour has lost significant swathes of support in the constituencies where historically the Labour vote had to be weighed rather than counted. Makerfield, an ex-mining, working class seat that has voted Labour since 1906 saw 35% of its electorate vote for a right-wing party. The result seemingly represents the phenomenon that has b

The political centre does not have a divine right to govern; it must prove itself worthy of trust again, or face being wiped out. In March, the two main parties of UK politics found themselves trailing in the polls for the first time to insurgent populists on the left and right. There is no denying that parties that thrive on pitting the people against a perceived corrupt elite are rising and winning elections. For some time, the primary explanations of populism surging have

May 28 marked the passing of the Iran war from its third into its fourth, and possibly final, month. From early April to June a fragile ceasefire had remained, somewhat improbably, intact, before a flurry of missiles exchanged between Israel and Iran, Tehran’s downing of a US Apache helicopter, and a swift series of US retaliatory strikes against Iran marked an end to this period of relative quiet. Yet days later, on June 14, US President Trump announced that Washington and T

Global security alliances have enjoyed a resurgence in relevance as regions the world over come under ever-increasing geopolitical strain. In the shadow of this global uncertainty, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) will convene its 2026 summit in Türkiye on 7-8 July 2026. Originally confined to the Euro-Atlantic domain, catering to traditional security, the alliance’s footprint has assumed a global dimension. India, though outside its formal structure, remains a p

‘The only thing stopping Trump from monetising Greenland is that you can’t put it on a mug. Yet’ Donald Trump has never been a man who does things quietly, or particularly logically. Chaos is the policy. Disruption is the strategy. By the time he had set his sights on Greenland, most of the world had long stopped being surprised by what came out of his mouth; and yet, for the 56,000 people who live there, this particular fixation landed differently. At some point in 2019, Nuu

When four ex-cabinet ministers split from the Labour Party in 1981 to form the SDP, they did so with the intention of ‘breaking the mould’ of British politics. This Gang of Four believed the Labour Party was on an irrecoverable journey down the Hard Left flank of British Politics. Veteran left-winger Michael Foot had just been elected leader, the Trotskyite Militant Tendency had successfully infiltrated the party, and Tony Benn was circling, waiting to steal the Deputy Leader

I have tended to support left wing parties, gravitating towards their ideas as regional and national politics played a growing part in my teen life. Seeking equality, eliminating poverty, helping the downtrodden and the marginalised, and defeating a self-interested elite have remained leftist constants, but the vehicle of these ideas for me has changed over time. Anarcho-communism was appealing in my early teens, then was Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. While Jeremy was never g

The legislative elections of the Mexican state of Coahuila, held this past Sunday, shocked the nation. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) emerged victorious, sweeping aside the competition in winning in every local district. Although a state election, national politics has been upended by such a crushing defeat, prompting searching reflections for all the forces preparing for the 2027 midterm elections, in which the entire Chamber of Deputies, multiple governorships,

Artificial intelligence has ushered in a new age of geopolitics. The unveiling of Anthropic's Mythos AI model in April may one day be remembered as a historic turning point. But this is not a technology story. It is a geopolitical one. How the technology is being distributed, and how Washington has responded to its unveiling, tells us a great deal about the world that is emerging. New geopolitical lines are being drawn, and Mythos may prove to be the ink. What is it exactly?

‘We’re living in a two-tier culture in this country where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities.’ These were the words of Nigel Farage in an ‘emergency address’ following George Nowak’s tragic killing in Southampton. It is rather rare to hear the Reform UK leader speak directly about race. He would feel much more comfortable ranting about illegal migration or asylum seekers. Farage appears especially keen to weaponise this mome

France held its first Africa-France summit in an anglophone African capital on 11 and 12 May, gathering more than thirty heads of state at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre in Nairobi. Emmanuel Macron and William Ruto co-chaired the Africa Forward Summit, which closed with the eleven-point Nairobi Declaration and €23 billion in pledged investment across energy, agriculture, artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure. Paris presented the venue and the figure

Tony Blair’s unabashed tendency to offer his unsolicited opinion on the decline of the Labour party has unfortunately become a rather exhausting feature of British politics. Refusing to comply with his fate of exiting stage left and disappearing into irrelevancy, the former Prime Minister and Labour party leader has maintained an irritating desire to be heard. His latest intervention comes in the form of a rambling essay posted to the Tony Blair Institute’s so-called ‘insight

Despite not having won Best Picture or Best Director at the 2026 Oscars, I have no doubts that Ryan Coogler’s Sinners will stand the test of time as one of the greatest cinematic achievements of the 21st Century. In a media landscape saturated with franchises, reboots, and sequels, Coogler’s original genre-bending film about a black community in the Jim Crow south, who find their newly-established juke joint and promise of emancipation devoured by undead vampires, is both inc

“Oh no, we shouldn’t talk about politics. It’s not worth getting involved”. That is the reply of an Ama (Granny) to a question about the “Nine-in-One” local elections taking place in November later this year. You can understand where Ama is coming from – she has lived through a prolonged “White Terror” period of martial law, where talking politics could cost one their life. For the young people in the modern, democratic Taiwan, the opposite is now true. “If we allow the KMT