It is somewhat rare for an election to proffer signs that are simultaneously encouraging yet brutal for a party in British politics, but the Makerfield by-election proved just that for Reform UK. The result, while confirming that the party has decisively supplanted the Conservatives as the premier force on the British right, nevertheless exposed the possibility that Reform’s rise has itself birthed a coalition capable of stopping it. The encouragement is obvious; Reform amass

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

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

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

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

September of last year marked Zack Polanski’s irruption into the highest echelon of British politics. The Green’s new leader, imbued with the gifts of personality, pitch and popularity, bestowed upon the party an attribute they had yet to enjoy – a brand. Polanski has swiftly turned himself into the Greens’ main asset; sharper than his predecessors, more media-savvy, more combative and far less embarrassed by the prospect of harnessing populism for his party’s good. Polanski,

Lying recumbent and wrecked, roughly 130 kilometres to the North of the glittering Saudi city of Medina, rests the rusted hull of a century-old Ottoman locomotive. Targeted by British Intelligence Officer T. E. Lawrence and future King Faisal I of Iraq’s small cadre of Arab fighters, the sun-baked cadaver exists as a relic of the First World War guerrilla campaign that buckled the formidable Ottoman Empire’s control over the Hejaz, turning the tide of the theatre’s conflict,

Perhaps the most renowned passage of Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship & The Heroic in History opens with the decree that ‘a man’s religion is the chief fact with regard to him’, a proposition through which Carlyle elucidates how an individual’s true faith often lies outwith their professed church creed. Separate from the divine teachings of any sect, Carlyle instead argued that an individual’s true religious persuasion lies in the set of core beliefs which they hold

Across Europe, a striking consensus has taken hold. Quiz a passerby on the streets of Paris, Berlin or London on the state of society and you are likely to hear all too familiar lamentations concerning the declining state of both government performance and social cohesion. The cost of living continues to rise whilst wages stagnate and public services buckle, politics is brittle and the future looks more precarious than the past. This transnational belief , one which has been