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Who’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…
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The 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…
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Avoiding 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…
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Conscription 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…
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Burying 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…
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Their 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…
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The 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…
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The 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…
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Save 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…
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Shuffling 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…
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Waving 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…
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The 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…
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Nation-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…
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The 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…
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Australia’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’…
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Political 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…
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The 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…
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When 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…
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Eurocentric Cosmopolitanism
Peter Ramsay reviews Hans Kundnani, Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (Hurst, 2023)
The Northern Star 