The idea that, without capitalism, the planet might not be facing so great a climate crisis is well established, appearing in works like Naomi Klein’s bestselling This Changes Everything (2014) and from the growing ranks of “eco-socialist” activists. But in this essay, the science writer (and committed socialist) Leigh Phillips argues that an entirely socialist 20th century would have resulted in global heating at least as bad, if not worse. He outlines a counterfactual history in which capitali...
Sep 17, 2022•22 min
In 1947, on her 21st birthday, Elizabeth Windsor promised that when she ascended the royal throne she would serve “our great imperial family”. By the time of her coronation six years later, the Crown’s ties with empire were already significantly weaker. Yet for the duration of her 70-year reign, Queen Elizabeth II would remain a human link to old imperial Britain – the original “global Britain” – and its virtues and principles, real and imagined. Her death is a rupture, a breaking of that final ...
Sep 10, 2022•17 min
The shock of her death on 31 August 1997 sparked mass public mourning, a crisis within the royal family, and a test of the prime minister Tony Blair’s leadership. A quarter of a century later, how is “the People’s Princess” remembered? Reporter Tanya Gold goes in search of the woman behind the myths, the movies and the conspiracy theories – visiting the Spencer family home, Althorp, where Diana is buried, and a walking trail of her London haunts and monuments. She meets the keepers of Diana’s fl...
Sep 03, 2022•22 min
For 50 years, the “mean old daddy” immortalised in one of Mitchell’s best-loved songs was an enigma. For the first time, he tells his side of the story to the New Statesman ’s lead interviewer, Kate Mossman. Kate and Cary Raditz met in Paris in late 2021 to talk about a love affair that began on the island of Crete in the spring of 1970, continued in California and England, and which became a part of Mitchell’s iconic album, Blue . Written and read by Kate Mossman. Read the text version here . I...
Aug 27, 2022•38 min
On 16 November 2021, testified to parliament about his experiences of racism while playing for Yorkshire County Cricket Club. The off-spinner and former England youth captain said that, between 2008 and 2018, he had been repeatedly subjected to racial slurs, excluded and portrayed as a troublemaker. The fallout was catastrophic, at Yorkshire and across the professional game, with high-profile resignations and inquiries announced. Earlier this summer, the entire board of Cricket Scotland resigned...
Aug 20, 2022•27 min
Three years ago the New Statesman published a cover story showing how successive British governments have emaciated standards in UK university degrees, creating a generation of graduates with devalued qualifications, while costing the taxpayer billions. Since then, the “great university con” has continued unabated. Grade inflation has only increased, despite various declarations from ministers that something should be done to counter it. In this deeply researched and wide-ranging article, the Ne...
Aug 13, 2022•35 min
Why, six months into Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, is Germany still struggling to come to terms with the new European reality? For explanations, some point to the country’s reliance on Russian gas; others to the legacy of the Second World War or the Cold War. Yet, as Jeremy Cliffe argues in this essay from the New Statesman ’s 2022 Summer Special issue, to fully understand Germany’s instinct to maintain cordial relations with Russia, we have to go back much further than 1945 – into the nation...
Aug 06, 2022•24 min
On Boxing Day 1920, 53,000 people watched the Dick, Kerr Ladies beat St Helens Ladies 4-0 at Goodison Park – the largest-ever crowd recorded for a women’s football match in England. The game had blossomed during the First World War, as lunch-break kickabouts at munitions factories evolved into 150 women’s clubs across the country. But months after the Boxing Day fixture, the sport was banned by the Football Association – deemed “unsuitable” and dangerous. The ban remained for 50 years. In this r...
Jul 30, 2022•27 min
On 7 July 2022 Boris Johnson announced he would resign as Prime Minister. Despite surviving a series of scandals, Covid-19 and a parliamentary no-confidence vote, Westminster’s “greased piglet” was finally undone by the alleged sexual improprieties of his chief whip, Christopher Pincher, and the mass resignation of his cabinet. For many, the mystery was that such a policy-light, contradiction-heavy leadership had lasted so long. But in this dazzling satirical essay, the novelist Ed Docx shows us...
Jul 23, 2022•34 min
Soon after finishing his most recent book, The Last Days of Roger Federer , the author Geoff Dyer decided to follow in his hero’s footsteps and have surgery. “Strictly speaking, I was following in the footsteps of Novak Djokovic and Stefanos Tsitsipas,” he writes, “in that I would be having surgery on my elbow (left) rather than a knee, but that’s just an anatomical detail.” Worsening tennis elbow was the latest sign that, at 63, Dyer might be getting old; “business-class” medical care near his ...
Jul 16, 2022•23 min
On the eve of the millennium, JG Ballard noted how “everything is clean and shiny but oddly threatening”. The dawn of the 1990s had heralded a period of economic prosperity, of globalisation, relative peace and hi-tech connectivity – but did we end the decade more divided than ever? In this deeply researched and wide-ranging essay, first published in March 2021, the New Statesman ’s ideas editor, Gavin Jacobson, looks at the culture and politics of a misunderstood decade. After the old certainti...
Jul 09, 2022•29 min
The New Statesman ’s Pippa Bailey has long had a professional as well as a personal interest in the OED: she and the team of sub-editors she leads rely on the world’s most comprehensive dictionary to answer questions of meaning and spelling. So it was a labour of love when she visited its Oxford HQ to meet the lexicographers whose decisions – about which words are added, revised, or rendered obsolete – help shape the world’s most-spoken language. In this richly researched and beautifully observe...
Jul 02, 2022•33 min
In the wake of the pandemic, mental health referrals for adults and children have doubled. Has Covid sparked a parallel wave of mental illness? Or is grief and sadness a natural response to those months of isolation, uncertainty and daily death tolls? In this richly reported long read, New Statesman associate editor and feature writer Sophie McBain talks to the patients and medical professionals who believe we over-diagnose mental illness, ascribing labels and medication that do not help. A move...
Jun 25, 2022•28 min
Music writer Pete Paphides has turned to songwriters and musicians, from Abba to the Undertones, to make sense of all the big moments in his life. So when he got the call he was dreading, to say that his father was dying, it was music that saw him through shock, denial and loss. In this moving audio essay, read by the author, Paphides explores both the unpredictability of grief and the way his playlists gained fresh meaning – particularly the traditional songs his Greek-Cypriot father listened t...
Jun 18, 2022•34 min
On June 21 2022, Prince William will turn 40. What kind of king will the second-in-line be: the moderniser who posed for the cover of Attitude magazine, or the relic behind a disastrous recent tour of the Caribbean? Freelance writer Tanya Gold sets out in search of the ‘real’ William, talking to former colleagues and collaborators, joining a royal visit to Wales, and hearing from the actor who plays him in the Netflix comedy The Windsors. (The starting point was “speaking as poshly as I could”, ...
Jun 11, 2022•25 min
Since Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, stole an election two years ago his regime, already one of the most repressive in Europe, has been cracking down on opponents real and imagined. These include the fanatical supporters – “ultras” – of Belarusian football clubs, inspired by tales of Ukrainian football hooligans joining protests in Kyiv which led to the removal of a pro-Russian president in 2014. Like the Ukrainians, the Belarusian ultras opposed Moscow’s influence over their co...
Jun 04, 2022•32 min
On 17 June 1972, a nightwatchman stumbled across a burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC – triggering what became known as Watergate, the investigation that ultimately led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation. Fifty years on, the historian Colin Kidd reflects on Watergate’s renewed relevance in a populist, post-Trump era. Did the scandal help fuel today’s political conspiracy theories? And did Donald Trump’s war on “fake news” begin with the “journalisti...
May 28, 2022•22 min
When George Orwell travelled to Spain in the winter of 1936 to fight General Franco and the fascists, he stopped en route in Paris, where Henry Miller gave him his coat. The two men could not have been more different: the passionately political Englishman, and the American who disdained of all forms of activism. As Ian McEwan writes: “In a letter to Lawrence Durrell he wrote that he knew he could head off the rise of Nazism... if he could just get five minutes alone with Adolf Hitler and make hi...
May 21, 2022•37 min
It started with an innocent question posted on Yahoo! Answers in 2009, and snowballed into a thriving subreddit community: did anyone remember an American movie from the early Nineties called Shazaam , starring the comedian Sinbad as an incompetent genie who grants wishes to two children? Thousands of people did, vividly – and yet there was no trace of it. In this compelling long read, culture writer Amelia Tait talks to the Shazaam true believers, sorts fact from fiction and looks at the notion...
May 14, 2022•19 min
It launched with a promise to shake up the staid world of television news – to challenge broadcasting’s perceived liberal, left-wing bias. One year on, and faced with a new rival in TalkTV, how is GB News’s revolution going? Freelance writer Stuart McGurk spent several months reporting the inside story, as told by staffers past and present: those who were there for a chaotic June 2021 launch, those who quit, and those who stayed. In this deeply researched and often very funny long read, McGurk c...
May 07, 2022•47 min
What does Vladimir Putin owe Stalin? In this week’s audio long read, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore reflects on the parallels between the two Russian leaders, from their formative years to their ultimate reckoning in the history books. Putin keeps half of Stalin’s library in his office, annotated by the former dictator, and has embraced the Soviet cult of ruling through fear and control. By invading Ukraine, he has made a colossal gamble on securing his own legacy. Written by Simon Sebag M...
Apr 30, 2022•21 min
Stretched to breaking point by the pandemic, health services around the world are in crisis – with staff exhausted and demoralised, many of them quitting as a result. England alone is at least 6,000 GPs short of the government’s stated 2024 target – a recruitment pledge of the last election which it has already abandoned. The New Statesman ’s medical editor, Phil Whitaker, a practising doctor, reflects on the ordinary pressures he and his colleagues face – in this case, through the gradually unf...
Apr 23, 2022•28 min
On 7 June 2020, the statue of the former slave trader Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol during a Black Lives Matter protest – an act that, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police in Minnesota, US, reverberated around the country. Eighteen months later, Tom Lamont spent a month at the trial of the four protesters charged with its fall. As he writes, the UK government and others “viewed the toppling as guerrilla work, not just illegal but selfish and dangerous”. Others saw it as an...
Apr 16, 2022•42 min
On the eve of the 2022 French presidential election, the New Statesman ’s writer-at-large Jeremy Cliffe caught a train from Courseulles-sur-Mer on the north coast of France to Marseille on the Mediterranean. Stopping in Caen, Paris and Vierzon along the way, he heard how contemporary France is reshaping itself in the long shadow of Charles de Gaulle – and against the backdrop of Europe’s biggest war since 1945. What does the future hold for the Fifth Republic? Written by Jeremy Cliffe and read b...
Apr 09, 2022•32 min
When the Taliban took control of Kabul in August 2021, the Koofi family were among 8,000 Afghans airlifted to safety in the UK, as part of the government’s Operation Warm Welcome. The New Statesman ’s Sophie McBain met them in a hotel in the north of England soon afterwards, where they were waiting to be resettled. As the months passed, she followed their new life, as well as that of the hotel staff and its other residents: an uncertain limbo of bureaucracy and confinement. Written and read by S...
Apr 09, 2022•35 min
The anti-ageing industry is bankrolled by some of the wealthiest people on Earth, including Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel. Are the scientists it employs close to a cure? And if they are, who wants to live forever anyway? Jenny Kleeman meets the entrepreneurs who say that a 120th birthday is within reach, and critics who argue that life extension is the pinnacle of elite narcissism. Written by Jenny Kleeman and read by Emma Haslett. Read the text version here . It was first published on the New Stat...
Apr 09, 2022•28 min
For 50 years, the “mean old daddy” immortalised in one of Mitchell’s best-loved songs was an enigma. For the first time, he tells his side of the story to the New Statesman ’s lead interviewer, Kate Mossman. Kate and Cary Raditz met in Paris in late 2021 to talk about a love affair that began on the island of Crete in the spring of 1970, continued in California and England, and which became a part of Mitchell’s iconic album, Blue . Written and read by Kate Mossman. Read the text version here . I...
Apr 09, 2022•38 min
Audio Long Reads is a new podcast from the New Statesman , showcasing the best of our reported features and essays, read aloud. Ease into the weekend with stories and analysis from our authors – including Kate Mossman, Jeremy Cliffe and Sophie McBain – published every Saturday morning. Just search for Audio Long Reads from the New Statesman wherever you get your podcasts. For all our long reads, subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special podcast offer. Just ...
Apr 01, 2022•2 min
