The Left Power List 2024

Britain’s gentle revolution

Labour has benefited from years of Tory misrule, but does it have the capacity to deliver national renewal?

Letter of the week: The joys of spring

Write to [email protected] to have your thoughts voiced in the New Statesman magazine.

The officer class is swelling Labour’s ranks

Your weekly dose of gossip from the campaign trail.

What the West gets wrong about the war in Ukraine

If Kyiv’s allies had identified Putin’s invasion as an act of colonisation, they might have won more support from…

Wigan’s underdog spirit

A northern takeover of Wembley, a D-Day tribute, and the greatest try ever.

Kemi Badenoch and the legal definition of sex

The presumptive front-runner for the next Conservative leadership contest has been unfairly vilified.

The seismic radicalism of Nigel Farage

Liberals and mainstream Conservatives loathe him. But he understands something important about the fractious mood in the country.

Waging lawfare against Trump will not end well for Democrats

Progressives must speak out against partiality in the legal process and the endless persecution of the former president.

Keir Starmer’s promise of stability will come back to haunt him

With Britain in ruins, change without disruption means no change at all.

The Conservative Party may not survive this election

A deepening identity crisis has left the Tories unable to appeal to either centrists or populists.

Teenagers don’t need mandatory national service: politicians do

With citizenship training for MPs, the Commons would see a marked improvement, as would our response to crises.

There is no cultural armada behind today’s left

Our artistic consumption has become divorced from our political imagination.

Love, loathing and Lucian Freud

Rose Boyt’s memoir of her controlling father reveals a relationship defined by cruelty and shame.

The petit bourgeois insurrection

Family-owned firms now sit at the heart of America’s fraying democracy.

From Iain Sinclair to Colombe Schneck: new books reviewed in short

Also featuring Going Home by Tom Lamont and The Roads to Rome by Catherine Fletcher.

John Burnside’s soul music

The late poet, novelist and New Statesman columnist was equally attuned to the natural world and what lies beyond…

The Born in the USA fallacy

Forty years ago Bruce Springsteen’s bleak portrait of America’s discarded working class was miscast as a patriotic anthem.

Viggo Mortensen’s self-indulgent western

In The Dead Don’t Hurt, the actor struggles to update an archaic genre.

Queenie is a crude parody of real women

The charmless TV adaptation of Candice Carty-Williams’s novel is full of cliché, cod psychology and faux empowerment.

The sensory delights of Spirited Away

The London Coliseum’s stage version of the Studio Ghibli film is a feat of both engineering and aesthetics.

Breaking sugar’s hold makes culinary pleasures even sweeter

Having reset my relationship with sugary food, I’m no longer led by my sweet tooth.

An assisted cycle through scenic Silesia

How I conquered picturesque Polish volcanoes, e-bikes and endless vegetarian meals.

Rediscovering the bright lights

An old album and a Pet Shop Boys gig remind me of music’s power to refresh memories and forge…

This England: Clucking hell

This column – which, though named after a line in Shakespeare’s “Richard II”, refers to the whole of Britain…

What do you do? Professor of business enterprise and innovation at the University of Essex. Where do you live?…

James Shapiro Q&A: “I’d like to live in 1600s London – just for a week”

The American academic on finding fulfilment in Shakespeare, structuralism and dry-stone walls.