Sea Change

We all know that the first rule of the modern world is to expect the unexpected. Corbyn, Brexit and Donald J Trump. Ex-Russian spies poisoned with nerve agent in Salisbury and ex-Russian journalists emerging alive in Kiev, having been assassinated less than 24 hours earlier. There’s really nothing that should surprise us. That Irish referendum last weekend though. A huge victory for women and a turn of events that would not have been predicted a year ago. Ireland’s Taoiseach Leo Varadkar took a big risk when he pushed ahead with the poll on a pretty tight timescale. He was vindicated by a spectacular 2:1 victory for liberalisation that would simply not have been possible in 20 th Century Éire. This was, after all, a country in which the conservative Catholic Church was completely entangled with the state and the expectation was that people would always defer to the religious order. No more. But the surprise referendum produced another twist. Suddenly attention w...

The best way of thinking about Brexit is to picture a minefield or maybe a darkened labyrinth with a number of carefully-laid tripwires. Any false move along the way and there’s a danger of a detonation. So Theresa May can’t run freely, as she once did through the wheat fields of her youth. She tiptoes cautiously and brings along her bomb disposal experts. So far, no explosion. But the mines and tripwires stretch off into the distance. And there’s a deadly surprise lying in store. Even if you manage to make it to the end of the maze, a blast is set to go off on a timer anyway. The more I look at the politics of Brexit, the more I see circles that just cannot be squared. Just decisions and crunch points that get endlessly deferred. Until eventually there’s no more road left. If you’re the DUP, you believe in Brexit, but you don’t want a hard border. At the same time, you don’t want regulatory alignment with the EU and a border in the middle of the Irish Sea. Tripwi...

Until recently, Windrush was probably a name that resonated mainly among the Afro-Caribbean community, political activists and students of British social history. In 2018, it has become a household discussion point, synonymous with scandal and the appalling mistreatment of a community that deserved respect and admiration. There is no need to rehearse the detail here, as it has been covered extensively across the media in recent weeks. We have listened to stories of personal tragedy, bureaucratic intransigence and the creation of an environment so ‘hostile’ that it led to people being harassed and even deported with no just cause. The furore has engulfed Theresa May’s government and rightly so. It’s led to the resignation of one of her most senior ministers and trusted allies. But there is one shocking revelation that has attracted relatively little attention. Recent opinion polls show that Windrush has seemingly had no impact on levels of Conservative Party support. ...