Sea Change

One of the most remarkable things about global politics in 2018 is the huge importance of Russia. Its influence goes way beyond its obvious reach. Beijing is much more powerful than Moscow economically. Washington is still much more powerful than Moscow militarily. But Russia under Putin is a fulcrum on which the politics of North America, Western Europe and the Middle East seems to turn. We are grappling with the idea of Russian interference in elections and referendums. Still reeling from its enormous implications. Press conferences are held in which Putin is questioned on whether he has kompromat on the US President. While the US President is standing right beside him. The US President reminds us that Germany is heavily dependent on Russian energy supplies. UK security services investigate a murder on British soil linked to a Russian nerve agent. We have reconciled ourselves to the fact that the butcher Assad will survive in Syria, because of his powerful ba...

On my bookshelf, I have a copy of an East German publication from 1984, entitled Young People in the GDR Today . Flicking through its pages, I am reassured that that there was no drug addiction or ‘drug scene’ in the former Soviet satellite state and that Nazism was ‘wiped out’ as a philosophy at the end of the Second World War. All good to know. I was reminded of the book when Jeremy Corbyn spoke at the Durham Miners’ Gala this weekend. The Labour Leader, who notoriously toured East Germany on a motorbike in the 1970s withDiane Abbott, announced that under his premiership children in English schools would be taught ‘about the trade union principles of solidarity and collective action, so they are equipped to uphold their rights as workers’. Now, I’m all in favour of people knowing their rights. But the language here suggests a much weirder and more sinister agenda, which speaks volumes about Corbyn’s outmoded politics. He believes that teachers should be involved in imb...

Following the latest dramatic twists in the Brexit saga and the news that David Davis and Boris Johnson had resigned, two groups of people seem particularly jubilant. The first is that insufferable bunch of Remain supporters which believes that the referendum result in 2016 was simply ‘advisory’ and can be ignored or overturned. While the folk in this camp are absolutely right in their assessment of the damage that Brexit will do to the UK economically, they completely misread the political mood beyond their own Twitter-fuelled bubble. A constant refrain is that Parliament stop Brexit or that we have a so-called #peoplesvote on the final deal. Now, they feel their moment has come. The second group consists of paid-up members of the Corbyn fan club (and perhaps some of the Labour Leader’s fellow travellers on the Opposition front bench), who think a general election is now on the cards and that the Brexit debacle can be used as a lever to usher in a socialist government. ...