The cost of austerity
A generation of children have been held back by political opportunism.
ByThe Magazine
In this week’s issue
Britain’s Child Poverty Epidemic
Letter of the week: The case for immigration
Write to [email protected] to have your thoughts voiced in the New Statesman magazine.
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Farage lives rent-free in Starmer’s head
Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.
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The dark reality behind Trump’s embrace of white South Africans
The president has granted refugee status to Afrikaners, while blocking asylum for everyone else.
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My plan to Trump-proof Britain
If an old patriotic progressive can’t muse on such themes here, where can he?
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Robert Macfarlane: “Come and meet this incredible tree”
The bestselling writer asks: can a forest think? Is a river alive?
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Dickens’s Britain is still with us
The two-child benefit cap would have punished Tiny Tim.
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What’s the point of a Labour government that allows child poverty?
Keir Starmer says in private that lifting the two-child cap is his personal priority.
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The EU-UK reset exposes the limits of a “geopolitical Europe”
The common understanding agreement is as aspirational as it is skeletal.
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Gary Lineker and the impartiality trap
The BBC presenter is caught between the worlds of old and new media.
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Britain’s ghost children
School lifted me out of poverty. Today’s absence crisis denies that opportunity to thousands.
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It’s the nuance, stupid
Binary thinking has broken our politics. Is there a way back?
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Britain is failing children in care
I had to leave my foster home when I turned 18. I looked for support and found none.
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Free breakfast is not enough
It’s time for the government to step up: Britain’s children need high-quality food to thrive.
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The children denied a childhood
Families in poverty don’t just need basics – they need everyday joys.
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Child poverty is a scar on our national conscience
A Labour government has taken millions of children out of poverty before. It can do so again.
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When David Tennant met Gordon Brown
“Drama is always political – it’s about human beings and how we interact with the world.”
A cold childhood
My unheated home wasn’t a temporary discomfort. The chill got into my bones.
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Stained by shame: Britain’s hygiene poverty crisis
In the absence of state support, teachers are providing everything from clothing to soap.
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Photo essay: The children of Thatcher’s Britain
Craig Easton’s images of one family capture the reality of state neglect.
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Letter from Wigan
In the post-industrial north, a town searches for a sense of belonging.
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The child in time
Writers reflect on photographs of their younger selves.
America’s broken commonwealth
The nation’s founding myth was based on faith and solidarity – but it also contained the roots of today’s…
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There is no contemporary fiction
The novel promises an ending. But world events will not be so neatly contained.
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Gertrude Stein’s quest for fame
The modernist phenomenon believed bad attention was better than none at all.
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The vagus nerve industry
Can a small and unassuming bundle of fibres really be the key to better health and a longer life?
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The Biden cover-up
The extent of the president’s decline was concealed by his desperate team. The reality was even worse than it…
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From Helen Oyeyemi to bell hooks: new books reviewed in short
Also featuring Irascible by Adrian Clark and Richard Calvocoressi and To Have or to Hold by Sophie Pavelle.
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The NS Poem: Help Yourself
A new poem by Simon Armitage.
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Wes Anderson’s sense of an ending
Unlike his mannered recent films, The Phoenician Scheme has both style and story.
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The Bombing of Pan Am 103 is poignant and fascinating
I didn’t think we needed another drama about the Lockerbie air disaster. I was wrong.
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The BBC Sounds series Stalked is thrilling and worrying
With sensitive reporting, Carole Cadwalladr and Hannah Mossman Moore highlight the lack of safeguarding for victims of stalking.
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Alsace’s wines defy its turbulent history
The French region has overcome a legacy of religious and political conflict to compete with its highly regarded neighbours.
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In the presence of the Great English Bore
How a pleasant day at the cricket turned into dismal anthropology.
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Life at home is a delicate balance
One of the hardest things about my strained back is my lack of agency.
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This England: Never mind the knock-offs
This column – which, though named after a line in Shakespeare’s “Richard II”, refers to the whole of Britain…
ByPlease email [email protected] if you would like to be featured.
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Adjoa Andoh Q&A: “Life is a miracle – don’t waste it on not being yourself”
The actor on Pippi Longstocking and being painted by Lucian Freud.
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