The Guardian e-paper Journal
Back in Blighty: the Sussexes in the travel show no one wanted
Wednesday night brought an absolute cloudburst of psychic rain for our parched land as it emerged that Prince Harry and Meghan were reversing their self-styled “freedom flight” to California and returning to live in the UK. Nature is healing! Is that …...
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Make money, make lots of it – that’s the art of this presidency
Many years ago, in the crowded corridor of a Manhattan hotel, I was surprised to find myself standing face-to-face with Imelda Marcos – who was then first lady of the Philippines. At that time, she was said to possess 3,000 pairs of shoes. I really...
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Welcome to the age of climate whiplash: bone-dry and soaked
This summer could be the hottest, driest and deadliest in the history of England. Successive heatwaves have so far claimed almost 3,000 lives. Nearly three-quarters of England and the whole of Wales is in drought, while key reservoirs are parched....
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The far right is tightening its grip on the EU from the inside
The EU exists because its nations swore never to repeat the past. European integration is the insurance policy against the oldest temptation of power: that a majority decides who does not belong. So countries across the continent agreed to share power...
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If ‘Woke 1.0 is over’ in the US, did progressives get it all wrong?
Every once in a while, the discourse gods send a tablet down to the people, announcing that a previous era is dead and a new age is upon us. Recently, it was the “vibe shift”, a post-pandemic change in culture that encompassed everything from fashion...
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Unlike the PM, British workers can’t ignore the climate crisis
I don’t think I have ever written before about a British strike directly related to the climate emergency. But that’s exactly what began late last week in north London, with picket lines outside bus depots and massed walkouts, while the temperatures in...
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The masters of failure: they are good for stunts, and little else
It’s a shame Nigel Farage ducked the announcement of his victory in the Clacton byelection, which confirmed his return as MP for the seat he had needlessly resigned from just a few weeks earlier. You’d have thought he would have loved it. It was the...
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Has drought-hit Britain planned for a food crisis? Not on your life
When a business makes long-term plans, they call it prudence. When a government makes longterm plans, they call it communism. Any sustained state intervention attracts the prefix “Soviet-style”, and triggers vicious attacks across the billionaire...
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The right will use the Jason Arday scandal to halt society’s progress. Don’t let them do it
In 1987, a college at the University of Cambridge considered offering a prestigious position to a black man in what would be the first appointment of its kind. Not only did the man not have a degree, but he had left school at the age of 13, struggling...
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Nigel Farage is looking trapped – now the tide can be turned
Nigel Farage can be confident of victory against a man posing as an ennobled space traveller with a dustbin on his head. At least, in Clacton he can. The refusal of major parties to contest this week’s byelection sets the bar low. But even if the...
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As the PM sets off around the country, will the cash follow?
Andy Burnham begins his travels this week, aiming to reconnect No 10 and the government with voters across the UK. But just weeks before he set out his stall as prime minister, promising to rebalance the economy with growth in every postcode, a...
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Britain’s AI boom is already threatening the places we love
Amid headlines about drought, wildfires and global temperatures, it was 28C when I arrived in Slough last Monday. I was there to look around Slough Trading Estate, a place that might once have conjured up images of the TV comedy The Office, many of the...
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One summer doesn’t make a Keminaissance. Not even close
The Keminaissance will be delayed. For nearly a year, Conservative optimists and a clutch of supportive pundits have been forecasting an upturn in the fortunes of Kemi Badenoch, confident that her party will emerge from the crater it fell into in 2024,...
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Big food firms are panicking. Their time may be running out
It is rare for people to drop dead holding the incriminating packaging, but there is no longer any serious doubt that consuming a diet of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) risks life-shortening illnesses from heart disease and stroke to diabetes and cancer....
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The right made DEI a weapon, and the left just let it happen
‘To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me.” That was the breathtaking response of Prof Jason Arday when the Guardian interrogated the details he provided of an alleged racist campaign of intimidation against him, which involved a severed...
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When artificial intelligence meets human foolishness
When I am woken by the sound of my dog whining, I understand that she wants me to get up. When my alarm clock goes off, I don’t consider its needs. It is following an instruction to rouse me but it doesn’t care if I stay in bed. It doesn’t try to get...
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Amid the rage and misery, the right has hit the jackpot in Ceuta
The live streams are still running, training their cameras on the beach at Ceuta, where nothing is happening. The self-styled citizen journalists are still pounding the streets, capturing their shaky smartphone footage. Zia Yusuf of Reform UK was out...
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He’s a PM for the age. But being camera-ready isn’t enough
Andy Burnham is having a good time. I can’t remember the last time a PM (or indeed any high-profile British politician) actually looked as though they were enjoying what they were doing. I saw a clip the other day in which Burnham remembered arguing...
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Will Trump be Burnham’s undoing, or the making of him?
There is an orange cloud in the sky. I’m not referring to the wildfires ravaging parts of Europe and East Anglia, though they are connected. I mean the looming pall from across the Atlantic that threatens to spoil the sunny start to the premiership of...
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Nothing is safe from this global assault on our human rights
No more resistance in the US. The era of human rights is over, and dissent is once more forbidden. This is what certain billionaires and their concierges want, and this is the model they’re also seeking to project across the world. If we fail to...
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This battle for social care will define us. And it must be won
‘People pleaser!” That’s the insult Andy Burnham’s enemies sneer at him. And yes, he will need all his mightiest people-pleasing talents to win over voters to contribute to a new national care service. Choosing this forever failed policy (22 major...
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A political chill has gripped the right. It’s cold in the PM’s shadow
Andy Burnham’s recollections of Britain in the 1970s must be pretty hazy. He was nine when the decade ended. Kemi Badenoch, born in 1980, can remember nothing. Lacking first-hand experience, the Conservative leader evokes the turmoil of a bygone era...
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He controls his message now – but that battle will get harder
After a week in No 10, when Labour’s previously flatlining position in the polls has at least shown signs of having a pulse, Andy Burnham is still just about enjoying a prime ministerial honeymoon. But he has been in politics long enough to know that...
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More conflict, more tariffs – Trump’s wars victimise us all
You would be forgiven, as the US and Iran traded strikes over the past few days, for thinking that it was only last month that the two signed the Islamabad Memorandum, which formalised the process of ending the war and established a 60-day period to...
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Scoff at his bus fares if you like – the PM knows what he’s doing
One of Andy Burnham’s first policy moves brought back a sharp memory. On Wednesday, he announced that single bus fares across England would be capped at £2, starting from January. It was part of a series of small, practical measures designed, said the...
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After Trump, we’ll need the ICC. Don’t let him destroy it
Barely a month appears to go by without Donald Trump making a fresh attempt to destroy the international rules-based order. The US has pulled funding from dozens of international institutions, shut down USAID and withdrawn from the Paris climate...
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Why do our environment ministers keep chickening out?
There’s a slightly mean question I often ask British people with an interest in the living world: can you name the environment secretary? I don’t intend to show them up: it’s not them I’m testing. I watch the brows knit, a finger go up, the mouth open...
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Burnham plays a long game in an age of short attention spans
It all sounded feasible but improbable. A few days after Labour’s disastrous performance in local and devolved elections in May, one of Andy Burnham’s allies confidently forecast for me the sequence of events that would convey the then mayor of Greater...
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So far, so good, but how good? The challenges to come will tell
Only vaulting ambition takes anyone to No 10, but Andy Burnham’s ambition reaches phenomenal heights. Can he really make the biggest changes in 40 years? Can he build a new economy? The new prime minister lashes himself to the mast of those mighty...
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How our oldest political title turned radical Islamophobe
I start this column already resigned to the tune out, the glaze over, the click away. This is not to say that I do not have faith in you, dear reader, to keep reading and caring. But I am aware that it is now normal, when it comes to a certain minority...
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Andy: ignore all the unwanted advice (apart from this piece)
The first piece of unsolicited advice I would offer to Britain’s incoming prime minister is: don’t take unsolicited advice. Don’t be one of those leaders who’s swayed by the last person in their ear. That’s what they used to say about Boris Johnson,...
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Britain must be honest about the sort of politics it wants
Ann Widdecombe was never one to hide from an argument. And she wasn’t afraid for her safety either. She scoffed at friends’ suggestions that she should get electric gates, as an elderly woman with a public profile living alone on Dartmoor, just as she...
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Let Wales be a cautionary tale for how not to do devolution
As a journalist, I have specialised in Wales, Welsh politics and devolution for the past 10 years. Devolution in particular could be considered a bit niche as subjects go. But suddenly everyone wants to talk about it because Andy Burnham is making it...
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Palantir has a foothold in our state. But is it working for us?
Andy Burnham faces a lot of big decisions. But one of the incoming prime minister’s biggest early tests is what he does about the world’s “scariest company” – Palantir. The US defence and surveillance tech behemoth has a swathe of British public...
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Pip needs an overhaul – and at last, that can be progressive
‘Broken Britain” has become the favourite narrative of the right in recent months. The playbook goes like this: politicians and pundits exploit genuine concerns about squeezed services and living standards to propagate a sense of division and despair....
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The tangle of crypto and our politics goes beyond Farage
Tomorrow, the representation of the people bill comes back to the House of Commons for its third reading. It bundles up various measures, including an extension of the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds and changes to voter registration. But thanks to...
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Burnham now has to master the art of dealing with Trump
It’s all starting to feel very real. Or so Andy Burnham said, on the day that he in effect became Britain’s official prime minister in waiting: a moment both heady and sobering. The papers are signed, the die cast. Keir Starmer has yet to leave the...
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Britons yearn for real change, but never get it. This is why
In an old, often anxious and conservative country, the perception of risk is a potent political weapon. If a policy or a project for reforming the UK seems too risky, or can be made to seem so by its opponents, then it can usually be quickly killed...
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It’s the great carbon capture con: behold the wasted billions
The new prime minister will be looking for money? Well, here’s £21.7bn lying on the ground. The government could cancel its deranged, disastrous carbon capture and storage (CCS) programme at no cost to public welfare: in fact, it would greatly reduce...
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Who gains from Farage’s stunt? No one who lives in Clacton
Most people who closely follow British politics probably know the basics about Jaywick, an enclave of Clacton, on the Essex coast. A sprawling tangle of tracks, paths and old holiday shacks repurposed as permanent homes, it has been ranked as England’s...
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If Farage is on the brink, that’s an opportunity. Don’t waste it
No politician is greater than their party. However bright you shine, you’re never so indispensable that you couldn’t be replaced tomorrow – or so, at least, convention has it. But there’s one man at Westminster to whom convention rarely applies, and...
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Can Burnham really make British industry great again?
In the autumn of 2005, Tony Blair gave one of his most unhinged and fascinating speeches as prime minister. “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation,” he said. “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.” He went...
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It’s good, bad and ugly: the United States at 250 years old
The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a computer programme that has been hacked. The United States of America is … so many things, horrific and magnificent, good and evil, promising and...
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An awful deal, a terrible legacy: be very afraid for our NHS
For all the crowd noise and heavybreathing match analysis, British democracy is a simple sport. We elect politicians to serve our interests. They direct the vital services that look after our families and communities, such as our healthcare and our...
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Heat is danger – and the right’s denials put our children at risk
Every time you think the idiocy has hit rock bottom, it discovers a new level. It turns out there’s an even deeper hole you can dig for yourself than climate-science denial: heat-stress denial. Across the billionaire press last week, columnists and...
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Easy
The normal rules of sudoku apply: fififill each row, column and 3x3 box with all the numbers from 1 to 9. In addition, the digits in each inner shape (marked by dots) must add up to the number in the top corner of that box. No digit can be repeated...
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What would a ‘kind’ Labour do? Take care of its day centres
Wellington House is in north Brighton, and known to the people who frequent it as Welly. It has the austere look of an old Victorian school, but what goes on inside is all about care and empathy. The building is the home of the city’s last council-run...
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Britain burns – and still the climate sceptics refuse to look
It was hardly a perfect film, but I keep thinking of Don’t Look Up. In its depiction of a world that stubbornly refuses to heed the warnings of an imminent planetary disaster, it was perhaps too on the nose. But these days, reality itself is too on the...
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Labour is filled with hope once again – but that could all go pop
The creation of hope is a vital but risky part of democratic politics. Leaders or would-be leaders who arouse hope attract supporters, motivate activists, achieve momentum and win over voters – and then have a chance of holding together political...
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Burnham has less to fear from markets than his own MPs
A Labour leader arrives, shirt and smile ironed into place, in his hands a big idea. He has polished one slogan, prepped three anecdotes, memorised eight bullet points. He wants more cash for vital services, or workers to have a stake in their...
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With Starmer’s exit, the Brexit curse claims another PM
Britain is not ungovernable, but the chalice of high office has been spiked with unusually fast-acting poison. Six prime ministers down in a decade. Since the Brexit referendum, the average tenure in Downing Street has been less than two years. That...
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Keir Starmer’s sheer blankness was his fatal flaw for voters
On a bone-chillingly cold morning in January, it felt as if I had suddenly found at least part of the reason for Keir Starmer’s chronic unpopularity. I was in Gorton and Denton, where the prime minister and his people’s decision to block Andy Burnham...
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The crucial lesson for Burnham: first impressions are everything
Andy Burnham’s comprehensive victory in the Makerfield byelection, surpassing expectations, was a precious moment. He demolished £5m-Nigel Farage’s party of loathsome Reformers, whose every election candidate seems more repugnant than the last. Hostile...
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Andy Burnham has shown that he can win. But can he govern?
By the end, it had become less a byelection, more a mythical quest. Whoever could draw the sword from Makerfield’s stone – or more prosaically, beat Reform UK in a seat where it practically swept the board in last month’s local elections – would claim...
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Trump claims his deal is a win. Well, yes, it is – but for Tehran
Donald Trump is running fast to escape the catastrophic war on Iran that he and Benjamin Netanyahu started four months ago. He is saying anything that appears to suit the moment. In fact, he clearly feels he can now ditch his friend, the Israeli prime...
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The right grasps this key fact: we are still a land of Brexit ghosts
What story does Britain tell itself about Brexit, 10 years after the vote that transformed the country? Watch TV or read the papers and you find one of two viewpoints: from the common room or the conference room. The common room story is about chums...
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A riot, a protest: who decides what terrorism looks like now?
‘If you are targeting people on the basis of the colour of their skin,” the Northern Ireland secretary, Hilary Benn, asked last week, “how else can you describe them? That is racist thuggery.” It is. But there is another way of describing the actions...
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If we do want to rejoin the EU, we first need to understand it
As Britain approaches the 10th anniversary of its vote to leave the EU, the British are beginning to debate rejoining what they call Europe. But, as in most previous British debates about “Europe”, this is Europe with the Europe left out. The...
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Here among the voters, the scale of Burnham’s task is clear
Keir Starmer teeters. The defence secretary exits, and thereby seems to confirm the prime minister’s demise. Andy Burnham scents a final, belated breakthrough, while most of the national talk is of violence, a country in crisis and malaise. And in...
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The right has created a false reality – fuelled by toxic images
When voters in Makerfield head to the polls next week, their decision, as is increasingly the case across the nation, may come down to this: whether to be more swayed by a hopeful vision of the UK or by a narrative that defines the country as little...
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They’re both hard right and poisonous. Is it their undoing?
For all their claims to be mould-breaking politicians, the feuding Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe are in many ways predictable and traditional rightwingers. Two wealthy white men in their 60s from southern England, with private educations and previous...
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Blair’s diagnosis is good. But his prescription is truly deluded
Tony Blair is right. Labour has made some big and avoidable mistakes since it came to power nearly two years ago. Keir Starmer had a strategy for winning the election but lacked a coherent plan for what his government would do next. Fair cop. Blair is...
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War, what is it good for? Apart from ducking a son’s wedding
How far would you go for your son? For Donald Trump, the answer is simply: “The Bahamas? That is way too far! Why can’t you just get married on the golf course we buried your mother in? Or better still, the one I’m being carted to the second I get off...
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