Tactical voting: how effective is it really?
Illustrations by Megan Le Brocq On May 6th, we go to vote again. For those of us in Scotland, the election will decide which MSPs represent our constituencies in the Scottish…
Biden’s Bold Ambitions
In his first hundred days in office, Joe Biden did not lack ambition. On January 14th, before his inauguration, he announced an enormous $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package that was…
Scottish Election Hustings 2021 and The Backbench podcast: a microcosm of how politics should be
Illustrations by Megan Le Brocq In the very first answer of the hustings, barely five minutes in, Angus Robertson (SNP) encouraged young people to vote, even if they wouldn’t be voting…
Patriotism and the Labour party
Illustrations by Megan Le Brocq Much has been said of late about Keir Starmer’s move to make Labour more patriotic. As is now common with Labour, reactions have been quite decisive….
Global struggles: Ethiopia
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson Ethiopia, situated in the Horn of Africa, is a landlocked country that gets incredibly little airtime on western news channels. Though they have been struggling with inter-ethnic…
Political bias and mistrust are corroding our democracy
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson Over time, political interest has grown but our trust in the system has markedly diminished. We’ve lost trust in traditional news channels and increasingly look to social…
Wilfred Owen warned us of the dangers of war rhetoric – lest we forget
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson Never has a work of literature so accurately articulated the profound dangers of war rhetoric than Wilfred Owen’s World War I poem Dulce Et Decorum Est. Owen…
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,…
Johnson’s use of language has distracted from his failure to act on COVID-19
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson Language has been a significant factor in the coronavirus pandemic. There has been a rapid change in global discourse as a new and resurgent vocabulary of terms…
In defence of occasional idiocy: how partisan hatred is corrupting our society
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson 175 years of history and you’ve blown it. From a prized free trade journal to this. The Economist’s Europe Editor Chris Lockwood was greeted with utter disdain…
Leveraging truth in politics
In the age of fake news, lies, and propaganda, our political paradigm is becoming increasingly strained with the often casual relationship our representatives maintain with the truth. Everybody agrees that…
Genocide must never become a political plaything
24 April is marked with black in the calendars of Armenians all around the world. On this day, Armenians living inside and outside their homeland remember those who died in…
Travelling the Arab World: Lebanon
Sitting on the Mediterranean Sea and bordering Israel and Syria, Lebanon has an incredibly rich, but volatile history. The town of Byblos, just north of Beirut is one of the…
Debate forces us to examine ourselves
We’ve all been at a dinner party or pre where political discussion rears its ugly head and hijacks a corner of the room or end of the table. People usually…
The Midterms’ firsts were inspirational and disappointing
After a long night anxiously watching midterms and aggressively drinking iced coffee from a massive reusable bottle that has a sticker with the fitting phrase “A woman’s place is in…
There’s no such thing as society, my ass
One thing that Vietnam does fantastically well is community. There is an unspoken familiarity between people there. Even the way you address people (‘hey big sister’, ‘hey grandpa’) is predicated…
Unbelievably, we still have to talk about communism
“I’m literally a communist, you idiot” has been on the rise as the mantra of the millennial left ever since Ash Sarkar’s outburst against Piers Morgan. Neo-communists, caked in hypocrisy…
Boris Johnson’s resignation means progress for Brexit
Following the emergence of a soft-Brexit Chequers deal earlier this week, May’s cabinet has taken several blows. Most notably, the Conservative administration has suffered at the hands of the resignation…
Trump and his associates don’t deserve civility
This coming Thursday, President Trump will be making his first official state visit to the UK. A series of demonstrations and protests are scheduled to take place during his four-day…
Deal or no deal, what does Brexit mean for the NHS?
March 2019 is not getting any further away, and the UK Government is still struggling to make any progress in ongoing Brexit negotiations. With the aim of guiding the nations…
The world is the realist’s oyster
When it comes to understanding the world around us, we are our own greatest adversaries. The cognitive biases that lurk under the the film of ideology quietly obscure the clarity…
Does Britain need a new centrist party?
There’s no doubt that centrists in the UK have become the political vagrants of the island. As the Labour party promises the nationalisation of major industries, while the Conservatives continue…
The Modern BRICS: How Latin America is learning from Brazil’s mistakes
In 2001, the British economist Jim O’Neill coined the term BRIC nations to describe the rapidly developing global economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, with South Africa being added…
Grammar schools are not the way forward
On May 11 the government announced its plans to provide £50m for an expansion of the number of places in grammar schools, after their plans to open new grammar schools…
The Butch, The Bitch and The Mummy: the women in Westminster
Let’s go back to the tripartite I suggested in the first article; the Butch, the Bitch, and the Mummy. If you’re a woman working in politics, expect to see your…
Row, row, row your boat back to Blighty or stick your left oar in
Think about the word, ‘change’. Chew over it for a moment. Is the unknown, the scary, and the weird, to be avoided? Or is it a break from a tired…
Amber Rudd: the women in Westminster
‘Where would you like to sit?’ Her office was hardly short of options. ‘Shall we go soft?’ and pointed to the corner sofas before we became confused. As a staunch…
An encounter with Andrea Leadsom: women in Westminster
I knew very little about Andrea Leadsom before I met her. Like many, I had watched Leadsom’s 2016 Conservative Leadership campaign go up in flames after suggesting in an interview…
Interviewing Ruth Davidson: the women in Westminster
There seems to be an ‘all-eyes on Ruth’ effect in the media. Everyone is listening out for what she will say next, or anticipating which armoured vehicle she’ll jump into…
Will FBI raids be the end of Trump or the end of privacy?
After months of controversy and public upheaval, it’s no surprise that Donald Trump’s presidency is under scrutiny once again. But do the recent FBI raids of Michael D. Cohen’s office…
Power plays: the women in Westminster
The ‘visibility issue’ of women in politics is not just how many are sitting in Parliament. It’s also an issue of who they’re allowed to be once they’re there. If…
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…
Government can’t change the censorious attitude on campus
The joint committee on human rights (JCHR), a select committee of the Commons and the Lords chaired by Harriet Harman, have recently been considering the issue of free speech at…
There’s nowhere to hide from Cambridge Analytica, nowhere at all
It’s been a tough few years for globalists. At an exponential rate, all that they heralded as vessels to bring us closer together – free trade, open borders, the future…
Opt-out organ donations
You know a policy is a corker if you agree with Jeremy Hunt on it. After all, the man has continuously ran the NHS into the ground since he was…
Vince Cable’s speech has revealed his anti-democratic bigotry
The Liberal Democrats are currently polling at 7%. They have been languishing around this level for some time and, despite rebranding themselves as some sort of Remain resistance, have yet…
Are millennials hypersensitive puritans?
Generation Y. Snowflakes. Millennials. Call them what you want. Our generation is quickly becoming the largest focus of debate and analysis in contemporary discussion since the Free Love generation of…
Borders underpin international order
Last week my fellow columnist Lucy Hodgeon wrote a piece on whether borders have been made redundant by globalisation. It was original, thought-provoking and brilliantly written. I categorically disagree with it….
Borders suffocate international progress
Trump and Mexico. Britain and Brexit. Whilst states across the world seem to be reaffirming their borders, there exists a counter movement asking: do we even need borders? The World…