Category: British Politics
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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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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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The 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…
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National 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.”
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Debasing Citizenship
“That Labour should make these proposals reveals its profound, paternalistic hostility to the idea of democratic self-government.”
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The Graveyard of Euroscepticism
“There could hardly be a more fitting place for the graveyard of Euroscepticism than Northern Ireland…”
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Book 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.’
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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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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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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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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”
The Northern Star 