Ending the welfare trap
Labour must not only make benefits less attractive, but make work more so.
ByThe Magazine
In this week’s issue
Why Britain isn’t working
Letter of the week: Missed connections
Write to [email protected] to have your thoughts voiced in the New Statesman magazine.
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Labour’s boulevard of broken promises
Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.
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Mark Carney can’t save Canada
Is a technocratic, career economist really the man to take on Donald Trump?
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Seeking solace in poetry
Also this week: Steve McQueen’s powerful exhibition and Labour’s frustrating curriculum and assessment review.
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Can the British Council be saved?
CEO Scott McDonald on an imperilled institution.
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Labour’s collision course
Keir Starmer is in an economic bind. The fallout could fracture his party.
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Daily Mail redundancies are being watched by Fleet Street with horror
Also this week: a conspiracy theorist at the FBI, and Meta’s free-speech wobble.
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How did the BBC’s Gaza documentary ever get broadcast?
Cuts have hollowed out the corporation’s decks of talent – to the point where catastrophic errors slip through.
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European leaders still aren’t facing reality on Ukraine
No matter how they spin it, there is no practical alternative to American military power.
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How the right weaponised the “vibe shift”
What’s brewing in America isn’t a cultural turn – it’s a political catastrophe.
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Why Britain isn’t working
How the benefits system became a danger to the economy and a battleground for Labour.
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The return of America First
From trade wars to peace deals, Donald Trump’s ruthlessly transactional politics treats global crises as opportunities for American gain.
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How not to build a nation
Britain and the US lack the political will and legal means to innovate.
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The NS Poem: The Health Check Crapshoot
A new poem by Claudine Toutoungi.
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Inside the media circus
Natasha Brown’s Universality is a wincing satire of journalism, publishing and cancel culture.
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Pilgrims of a lost Palestine
In Forgotten, writers Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson explore the careless treatment and outright destruction of Palestinians’ most precious…
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Our overdiagnosis epidemic
How a marked rise in the treatment of certain conditions – physical and mental – is harming, not protecting,…
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From Becky Barnicoat to Nick Trend: new books reviewed in short
Also featuring The Library of Ancient Wisdom by Selena Wisnom and Holy Places: How Pilgrimage Changed the World by…
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The Leopard and the ruins of history
Newly adapted by Netflix, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel is a lesson in the anarchic motions of our times.
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Murder in the care home
The Rule of Jenny Pen doesn’t need the supernatural to scare us – the terrifying prospect of getting old…
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Jack Thorne’s Adolescence is how crime drama should be done
This Netflix series is a veritable pageant of sophisticated anxiety and dread.
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The rise of Gracie Abrams
That Abrams is not quite ready for and a little startled by her early fame is part of her…
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On Mayhem, Lady Gaga makes a chaotic return to form
The singer’s new album attempts to recapture the intense art-project pop of her early records.
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We should admire the complexity of garden design
There’s much more to it than wafting around in a kaftan.
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We lose more than pounds when we substitute weight-loss jabs for exercise
Regular physical activity has many other benefits.
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In my shopping basket I see a feast of brown
I have become more dependent on the staples of Englishness.
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I am content to be (temporarily) alone – bar the nightmares
The truth is, there’s pleasure in solitude.
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This England: Addressed by the haggis
This column – which, though named after a line in Shakespeare’s “Richard II”, refers to the whole of Britain…
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Subscriber of the week: Geraldine Finn
Please email [email protected] if you would like to be featured.
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Laila Lalami Q&A: “Power is a dynamic. It doesn’t flow in just one direction”
The essayist and novelist on Spanish history, Aretha Franklin and meeting her heroes
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