Why might Trump not want to win the election?
llustrations by Hannah Robinson Donald Trump is in trouble. He may have recovered from COVID-19, but his campaign is riddled with disease. Trump trails in some national polls by double digits….
What can we learn from the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg?
Illustration by Felix Pawlyn The recent death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg has exposed the lack of democracy at the heart of the US political system. Justice Ginsburg, who died in…
Presidential debates and Supreme Court nominations: the US election so far
llustrations by Hannah Robinson In boxing, a boxer who overreaches can usually expect to find himself on the canvas. The same tends to apply to politics. Throughout the US presidential campaign…
Is it time up for TikTok?
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson TikTok; the video-sharing app that no one can stop talking about and the app that will be responsible for making me fail university. It is addictive, and…
Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and dereliction of duty
This week it ‘emerged’ that Donald Trump knew coronavirus was deadly in February. He knew and did nothing. With polls narrowing, Democrats are seizing this in order to double down…
The Abraham Accord: winners and loser
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson “Everybody said this would be impossible”. With these Trumpian words, on August 13th, the US President announced the “Abraham Accord”, an agreement brokered between the United Arab…
Will Trump become a tyrant?
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson It’s unusual to start an article with a caveat, but then these are unusual times. I’m not an Oracle but I still see no way that Donald…
We must not let critiquing of China lead to prejudice
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson Over the last few months, the People’s Republic of China has been in the spotlight, and rightfully so. Despite many of us in the West not agreeing…
Why are female leaders excelling at fighting COVID-19?
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a lot of media attention paid to the link between the gender of leaders and the effectiveness of their…
Can a safe choice help Biden win the “referendum” on Trump?
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson Due to many mail-in votes it seems unlikely that there will be a U.S Presidential election winner on November 3rd. I’ll go one further; there probably won’t…
Trump and Bolsonaro’s COVID-19 fake news is worsening our infodemic
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson In February of this year, the Director-General of the World Health Organization declared an ‘infodemic’. As COVID-19 began to spread at a terrifyingly rapid pace across the…
From Dystopian YA fiction to Black Lives Matter; the evolution of the revolution
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson On Monday 1st June, President Trump stood outside Washington D.C.’s St John’s Church holding up a Bible; in a photo-op meant to show the strength and resilience…
Donald Trump is set for a one term presidency
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson Logic has been cast aside with bombastic disdain by Donald Trump, a populist outsider who confounds expectation. His opponents do not want to be made electorally foolish…
Biden has to prove he is capable of making the promises of change a reality
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson Following George Floyd’s death, and the subsequent protest marches, the US has become even more divided– between those fighting for change, versus those fighting to sustain the…
America’s racist history – how we can make the future different?
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson Three weeks ago, I wrote an article commenting on how the fatal shooting of unarmed black jogger Ahmaud Arbery was symptomatic of a system which prioritizes the…
The UK Government’s deafening silence is complicity of the highest order
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson On Sunday, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab decided to change the job description of one of the Great Offices of State, in order to appease a racist. When…
Complacency is complicity: black lives matter in the UK too
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson “Please I can’t breathe. My stomach hurts. My neck hurts. Everything hurts. They’re going to kill me.” GEORGE FLOYD, 2020. “I can’t breathe.” ERIC GARNER, 2014. People…
Pandemics and populists: democracy’s ancient enemies
Illustrations by Felix Pawlyn The 2010s saw various pillars of global liberal democracy being swept away by a wave of international populism. America and Britain both fell prey to populist…
Why has COVID-19 brought a return of Yellow Peril?
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson Last week Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, stated that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused “a tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scare-mongering”. This effect of the…
Beware the age of the Political Fool
Illustration by Hannah Robinson It is fashionable to label political eras. The last 60 years of American Presidency, for instance, is normally divided into imperial, imperilled and post-imperial segments. David Runciman,…
COVID-19: The End of the American Century
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson Donald Trump’s petulance on the global stage during this crisis has provided an open door for others to take control of global hegemony. The 45th President of…
COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on the LGBTQ+ community
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson While the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic has many believing that ‘we’re all in the same boat’, for minority communities the virus does, in fact, discriminate. Not…
Ahmaud Arbery’s story is more sombre proof of the reality of rights before lives
Illustration by Hannah Robinson On April 22nd, 1993, 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death by white supremacists whilst waiting at a bus stop in South-East London. On the 28th April…
I Would’ve Voted for Trump in 2016 – But I Have Since Changed My Mind
To understand why the majority of America voted Trump, you need to understand the climate of 2016. Obama, the man that promised ‘Yes, we can!’ had broken a string of…
Trump’s handling of this crisis exposes his shocking campaign tactics
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson President Trump’s daily press conferences are incomparable to anything politics has seen before. Topics range from him being number one on Facebook (for what nobody knows) anti-malarial…
Fake news hysteria can only lead to fake solutions
Illustration by Hannah Robinson Fake news has become an omnipresent aspect of politics around the globe. It appears that no election, referendum, or debate can happen without this ubiquitous term being…
Iran vows “severe revenge”; but who will actually suffer?
Illustration by Hannah Robinson Following the death of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani the world has, quite frankly, gone into a spin. Three days into the new year and Trump is tweeting…
Political accountability is key
Illustration by Hannah Robinson Since his immortalisation in James Graham’s epic drama, Brexit: the uncivil war, Dominic Cummings has become something of a political celebrity. When the Prime Minister included…
Trump’s shutdown is unnecessary and cruel
I found peace following a semester at war with homesickness. Once again able to drive around aimlessly, eat endless pits of Mexican food, catch up with family and friends, remind…
The US can’t ignore the caravan, they helped cause it
On October 13th, in the city of San Pedro Sula in Honduras – the crime capital of the world for two years running – a caravan full of people desperate…
Safe injection sites are short sighted and racially charged
In light of America’s current opioid epidemic, the US government has fallen under immense pressure to come up with a solution. With more than two million Americans suffering from addiction…
Trump be warned: tariff hikes are a historically bad idea
This week Donald Trump criticised well-known US motorcycle firm Harley-Davidson over its proposed plans to shift production away from the US. Such a move was proposed to avoid the recent…
Trump’s immigration U-turn highlights his hypocrisy
Donald Trump, a man who really likes to say he got the job done, has seemingly taken a U-turn in immigration policy this week. Congratulations are in order for the…
Celebrities shouldn’t be expected to be political commentators
On Saturday night, Robert De Niro caused quite the stir when he took the stage to introduce Bruce Springsteen at The Tony Awards. Instead of obsequiously rounding off Springsteen’s achievements…
Hypocrisy and faux outrage are new hallmarks of the right
There has been no escaping the news of the swift downfall of Roseanne Barr. In case you needed reminding, within hours of making racist remarks on Twitter about Obama’s former…
Yeezus or Judas? Liberal elite wants Kanye to repent for his tweets
Kanye West is a maverick in an otherwise monolithic world of pop stars. He has courted controversy his entire life within the public sphere, and where others have an entire…
Triangular diplomacy or playground talk?
What does a 180 turn in North Korean diplomacy really mean? Over the last few months, we have seen Kim Jong Un display a willingness to open up to the…
Sex and the City for president
As Carrie Bradshaw once said, ‘The universe may not always play fair, but at least it’s got a hell of a sense of humour.’ On this week’s episode of ‘Keeping…
Don’t forget about men like Roy Moore
The whirlwind of the patriarchy moves at such a dizzying pace these days that its hard to find time to be upset about something before some new famous man you…