Towards a Gender-Critical Nationalism
Peter Ramsay reviews a new book that explains the transnational character of queer politics and the national character of gay and women’s rights. Book Review: Alexander Stoffel, Eros and Empire: The Transnational Struggle for Sexual Freedom in the United States (Stanford University Press, 2025) (Long read) The revelation earlier this year that the gender ideologists at Stonewall were…
Keep readingEthnonationalism: Last Refuge of Globalism
Philip Cunliffe thinks we have no national interest in ethnonationalism. (Long read) Ethnonationalism has reared its head in British politics, sowing division on the Right and providing vindication once again for the Left’s perennial prophecy of a looming fascist menace. It is an unsurprising development. As the electorate has grown increasingly frustrated by the failure of successive governments…
Keep readingBritain Against the Yookay: Nation Against Empire
Philip Cunliffe identifies the source of the increasing fragmentation of British politics and society in the imperial structures of the state, and its long experience of relying on devolved government and sectarianism to frustrate the national self-determination of the colonised. We live in the Yookay. Everyone instantly recognises their lives and surroundings in the social media memes displaying…
Keep readingGeopolitics at the End of the End of History
Lee Jones recently spoke to a conference of logistics professionals about the rapid changes in global politics. He argued that the current chaos is the result of the continuing decay of the old neoliberal order, and that this is leading to the militarisation of international relations, regionalisation of the world economy, and the redundancy of the existing political…
Keep readingChanging the Regime, Building the Nation
Philip Cunliffe explains why nation-building is the solution to the impasse in Western politics identified by Perry Anderson as the Regime. In a recent essay for the London Review of Books, Perry Anderson plots out the deadlock confronting political parties of both left and right across Western states, and notes that this deadlock paralyses both insurgent as well…
Keep readingDeath Warmed Up
Peter Ramsay argues that the British right’s proposal for a Great Repeal Act only reveals the futility of its approach to the nation. An online Anglofuturist put out a video last week weaving together the words of the Tory politician Robert Jenrick, ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe and conservative historian David Starkey, each promoting the proposal for a Great…
Keep readingThe Politics of Planning
Aaron Wells explains how Labour’s new Planning and Infrastructure Bill is unlikely to untangle the political problems in the planning process that plays such a large part in Britain’s building crisis. Housing Secretary Angela Rayner MP talks a big game about ‘taking on the blockers’ who stand in the way of development, but NIMBYism and Britain’s building malaise…
Keep readingTrump’s Tool: The Limits of Bannon’s Postmodern Nationalism
In Washington, the struggle within Trump’s coalition between MAGA and Musk is picking up steam. Alex Gourevitch thinks MAGA’s fascist-saluting champion Steve Bannon is likely to be on the losing end. It has been strange watching Steve Bannon not just stalking DC but having nearly reclaimed his place on stage. Even for a culture that is a sucker…
Keep readingMunich 2025: Trump, Vance and the end of Anti-Fascism
Philip Cunliffe asks whether Trump 2.0 marks not only the decisive end of the post-Cold War era, but also the end of an ideological framework that has dominated global politics since the 1940s. As European leaders were arriving for the Munich Security Conference 2025, Donald Trump was on the phone to Vladimir Putin talking peace in Eastern Europe.…
Keep readingVance Widens the Horizon
Peter Ramsay on JD Vance’s era-ending Munich speech. I knew I was far from alone as I gasped with astonishment listening to JD Vance speak at the Munich Security Conference last week. It may be a low bar, but this was the most powerful and enjoyable political speech I can recall. There was no soaring rhetoric, barely any…
Keep readingMultipolar Neoconservatism
Alex Gourevitch assesses Donald Trump’s rapid and disruptive intervention into global politics, and exposes the evasion of domestic renewal that lurks in Trump’s apparent territorial ambitions. Is there anything to celebrate about Trump’s national security policy? There is no doubt that he has checked off a number of items that would be on any real democrat or internationalist’s…
Keep readingIs Trump 2 the End of ‘Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome’?
Lee Jones asks why the liberal expert class may be changing its tune in the wake of Trump’s re-election. Doesn’t this time feel different? Is it possible that the liberal establishment is finally winding down its eight-year temper tantrum and coming to terms with reality? While it may be too soon to tell, reactions to Donald Trump’s re-election…
Keep readingNow Trump is Out of Excuses
Peter Ramsay argues that the American election is not only a stunning defeat for the world’s authoritarian liberal elites, but also a victory for democracy, albeit a temporary and equivocal one. Above all, the result means that Trump’s brand of populism is out of political excuses, and we are about to find out if it has any substance.…
Keep readingTwo Cheers for the Chagos Deal
Philip Cunliffe argues that the deal with Mauritius over the Chagos Islands is in the national interest, even if it was done for the wrong reasons. The British government has finally relinquished its sovereign claim over the Chagos Islands, Britain’s last African colony. Although an international treaty has yet to be finalised Britain has in principle granted sovereignty…
Keep readingReconstituting the Nations: Britain and Ireland after Brexit
This is the text of a talk given by Peter Ramsay to the Desmond Greaves Summer School 2024 in Dublin. He argues that the reconstitution of a sovereign nation-state in Britain depends on the achievement of Irish national sovereignty, and that the relation of the two nations exemplifies the inherent internationalism of the politics of national sovereignty. (It’s…
Keep readingThe Heart of Starmer’s Government
As the war in Eastern Europe escalates with Ukraine’s raid on Russia, Tara McCormack asks why Keir Starmer has pledged to put Ukraine at the heart of everything his government does. Britain’s new Labour government can be accused of vagueness and even dishonesty in its campaign to get elected. However, in one area at least it has been…
Keep readingThe Far-Right Excuse
Peter Ramsay argues that the official reaction to the recent riots in England is an ideological distortion that seeks to deflect responsibility for national disintegration. The riots and disorder that spread across Britain last week involved outright racial violence and intimidation, criminal damage and looting. They were widely condemned, and prosecutors are rightly taking action against the rioters.…
Keep readingWhy Britain needs PR+
In the wake of the general election, Peter Ramsay considers the strongest argument for Britain’s existing electoral system, and explains why it no longer works. He argues that we now need proportional representation, but that won’t be enough to reinvigorate democratic participation in government unless it is part of a larger reform to the electoral system. Britain’s First-Past-the-Post…
Keep readingRule of the Void
The UK’s general election result might seem like a restoration of the old pre-2016 political order. A bland technocrat has won a sweeping majority. However, Peter Ramsay and Philip Cunliffe argue that Labour’s massive victory is hollow and leaves the state in a weaker position than ever. The election results are a dramatic manifestation of the political void…
Keep readingWhy the Nation Matters
With a General Election looming, Peter Ramsay spoke last week at the London School of Economics about why the survival of the British nation is in doubt and why the politics of culture war are an evasion of the problem rather than a solution. Here is an edited version of what he said. Benedict Anderson defined a nation…
Keep readingWho’s Afraid of the WHO?
For more than a year many anti-lockdown campaigners have been scaremongering about a World Health Organisation power-grab entailing new draconian measures in the event of another pandemic. With news that the WHO’s revised International Health Regulations will be much less intrusive than feared, Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri argue that framing the WHO as the primary threat to…
Keep readingThe British Nation: What’s Its future?
Northern Star editor Peter Ramsay will be speaking about the future of the British nation together with David Edgerton, author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, and Tomiwa Owolade, author of This Is Not America: Why Black Lives in Britain Matter. The event is free and takes place: Thursday 2nd May 6.30pm London School of Economics, Marshall Building,…
Keep readingAvoiding the British Question
Following the recent restoration of devolved government to Northern Ireland after two years of paralysis, Pauline Hadaway investigates the permanent crisis that is Northern Ireland’s politics, and asks why Britain is keeping the Union on life support. Over 100 years after the Unionist Party elected James Craig as Northern Ireland’s first Prime Minister, Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill has…
Keep readingConscription and the Void in Foreign Policy
Recent discussions in Britain over the reintroduction of conscription only expose the dangerous void between rulers and ruled, argues Lizzie Finnegan. The outgoing Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Patrick Sanders, recently stirred public controversy by proposing that the British armed forces should be significantly expanded by training and equipping a ‘citizen army’ capable of rebuffing a…
Keep readingBurying Brexit to Save Stormont
Peter Ramsay on how Sunak’s deal with the DUP neutralises Brexit and confirms what we have previously argued on The Northern Star: that Britain’s national sovereignty needs Ireland’s reunification. Jeffrey Donaldson’s announcement that the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) will end its two-year boycott of the devolved power-sharing executive that governs Northern Ireland is bad news for Britain. The…
Keep readingTheir Fight, Not Ours
As the West goes to war against Yemen, Alex Gourevitch examines the demented character of Washington’s imperial policy in the Middle East and its remoteness from Americans’ national interest. In a recent comment, President Biden admitted that American attacks on the Houthis in Yemen were not working but that they would continue anyway. It is tempting to dismiss…
Keep readingThe Embers
23 January 2024 Give Thermonuclear World War a Chance Russia’s conspicuous failure to make much westward progress through Ukraine appears not to have discouraged European leaders who are keen to stoke war fever and fear of ‘barbarians at the gates’ among their own citizens. In aspiring NATO member Sweden, a minister declared ‘there could be war in Sweden’,…
Keep readingSunak’s ‘Easy Ban’ Strategy
What does a government do when it has lost the political authority to get anything done? It starts banning things, argues Jack Morgan Jones. First, they came for our pit bulls. Then, they came for our cigs and vapes. In December, we learned that Rishi Sunak’s Tories are apparently deliberating a social-media ban for teens, and while a…
Keep readingThe Embers
21 December 2023 Lockdown lowdown A think-tank report on poverty in the UK described lockdown as ‘the dynamite that blew … open’ the ‘yawning gap between those who can get by and those stuck at the bottom’. According to the report, during lockdown mental ill-health increased from one in nine young people to one in six, severe school…
Keep readingSave Us from National Saviours
Philip Cunliffe considers the current interest in ‘Anglo-Gaullism’ among some British conservatives, and asks whether there is any prospect of a national saviour on the French model coming to the rescue of an exhausted British nation. With the nation in the grip of palpable decay, our existing political system offers no prospect of change or meaningful improvement. After…
Keep readingShuffling Between Populism and Technocracy
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s latest cabinet reshuffle exposes a crumbling government torn between mindless populism and deadend, unaccountable technocracy, argues Lizzie Finegan. Another day, another cabinet reshuffle. The primary victim was Home Secretary Suella Braverman, darling of the right-populist wing of Britain’s Conservative Party. The prime beneficiary was ex-prime minister David Cameron. Rising from the political grave…
Keep readingWaving the Wrong Flags
The rancorous divisions in Britain over the war between Israel and Hamas exemplify the decadence of our national politics. Peter Ramsay argues that the claims of both sides in the dispute are toxic to the sovereignty of the British people. The sacking of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary is the culmination of an extraordinary round of reckless political…
Keep readingThe Embers
10 November 2023 Just when Keir Smarmer might have begun to think that he could ride a low turnout to electoral victory, the world’s most intractable conflict has emerged from the Void to wreck his plans. The Labour leadership’s idea was to bore its way into government by saying as little as possible. But now that strategy may…
Keep readingNation-Building
Last week Peter Ramsay and Philip Cunliffe spoke at the 2023 Battle of Ideas festival in London about the lessons of Brexit. They argued that Brexit teaches us that if we are ever to take control of our state then we need an independent politics of nation-building. Here is what they said. Peter Ramsay: I am going to…
Keep readingThe Embers
24 October Ollie Richardson pokes about again in the smouldering ruins of our politics. The commentariat have been examining every twitch and fart of the Labour Party’s decomposing corpse for any reassuring parallels with New Labour in the run-up to 1997. Even by the standards of Blairite propaganda, it is a show of chutzpah to cast Sir Keir…
Keep readingAustralia’s Brexit Moment
In our book Taking Control, the editors of The Northern Star argue that the Remainer response to Brexit exposed the liberal British elite’s fear and loathing of the masses of working people. Here Craig Smith explains how Australia has just experienced its own version of Britain’s Brexit moment, as citizens reject a proposed ‘indigenous Voice’ to parliament. On…
Keep readingPolitical Thinking vs Moral Posturing
The Hamas attack on southern Israel was a terrible sectarian massacre of civilians. The Western left’s willingness to apologise for it, or in some cases even celebrate it, is a dangerous development, giving a free pass to depraved acts carried out in the name of religious supremacism and anti-Semitism. However merely condemning Islamist violence and its leftist enablers…
Keep readingThe Embers
10th October 2023 British politics has been overshadowed this week by news of the atrocities committed by Hamas in its attack into Israel. Peter Ramsay reflects here on the responses from British commentators, too many of which fall into one or other of ‘two poisonous half truths’. Below Ollie Richardson takes a look at other recent news: Down…
Keep readingWhen Failed States Go to War
The atrocities committed by Hamas fighters in Israel represent a political failure that is matched by the stupidity of the reaction to them in the West, argues Peter Ramsay. The massacres, hostage-taking and humiliation of prisoners during the Hamas attack on Israel are vile and shocking: as vile and shocking as they were predictable. For decades now a…
Keep readingEurocentric Cosmopolitanism
Peter Ramsay reviews Hans Kundnani, Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (Hurst, 2023)
Keep readingThe Northern Star at Large
Northern Star writers have been at work elsewhere this summer. You can catch up with them here (some links paywalled). On the seventh anniversary of Brexit, Peter Ramsay wrote for Unherd about what Brexit has taught us about British politics. In June, Peter gave a talk to launch our book Taking Control at the Liverpool Salon. He was…
Keep readingNational Sovereignty or Bust
“national sovereignty is a dangerous term for a Left that despises the nation (and in particular its working-class members), and an impossible one for a Right that may be able to stomach the nation but blanches at giving the population real influence over economic decisions.”
Keep readingDebasing Citizenship
“That Labour should make these proposals reveals its profound, paternalistic hostility to the idea of democratic self-government.”
Keep readingThe Graveyard of Euroscepticism
“There could hardly be a more fitting place for the graveyard of Euroscepticism than Northern Ireland…”
Keep readingBook Launch
‘This is the most important book to come out of the struggles over Britain’s membership of the EU, and it makes all other works on the subject look trivial.’
Keep readingBrexit from NATO
“It took two decades of provocation by NATO before Russia was finally faced with the prospect of American nuclear missiles along its 1000 mile-long border with Ukraine and decided to invade.”
Keep readingThe Triumph of Global Britain
“The failures of Brexit so far must be laid on Tory Brexiters themselves: their inability to understand that economic growth was about much more than trade deals, and their resultant inability to deliver policies that were meaningfully different enough to demonstrate an authentic political independence of the status quo.”
Keep readingKeeping Control
“Instead of evaporating national sovereignty into the supranational forums of the EU, Starmer proposes to dissolve it away into local government.”
Keep readingNarcissism Goes to War
Peter Ramsay reviews Benjamin Abelow, How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How US and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe
Keep readingSovereignty and Industrial Relations
“By making the national arena of politics more meaningful, Brexit also makes industrial conflict and distributional struggles more meaningful, too.”
Keep readingNew Section: Book Reviews
George Hoare reviews Oliver Eagleton, The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right and
Phil Hammond reviews Frank Furedi, The Road to Ukraine: How the West Lost its Way
Keep readingWhatever Happened to the National Interest?
“Embedded in the idea of the national interest is the principle that there is a greater good that can be institutionalised through state structures and policy, and that political power can be meaningfully exercised to protect a people’s collective interests.”
Keep readingWhen Is a Coup not a Coup?
“The language of ‘soft coup’ tends to hide as much as it reveals about the character of the events it describes.”
Keep readingMorgenthau Rides Again: Why is Germany Deindustrialising?
“A Morgenthau Plan Redux is being imposed on Germany not because it has suffered military defeat, but rather as the outcome of a US-led proxy war on Russia, a war that is succeeding in inflicting more immediate damage on Germany than it is on Russia?”
Keep readingBritish Republicanism after Elizabeth
“The Queen was a symbol of the class compromise that lasted from the aftermath of the Second World War until the 1970s.”
Keep readingThe Singaporeans’ Pyrrhic Victory
“Just as the gods of the market have spurned Truss and Kwarteng’s offerings, with dreary predictability, the left has sided with those very same gods…”
Keep readingWho Will Constitute the Nation?
“As the old forms and appearances of nationhood inherited from the past lose their grip on the popular imagination and loyalty, we can more clearly identify the nation’s essence. And it is a potentially inspiring one: it is our own self-government.”
Keep readingWho Should Control Foreign Policy?
“As with Covid policy, to ask the most basic questions about means, ends, costs, benefits with respect to Ukraine is verboten and will draw a barrage of smears”
Keep readingCulture Wars and Wars for Values
“Both at home and abroad, culture-wars politics entails drawing a division between the enlightened, morally-superior minority attuned to the exclusions and oppressions of the vulnerable, and the uninformed, unaware majority who are likely to abuse if they are not re-educated and policed.”
Keep readingNational Sovereignty and International Order
“Surveying the last 30 years from the vantage point of 2022, we can confidently say that the cosmopolitan project has failed.”
Keep readingJohnson’s Populist Evasion
“The problem is not that Boris Johnson’s personal political inadequacy may have endangered the democratic gain that Brexit represents. The problem is that both in 2016 and again in 2019, Brexit had to be led by someone like Johnson.”
Keep readingThe Decay of Liberalism
“There is no hope for liberalism. It has reached the end of the road intellectually: standing itself on its head, subverting its founding commitments, unravelling into incoherence. For as long as decadent illiberal liberalism continues in power it will continue to degrade the state and to fragment civil society.”
Keep readingSinn Féin at the Crossroads
‘Sinn Féin’s strategy…seems to be moving closer to models of regional governance within the European Union and further away from the sovereign 32-county republic that inspired past generations’
Keep readingThe Problem with the Protocol is the Union
“The way to end the anti-democratic and Brexit-strangling Protocol is for Britain to start engaging constructively in the discussion of how the reunification of Ireland could be achieved”
Keep readingWhy the Tories Are Blowing Brexit
“…as Johnson cosplays as Winston Churchill in Ukraine, the domestic political task of ‘levelling up’ remains unaddressed.”
Keep readingWhy the West Hates Russia
Anti-Russian obsession had already reached fever pitch well before Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
Keep readingAnalysis: Vulnerability as Ideology
In a series of three articles, Peter Ramsay argues that the concept of vulnerability provides an organising ideology for contemporary capitalist society, serving to present the interests of the powerful in maintaining the political and economic status quo as the interests of all.
Keep readingBrexit from NATO
“It is Russia that has invaded Ukraine, but it is NATO’s high-handed indifference to political reality that has provoked the war. Reckless is a polite way of describing NATO’s policy.”
Keep readingUkraine: The Reality of Sovereignty
“True respect for Ukrainian national sovereignty necessitates a careful policy of national neutrality, a policy that is also respected by foreign powers. The country’s leaders have for many years been doing their bit to ensure the opposite.”
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