The Guardian e-paper Journal
A degree? A trade? Every rung for young people is a trap
Some months ago I was at my old university, speaking to prospective sixthform and college students about taking a degree in the arts and what future careers they could expect. It was a cohort of teenagers from underrepresented backgrounds: all of them...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Ukraine is the biggest of all the American betrayals
Viewed from Europe, the United States’ failure to defend the people of Ukraine against Russian aggression is the greatest and most consequential of a host of recent American betrayals. It’s not just the sickening subservience shown to Vladimir Putin,...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
The law takes its course on a day of royal ignominy
The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is a seismic moment for the royal family as well as for himself. On one hand, it is hard to believe any greater harm can befall the family after weeks of drip-feed from the US Department of Justice’s Epstein...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
One day we will see the student debt scandal for the injustice it is
Never go to war with Martin Lewis. The one iron law of politics is that the financial guru who built moneysavingexpert.com has a quasi-godlike status in Britain, the man millions trust with their cash in a way they would never trust any politician. If...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Labour’s Send revolution is heading for catastrophe
Where is this government heading, and who is in charge? Keir Starmer looks even weaker than he did a week ago, and only still in his job because the cabinet and parliamentary Labour party stared into a chaotic future and decided not to pounce for now....
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Here are the powerful men making racists feel great again
It lacks the elegance of “greed is good”, but as a distillation of the spirit of the age, it’s right up there. “I feel liberated,” a top banker told the Financial Times shortly after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 US presidential election. “We can...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Reform’s threat to Bangor Uni is a grim sign of things to come
It must have seemed the easiest offer in the world to refuse. Would students at Bangor University enjoy a question and answer session with Sarah Pochin – the Reform MP famous for saying it “drives me mad” to see TV ads full of black people – and Jack...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
The venerable Labour party is disappearing before our eyes
When he does go, what will the political death certificate give as the true cause of Keir Starmer’s demise? It won’t be the Peter Mandelson scandal, the policy U-turns or the bleak nights at provincial counting centres. All these are symptoms, not the...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Horror crossed with hilarity, Starmer’s last stand is TV gold
Keir Starmer is now the only person to have lost more comms chiefs than Meghan and Harry. After yet another day of drama, we kept hearing that the prime minister would be pressing the reset button. Not again! Starmer’s reset button is like the OK...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Who knew team Starmer would fail – and badly? The left
A chicken that loses its head can still, for a short period, run around and flap its wings: the illusion of life sustained by residual nerve impulses. After the downfall of Morgan McSweeney – our de facto PM – this is the phase Britain’s government has...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
What links UK politics and Epstein? A core of contempt
Contempt everywhere. From Jeffrey Epstein’s email exchanges to the scandal of Peter Mandelson’s appointment, it radiates. Contempt for women and girls, for the law, for the public. A continuum of disdain runs from Epstein on the one end to our...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Silly me for thinking the story here is mass abuse of women
Bill Gates’s ex-wife was asked about Jeffrey Epstein, obviously, and executed a very graceful drive-by. “Whatever questions remain there of what I don’t – can’t – even begin to know all of it … Those questions are for those people, and for even my...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
A decent PM brought down by Mandelson: not if, but when
The smell of death is in the Westminster air. Labour’s King Rat Peter Mandelson has again cast his sulphurous odour of villainy around the palace, and contamination may drag a decent Labour leader down with him. That’s the tragedy. Nothing about Keir...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
People first, leaders second. I think I’ve seen the new politics
‘How many?” On the end of the phone is a nice press officer for the Greens, head full from a long day in Gorton, Manchester, showing off their would-be MP. And now, as Friday’s sky turns indigo, I’m calling about reports from Lewisham, south London,...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Remember the men who aided Epstein, despite his crimes
Like a lot of women, I do vaguely care about the latest political implosion of Peter Mandelson – but I think we’re all massively more obsessed with the fact that there really was a network of incredibly famous and powerful men trying to help a known...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
How deep did the Epstein rot go? The public needs answers
Peter Mandelson did not want, he wrote disdainfully to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, to “live by salary alone”. Not for him the life of the little guy, slave to a mere six-figure salary: he had always aspired to something grander, a...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Here in Gorton and Denton, Labour’s frailty is plain to see
The route of the No 201 bus begins in the regenerated wonderland of central Manchester, and follows a straight line through the neighbourhoods to its east. The city’s box-fresh skyscrapers and gleaming new hotels quickly recede – and within 10 minutes...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
This may look like Trump in retreat. That’s the trap he’s set
Don’t be fooled. When it comes to Donald Trump, what might look like a full retreat is almost always a mere tactical withdrawal, designed to buy time. He’ll step back when he’s forced to, under pressure, but will then revert. Too often, his opponents,...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
How loose and lively rhetoric is remoulding British politics
Who was the last politician you listened to for any length of time? Perhaps it was Andy Burnham or Zack Polanski. Or maybe it was Wes Streeting, Nigel Farage or Zarah Sultana. Perhaps your dark secret is that it was Donald Trump. One thing these...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
The Minnesota revolt tells us this: the people have power too
For most politicians and journalists, the answer to nearly every question is to look up. Not at the moon, the stars or even the chimney tops, but at their leaders: the people who sit atop institutions, wield power and set the line that others follow....
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Starmer must learn: avoiding hard choices hasn’t worked
There comes a point in a prime minister’s career when foreign travel offers some respite from domestic trouble. Even when relations with the host country are tricky, as Britain’s are with China, the dignifying protocols of statecraft make a beleaguered...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
It’s now clear: Labour needs a new leader – and quickly
Labour’s impulse for political self-harm defies belief. It is as if some enemy within guides it unerringly along the wrong strategic path. Declaring war on Andy Burnham anoints him as a northern martyr and hero, and casts Keir Starmer as a coward. Many...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
We can build great council housing still. So why don’t we?
I met Carole Guscott, a retired carer, on a clear winter’s morning in the Somerset town of Minehead. She was walking her whippet, Gracie, on the way back to her new flat, past the local Premier Inn and on to a cul de sac called Rainbow Way. “I knew as...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
What happens when the taps run dry? Soon we will find out
You get up and go to the loo, only to find the flush doesn’t work. You try the shower, except nothing comes out. You want a glass of water, but on turning the tap there is not a drop. Your day stumbles on, stripped of its essentials: no washing hands,...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
It’s Brooklyn v Beckham Inc: a family feud for our online age
The way 2026 has started, none of us wants to see the word “nuclear” in a headline, so on some level you have to feel glad that Monday night’s news alerts announcing in real time that someone “goes nuclear” and “launches nuclear attack” related to...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
The free world now needs a new plan – and new leadership
A European-wide chorus of resistance, led on Monday morning by Keir Starmer, has greeted Donald Trump’s plan to take over Greenland, by force if necessary, and to start a tariff war if any country stands in his way. Have no doubt, this is a moment: if...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Don’t just look away as the people of Iran cry out for help
Did you notice history being made this week? I am not referring to what may have been the most pathetic moment in recorded time – Donald Trump gratefully taking the Nobel peace prize medal from the woman who actually won it – nor the defection of a...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
While the right wields its might, Keir Starmer fixes potholes
Last weekend, as the world wondered whether Donald Trump would swipe Greenland, Keir Starmer made his own big geographic intervention: he published a map of which councils were fixing potholes. Yes, potholes. Yes, a map. Barely 18 months into office,...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Take a lesson from the past, and light the way forward
From Greenland’s icy mountains, from India’s coral strand, as the old hymn has it, we seem to inhabit a world that is more seriously troubled in more places than many can ever remember. In the UK, national morale feels all but shot. Politics commands...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Who’s to blame for the crude Starmer songs? I’m afraid he is
It’s the world darts championships on the first day of the year, and a well-lubricated early afternoon audience at London’s Alexandra Palace is belting out one of the more recent additions to its songbook. Up on the stage, the then world No 20, Ryan...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Two horrifying truths have come from a lying president
For a serial liar, Donald Trump can be bracingly honest. We’ve known about the mendacity for years – consider the 30,573 documented falsehoods from his first term, culminating in the big lie, his claim to have won the 2020 election – but the examples...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Trump’s pitch for Greenland is a climate crisis land grab
Another week, another freak weather phenomenon you’ve probably never heard of. If it’s not the “weather bomb” of extreme wind and snow that Britain is hunkering down for as I write, it’s reports in the Guardian of reindeer in the Arctic struggling with...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Is Starmer being astute – or does he just not have a plan?
For an inveterate liar, Donald Trump is remarkably honest. The best guide to what he thinks is what he says. When forecasting his likely course of action, start with his declared intentions – removing the president of Venezuela, for example – and...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
A new world order is coming – and Venezuela is just the start
As Venezuela’s skyline lit up under American bombs, we were watching the morbid symptoms of a declining empire. That may sound counterintuitive. After all, the United States has kidnapped a foreign leader, and Donald Trump has announced that he will...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
From Trump to Netanyahu, let 2026 be a year of reckoning
It’s not quite a new year resolution, and it’s certainly not a prediction. Think of it instead as a hope or even a plea for the next 12 months. May the coming year see those leaders who have done so much damage to their own countries, and far beyond,...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
The best way to get round a tricky problem? Do nothing
If you really want to solve a problem, try doing nothing about it. Fold some laundry. Stir a risotto. Go for a run, watch a film, try to entertain someone else’s baby: anything that involves pottering about in an undemanding yet still vaguely engaged...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
What if racists say ‘Go home’, but you come from 15 places?
While accepting that David Lammy, the deputy prime minister and justice secretary, is, for many, the human embodiment of Marmite – loved or hated, with not much in between – one can still question whether, for all his faults, he should “go home to the...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Abd el-Fattah’s tweets were wrong, but do not define him
What is the proper punishment for hateful social media posts? Should you lose your account? Your job? Your citizenship? Go to jail? Die? For the people who have launched a campaign against the British-Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, no...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
The BBC tells the whole story of our nation. Let’s fight for it
Don’t let President Trump cloud the real debate about the BBC. Of course, his demand for damages of no less than $5bn has dominated our thinking about the corporation over the past few weeks, as has its cause. But let’s get this into perspective. This...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Trump’s legacy will be a blotch – not a Maga masterpiece
The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 was an unforgettable moment for those who lived through the cold war. The sinister watch towers with their searchlights and armed guards, the minefields in no-man’s land, the notorious Checkpoint Charlie...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Only the rich can afford to be in denial about climate crisis
Looking back on this crazy year, one event, right at the start, seems to me to encapsulate the whole. In January, recording his podcast in a studio in Austin, Texas, the host, Joe Rogan, and the actor Mel Gibson merrily dissed climate science. At the...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Was 2025 the end of British democracy as we know it?
Was this the year that British democracy as we have known it began to turn into something else? Politicians, voters and journalists have made this claim before – when their side has been out of power for a long while or an elected government has been...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
When the AI bubble bursts, people can take back control
If AI did not change your life in 2025, next year it will. That is one of few forecasts that can be made with confidence in unpredictable times. This is not an invitation to believe the hype about what the technology can do today, or may one day...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Yes, it’s flawed, but I see Labour delivering for those in need
Warning. This column contains good news, when it is an (un) truth widely acknowledged that only grim stories attract public attention. News must be something someone somewhere doesn’t want printed, says the old maxim. Well, battalions of interests want...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
In a dark year, these heroes have shown us there is light
Some traditions are getting harder to maintain. Among them, my own custom of devoting the last column before Christmas to reasons to be hopeful. In recent years, amid war and bloodshed, that task has been especially challenging – and this week was no...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
A lesson from 2025: Reform is surprisingly vulnerable
Imagine a classroom with almost nothing in it, save some hard wooden benches and a stack of Bibles. Imagine the school it is in has only one loo, no canteen, gets freezing cold in winter – oh, and the playground is full of gravestones. If this sounds...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Playing out in real time: a tragedy foretold 20 years ago
An Englishman drives into a new town and can’t see the warning signs. Richard Pearson is visiting Surrey to close down his late father’s home and settle his affairs and, everywhere he looks, the flag of St George is flying “from suburban gardens and...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Putin wants to export chaos – but democracy can fight back
I once spent an exasperating week showing a Russian friend around London. He insisted on seeing everything and admiring nothing. Museums, monuments, shops – all compared unfavourably with St Petersburg and Moscow. This got tiresome after a few days, so...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Finally it’s dawning on us: there is life beyond phones
It’s only a small rectangular sticker, but it symbolises a joyous sense of resistance. Some of Berlin’s most renowned clubs have long insisted that the camera lenses on their clientele’s phones must be covered up using this simple method, to ensure...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Donald Trump is pursuing regime change – in Europe
When are we going to get the message? I joked a few months back that, when it comes to Donald Trump, Europe needs to learn from Sex and the City’s Miranda Hobbes and realise that “He’s just not that into you.” After this past week, it’s clear that...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Europe must open the door to migrants – or face extinction
Iknow what “civilisational erasure” looks like: I’ve seen the graph. The European Commission published it in March. It’s a chart of total fertility rate: the average number of children born per woman. After a minor bump over the past 20 years, the EU...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
The cost of Starmer’s deal with Trump? British lives
Of Arthur Scargill it was said that he began each day with two newspapers. The miners’ leader read the Morning Star of course, but only after consulting the Financial Times. Why did a class warrior from Yorkshire accord such importance to the house...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
The real battle on the right: who will be the Maga stooge?
In free societies, when you don’t like the government, you support the opposition. In dictatorships, or under military occupation, you join the resistance. The distinction isn’t precise but it matters. All European democracies have radical...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Children need us to grasp AI’s flaws, before the worst happens
It was just past 4am when a suicidal Zane Shamblin sent one last message from his car, where he had been drinking steadily for hours. “Cider’s empty. Anyways … Think this is the final adios,” he typed into his phone. The response was quick: “Alright...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Streeting must not join the ‘overdiagnosis’ bandwagon
Wes Streeting is a politician whose interest in the zeitgeist is only matched by his seeming drive to be as close to the heart of it as possible. It is, therefore, not much of a surprise that the secretary of state for health and social care should end...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
What words are left to describe Trump’s global rampage?
The Trump administration looks ever more like a criminal enterprise – and now it seems to have added war crimes to its repertoire. Though even that may be too generous a description. On Thursday, word came that the US military had launched yet another...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
How a pint and a chat about soil led to a seismic discovery
It felt like walking up a mountain during a temperature inversion. You struggle through fog so dense you can scarcely see where you’re going. Suddenly, you break through the top of the cloud, and the world is laid out before you. It was that rare and...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Europe and its allies can hold him back. But for how long?
The failure of this week’s peace talks between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff fits into a now well-established pattern of standoffs on Ukraine during Trump’s second term. But the dynamic that produced these talks may be becoming...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
The misleading thing about the budget? Who it was really for
The charge is a grave one: that Rachel Reeves has just lied to Britons, spooking them into paying billions in extra taxes that she can splash out on higher benefits. However hyperbolic, this isn’t the usual Westminster sparring; this time, someone...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
The ‘squeezed middle’ is back. Labour upsets them at its peril
Just over 15 years ago, a realisation began to dawn on British politicians, triggered by the financial crash of 2008 and its effects on millions of ordinary lives. Before that rupture, they had clung to the idea that a huge chunk of the public was made...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
These Farage allegations matter – look at who he is today
Nigel Farage could have strangled this story at birth. Confronted with the testimony of more than 20 former schoolmates, who shared with the Guardian their memories of a young Farage taunting Jews and other minorities in the most appalling terms –...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Keir Starmer’s Mr Rules act is unsuited to the times
This Labour government loves rules. Fiscal rules, stability rules, investment rules, immigration rules and rules restricting protests: this government’s first impulse, when faced with the fluidity and chaos of the modern world, is to put in boundaries...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Rachel Reeves’s budget is more like Operation Save Our Skins
Imagine it: you are the chancellor of a government in mortal peril. Poll ratings are down the U-bend; your backbenchers are mutinous and colleagues are circling around the prime minister, readying themselves to land the fatal blow. You have a budget,...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
The solution to Labour’s crisis lies in Europe. Dare it say so?
Rachel Reeves has approached this week’s budget like a reluctant swimmer inching into freezing water. The chancellor started paddling delicately around the problem of insufficient revenue at the end of the summer. First, she refused to stand by former...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
My guide to protecting our fragile, ailing democracies
How can we defend our democracies against those who would destroy them? We talk a lot about strategies for keeping anti-liberal, nationalist populists out of power, but Donald Trump’s daily wielding of a wrecking ball shows it’s equally important to...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Meet Reform’s real voters: can Farage hold them together?
Who are Nigel Farage’s army, the voters who want him as our next prime minister? Few questions are as important in British politics. Were an election called tomorrow, the favourite for No 10 would be Farage. A few months ago, many in Westminster and...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
Who in their right mind would want to be a BBC boss?
Listen, I hate to ruin a yarn wall but I don’t think it’s at all helpful to start framing the current crisis at the BBC as a giant conspiracy or coup by dark rightwing forces, and get stuck in the weeds of that. The fact is, the three mistakes that...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
The war against the BBC is a war against all of us: let’s fight back
Gotcha! The BBC’s enemies have taken two scalps and inflicted maximum damage. The sheer viciousness of President Trump’s $1bn lawsuit threat will thrill the right, threatening the foundations of the corporation they detest. Meanwhile, the shock...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
What is politics now? Simply a bitter revolt against power
Westminster has a habit of staging occasions that are at once both lacklustre and ridiculous, and last Tuesday saw yet another one. Rachel Reeves’s speech, we were told, was an act of “pitch-rolling”, performed because – in the words of Treasury...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
As Democrats rejoice, Trump begins to plot his revenge
After the joy, the trepidation. Or at least the preparation. Democrats, along with many others around the world, cheered this week’s wins in a clutch of off-year elections that saw Donald Trump’s Republicans defeated from sea to shining sea. But now...
Read Full Story (Page 1)
After the two-party system? A new kind of British politics
Politics as we have known it in Britain for more than a century seems to be falling apart. Only six years ago, at the 2019 election, the Conservatives and Labour got 76% of the vote between them, coming first and second in both votes and seats, as they...
Read Full Story (Page 1)