Leader: The end of capitalist realism?
In the years before the 2008 financial crisis, liberalism appeared to have triumphed in the United Kingdom and beyond.…
ByNew Statesman Magazine
In this week’s magazine
The English Question
Jo Swinson began the campaign boasting she would be the next PM, so why did it all go wrong for her?
Why aren’t the Liberal Democrats doing better? This is an election in which both major parties are campaigning in…
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What the Chinese are doing to the Uighurs in Xinjiang could become a model for elsewhere
In a recent episode of the dystopian anthology series Black Mirror – spoiler alert! – the British police are…
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As a teenager, I did things more intensely – be it music, poetry or wallowing in my own pain
A few years ago, I was living back home in Ireland for three months gathering reserves and emotional energy…
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For José Mourinho the art of management is one part detail and two parts salesmanship
English football has always had a curious fixation with its managers. We seem uniquely convinced that the power of…
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Life in the electoral wilderness
In 1997 Tony Blair defeated John Major in a general election, ending nearly two decades of Tory rule. I…
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Commons Confidential: Wrath of Ian Blackford, the humble crofter
Jeremy Corbyn’s grandfatherly focus on providing more free childcare may reflect a traumatic experience of his grey eminence, Seumas…
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“What’s missing in the work of Richard Dawkins is social justice”
Jovial, clean-cut and impeccably tailored, Martin Hägglund has been hailed as “the most important young philosopher in America”. Born…
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First Thoughts: No time for Attlee, Jeremy Clarkson’s jet boat and a new home for Prince Andrew
Labour’s £82.9bn manifesto is compared to the programme of Clement Attlee’s 1945-51 Labour government. It quotes from the 1945…
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Leader: A world in revolt
As Generation Z adopts a militant stance against racial inequality, demands for change can no longer be ignored.
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The return of Freaks and Geeks, TV’s greatest teen drama
Freaks and Geeks is one of those strange shows that, many years later, seem like magic preserved in celluloid.…
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Knives Out: a smartphone-era whodunit with a smart pay-off
The name’s Blanc. Benoit Blanc. And, as played delightfully by Daniel Craig in Knives Out, this Louisiana detective is presiding…
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Elton John: Uncensored: a strange case of openness without candour
If Graham Norton’s questions were far from searching, John’s answers were accompanied by neither feeling nor reflection.
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The BBC’s radio adaptation of George Eliot’s Middlemarch is pitch-perfect
To a provincial town in England. Not in the south, not in the north. But “somewhere around the middle”,…
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How to delay the effects of climate change on our gardens
It is several years since you could last open a newspaper and not see it mentioned – on most…
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“Are you by any chance Nick Lezard?” This question can, of course, go two ways
The solitude almost assumes physical form after 11 o’clock at night. Everyone else goes up the wooden hill to…
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Recalling the Raincoats and Grease – and the very different effects they had on my teenage self
It’s a Sunday evening in Hackney, I’m at the Raincoats gig with my friend Gina, and tonight we’re gonna…
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The vote to scrap GP home visits is a stark illustration of the NHS’s unrelenting crisis
Doris is in her late eighties. She has a degree of heart failure, but the thing that renders her…
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Norman Jay Q&A: “David Attenborough gives me a reason to continue living”
Norman Jay MBE was born in Notting Hill in 1957. He started DJ’ing at warehouse parties in the 1980s…
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Drugs and misdemeanours: Will Self’s memoir Will
The metaphysics begin with the dust-jacket: a big black “Will”. Underneath, an almost invisibly white “Self”. They are divided…
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Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming: dense world-building that glitters with comic detail
“Well and so here we are again, back with fear, because gigantic tomes should be written about that, a…
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