Three years of procedural maneuvering, bombastic rhetoric, and policy paralysis in Parliament—not only on Brexit but on everything else—have produced new depths of distrust in government in the lead-up to the election.
The political paralysis Britain is experiencing derives from the fact that the country is divided along at least two axes: left vs. right, Leave vs. Remain.
Labour fared much better in Thursday’s election than many had predicted—myself included. But to win decisively in future, it still has work to do.
Since 2015 the British Labour party has sought to distance itself from New Labour and develop its populist appeal under left-winger Jeremy Corbyn. Why hasn’t it worked?
June 24 On June 23 the UK voted to leave the European Union after thirty years of a halting, sometimes noble, often messy experiment in international cooperation. In my circles—professional, well-educated, Cambridge and London—the principal reaction was incredulity. How could …
Huge swathes of England outside of London voted to Leave the European Union, because of a feeling of exclusion that has been growing since Thatcher’s 1980s.
Was F.R. Leavis Britain’s New York Intellectual? Though not Jewish himself, his wife and constant collaborator, Queenie Roth Leavis, was; and he was often taken for a Jew, described by one Cambridge undergraduate as dressing and speaking “like a member …
Just under ten years ago, a group of socialist and liberal intellectuals in London, fed up with the left-wing splits that had given Margaret Thatcher a hammerlock on power with barely 40 percent of the vote, got together to produce …
A few years ago, pundits on both sides of the water were pleased to announce the imminent convergence of British and American politics. There were said to be international forces at work too powerful for merely national political cultures to …
After Thatcher, after Reagan, after the cold war, what remains of the “special relationship” between Britain and America? There has always been less there than meets the eye. In the nineteenth century, a special feeling for the English was nurtured …
There is a powerful current in English political writing that is simultaneously radical and traditional. It is radical because harshly critical of the revolutionary impact of capitalism on the everyday life of the common people. It is traditional because it …
The Sykaos Papers by E. P. Thompson Pantheon Books, 1988, 490 pp., $19.95 An alien, Oi Paz, from the ultrarational, computer-directed society of the planet Oitar, crash-lands on Earth. Here he becomes a pawn in a cold war power struggle, …
Some thirty years ago in these pages, William L. Neumann registered an eloquent protest against the acquiescence of American academics to the conservative temper of their time. “Today’s American historian probably reflects his age more completely than in any previous …
In the United States, the relationship between socialists—often economic and cultural outsiders—and a more “American” working class has generally been problematic. For much of this century, however, Britain has provided an alluring counterexample. The British Labour party seemed to have …
The British New Left—at least in its first stage, from 1956 to the early 1960s—did not so much break with the old left as move beyond it. The smoothness of this transition, in contrast to the American experience, is most …
