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The 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.”
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Keeping Control
“Instead of evaporating national sovereignty into the supranational forums of the EU, Starmer proposes to dissolve it away into local government.”
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Narcissism 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
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Sovereignty and Industrial Relations
“By making the national arena of politics more meaningful, Brexit also makes industrial conflict and distributional struggles more meaningful, too.”
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New 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
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Whatever 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.”
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When 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.”
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Morgenthau 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?”
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British 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.”
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The 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…”
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Who 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.”
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Who 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”
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Culture 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.”
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National 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.”
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Johnson’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.”
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The 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.”
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Sinn 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’
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The 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”
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Why the Tories Are Blowing Brexit
“…as Johnson cosplays as Winston Churchill in Ukraine, the domestic political task of ‘levelling up’ remains unaddressed.”
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Why the West Hates Russia
Anti-Russian obsession had already reached fever pitch well before Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.