Image Credit: Wiki No, Keir Starmer should not reshuffle Anneliese Dodds. This is a silly idea and you shouldn’t be considering it. Let’s begin with the most important fact on this whole thing: Dodds is a good shadow chancellor. To start with, she has the correct background to do it, something that many politicians don’t; she has experience as an MEP; she…
Photo Credit: Midia Ninja The Brazilian Workers Party has an elegant saying for its current predicament: “No grass grows under Lula’s feet”. This poetic language doesn’t quite mask what is obvious to everyone else; that since 2018, and even before, in 2010, when he left power, the creator and creature of the Brazilian left has watched his legacy be squandered on the…
Photo Credit As time goes on, parties start to resemble their leaders; the Labour party of Tony Blair would not elect Jeremy Corbyn; but that of Ed Miliband would, whatever that might say about the men themselves. So, over 100 days into the job, what exactly does Keir Starmer’s Labour resemble? Polling suggests that the man himself has made a good impression…
(Image of Dominic Cummings by Radical Larry (CC BY-SA 4.0)) Due to whatever virtue (loyalty) or character flaw (obsequiousness), I was never radicalised; my politics are those of my mother, only less so – a big state social democrat with a passion for human rights. My household was intrinsically political; we ate our vegetables because not doing so was an offense to…
It is often said of Boris Johnson that his mode of doing politics is a bluff: a bumbling fool act that hides a very nasty strain of Tory politics which people don’t truly see until they have learned to love him. His opposite, Keir Starmer, seems to have the reverse image; a man who constantly and straightforwardly tells us exactly what he…
Jair Bolsonaro is nothing if not consistent – though he may occasionally have wavered on economics, the Workers’ Party and various issues great and small, the Brazilian president has always been and always will be a paranoid authoritarian with no respect for institutional rules. Upon his election in 2018, there were some who thought his anti-democratic outbursts were just flavor rather than…
The old saying goes that if you put a frog in hot water, it will jump out; but if placed in the lukewarm water, heated over some time, it will slowly accept its fate and die. It’s not true, of course; frogs are much smarter than people when it comes to existential resignation. But it does provide an interesting thought experiment: if…
Though Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has stuck in the wider cultural memory as a great romance for the ages, one of the most important parts of the novel does not deal with pining or misunderstandings or grand love declarations: it is instead when Charlotte Lucas, who had until that point all but become a spinster, tells her friend Elizabeth Bennett that…
