The UK awoke this week to news stories of demonstrations and agitation in the capital alongside a review of the overrunning and overspending on the HS2 rail project. These seemingly disparate stories tell another story, however, when linked together. In part, the reason we have creaking sclerotic bureaucracy capable of blowing £100bn on – well, it is hard to say what exactly is being delivered in return – is the same reason extremist groups are able to galvanise large number

Reform UK’s burgeoning popularity has never stemmed from policy alone. A central pillar of its appeal has long rested in the promise of purification; an anti-establishment, anti-corruption party supposedly untainted by the deceitful Westminster habits that have set Labour and the Conservatives hurtling towards electoral devastation come 2029. If polls are to be believed, this gambit will reap lucrative electoral dividends for Nigel Farage’s latest insurgency project. But the

Spanish politics has undergone profound transformations in the last decade. The shift from a relatively stable two-party system to a fragmented and highly polarised multi-party system has not only reshaped the electoral landscape but has also weakened the capacity for dialogue in the Congress of Deputies. The emergence of new forces to the left of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) and to the right of the People's Party (PP) did not revitalise Spanish democracy; on t

“Damn Daniel! Back at it again with the white vans!” Says the narrator in a viral Internet meme from roughly a decade ago. You probably associate this meme with reactions of laughter or derision in the school corridor. Regardless, the meme remains in your mind years later. Internet memes – colourful static photos, gifs, or short videos – are easy to recall. Constant repetition helps to reinforce the meme in the memory – your friend may have laughed at “Damn Daniel!”, repeatin

A teenage boy in Guldborgsund, Denmark, is searching for a pirated stream of the newly released Project Hail Mary on YouTube. Five videos later, he is watching a man wearing a crisp Oxford shirt calmly making the case that immigration to Europe is eroding Western civilisation. The boy does not pause to think. He does not resist the idea. He now actively searches for content that feeds this narrative. By the third day, the algorithm, having already registered his latent prefer

Viktor Orbán’s vanquishing in Hungary’s April election was, on paper at least, the kind of moment that once nourished Europe’s left. After sixteen-years of calcified nationalism, prolonged democratic erosion and Hungary’s suffocation beneath the dense smog of permanent culture war, one might have expected the floodgates to buckle for a great socialist or labour revival; a broad, popular movement surging through the opening, wiping out Orbán’s Fidesz and ushering in a fresh pr

Elon Musk seemed to be omnipresent a year ago. 2025 was swathed in a succession of Musk's political undertakings, his name part of the furniture of the headlines. January saw him salute in a way akin to the Nazis at the inauguration of Donald Trump, February his awkward wielding of a chainsaw at CPAC and the painful declaration that he had, quote, “become meme”. His role as leader of DOGE resulted in immense pitfalls for federal agencies and slashing of government jobs, as we

Orbán spent 16 years making himself the EU’s biggest problem. His legacy, it turns out, is an opposition equipped with a supermajority to dismantle everything that he built – if they choose to. Last Sunday, Péter Magyar 's insurgent Tisza party got the mandate to re-wire the state Viktor Orbán had consolidated around himself. For the EU, the implications of this election are immediate, and for once are in Brussels’ favour. The most relevant and urgent consequence is that the

In 1916, a twenty-four year-old British soldier arrived at the Battle of the Somme, where over a million men were killed or wounded over just five miles of ground. John Ronald Reuel (J.R.R) Tolkien lost two of his closest friends in the battle, an experience of indiscriminate slaughter that stayed with him for the rest of his life. Echoes of the First World War can be found throughout Tolkien’s later literary work, most famously in The Lord of the Rings - from the corpse-st

In the aftermath of the Cold War, scholars such as Francis Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy represented the final stage of ideological evolution, famously framing it as “the end of history.” However, what was celebrated as the final and best form of human government began to buckle under its own contradictions almost as soon as the Berlin Wall fell. “The end” became the starting point for a new political reordering, characterised by the rise of anti-liberal and, eventu

I was driving in the suburban Newtownabbey area just north of Belfast recently. I went up past the Ballyduff estate, on my way to Larne or Carnlough, I forget. My attention was drawn to some flags on lampposts, at a crossroads, which I didn’t recognise. I have learnt to tune out the various assortment of flags. The Union Jack, The Ulster Banner, Orange Order flags, flute band flags, State of Israel, or even Danish flags. However, this flag drew my attention. They were four br

The New York Times published one of the finest long-form features in recent memory last week. The piece was a thorough chronicling of the US-Ukraine relationship and its evolution over the past 12 action-filled months. Despite the US’s off-the-cuff approach to foreign policy, the brazen contempt it shows Ukraine and the rest of Europe is consistently striking. Pressure is barely exerted on Putin, with any attempt to end his barbarous actions feeling futile. Everything is stu

As 2026 commences, how ready is the world of journalism for the next quarter century of the 21 st century? With social media gaining traction in the 2010’s, it’s safe to say the online world has well and truly exploded in the 2020’s. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X are all pillars of communication, information gathering and self-expression; should they have been given the authoritative voice they now have? The current social media-sphere is many worlds away from the World

The second half of the decade begins with a political map in Latin America radically different from the one that marked its early years. The region enters 2026 undergoing a clear shift to the right , with political forces that have not only consolidated their power but have done so with greater ideological discourse and ambition for power than in previous cycles. During 2025, the right wing won all four presidential elections held in the region - Ecuador , Bolivia , Chile , a

On the 5th of December Donald Trump’s second National Security strategy was released to little fanfare, nevertheless precipitating great global alarm, not least in Europe, as it appears to promote an archaic vision of a world once again carved up for consumption by superpowers. This National Security Strategy is very streamlined, at only 29 pages, compared to Trump’s 55-page 2017 equivalent. It even describes these old strategies as ‘ bloated and unfocused.’ This reflects

Macron’s France offers a political mirror which Starmer’s Labour ignores at its peril. After years of cautious positioning, Labour has stumbled through the opening phase of government, seemingly unaware of a public exhausted by decline and impatient for visible change. Macron began his project with similar ambitions – technocratic renewal through post-tribal politics – but it has collapsed under a failure to deliver significant structural reform, fracturing the political land

The catalyst for the collapse of establishment MAGA began on October 7th. However, the ingredients necessary for its fracture have been stewing in the Republican political machine for the better part of a decade. MAGA, their vitriolic ideology, and their destructive attachment to the state of Israel, I argue, now only have themselves to blame. A little over a month ago, Politico dropped an exclusive report that focused on leaked messages from a Young Republicans Telegram gr

Labour is the party of social justice and compassion, says the party’s website . A title it seems the party will have to unceremoniously drop after its latest populist stunt regarding immigration policy. When the Labour party took power, albeit with little excitement, the reasonable public breathed a sigh of relief. No more hare-brained schemes to transport migrants to Rwanda , no more squabbling about ‘economic migrants’ , and finally a government filled with capable ministe

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s proposed asylum reforms received high praise from Reform leader Nigel Farage and notorious far-right activist Tommy Robinson. Inspired by Denmark’s asylum model , Mahmood’s reforms include refugees having to reclaim asylum every two and a half years, refugees needing to be in the UK for twenty years before they can apply for permanent residency, harsher interpretations of the ECHR frameworks regarding family reunion, and the seizing of high-v

Occasionally, you stumble across something that perfectly articulates the current zeitgeist. Recently, Tim Stanley on the Daily T podcast explained that Farage and Reform are neither a right-wing nor left-wing party; they are a nationalist outfit. Essentially meaning that on some issues the party tacks left, on others they sway right. Fundamentally opportunist, everything is underpinned by the idea and sense, whether factual or not, that decisions are made for your, the Bri