Brexit: 1649 or 1688?
A review of the Brexit debate as reflected in the pages of the Guardian newspaper from May 1st, 2016
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Press Button B
A raft of books from the US suggests that as a society we have made a Faustian pact with the tech giants and there is now no getting out of it. But have we really lost all freedom of action?…
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What Is To Be Done?
The philosopher Slavoj Žižek challenges what he sees as a facile left-liberal consensus, asking how many immigrants from Islamic countries really want to be integrated into the norms and practices of Western societies. What if the obstacle to integration is…
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On The Money
In the London Review of Books John Lanchester envisages the possible disappearance, facilitated by new secure technologies, of money and banks. Would this be a good thing or would it make it even more difficult than it already is to…
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Red, Pink and Blue
Samuel Freeman in ‘The New York Review of Books’ finds Roger Scruton’s inclusion of American progressive liberal thinkers in his general denunciation of hard left theorists unconvincing.
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Follow the Money
We would like to think that finance is the handmaiden of politics and can be bent to the will of benign policy-makers. But forces inherent in the financial system, national and international, have often historically pre-determined political and economic outcomes.
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Leading on Climate Change
The outlook after the COP21 summit is certainly better than after Copenhagen in 2009. But there is still a mismatch between the EU’s declaration of climate leadership and the resources it devotes to exercising that with the huge states of…
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Kafka on Thames
The injustice done to British broadcaster Paul Gambaccini as part of the Yewtree investigation leads one to wonder if the presumption of innocence can survive in a legal system which permits the police and media to destroy a person’s reputation…
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Body And Soul
Ta Nehisi Coates contends that white supremacy is a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. Marilynne Robinson argues that moral revival, though its results are never enough, is also central to…
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Getting the Left on Track
A new book that argues that the way forward for social democracy is more state, more tax, more spending fails to convince. If these were recipes likely to be favoured by the electorate there would be social democratic governments thriving…