As a philosophy student in the 1980s, the New Statesman ’s editor-in-chief Jason Cowley learned more from Bryan Magee than from any seminar or lecture. Magee’s 1987 BBC television series The Great Philosophers , described by one critic as “two boffins on a sofa”, examined some of life’s most recondite questions in an accessible way. Magee was also a prolific author (of philosophy, poetry and fiction), a Labour and then an SDP politician. But when Cowley later met Magee, sent to interview him by ...
Apr 15, 2023•22 min
According to the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, the face of British Christianity is changing rapidly. London is now home to the greatest concentration of African churches outside Africa – many of them in bingo halls and warehouses, schools and community centres, where they also serve as social and charitable hubs. Outside the capital, the prospects of a religious revival are relatively bleak: weekly Church of England attendance is below 2 per cent of England’s population, and 2...
Apr 08, 2023•20 min
In January 2023, a leaked memo from the US air force general Mike Minihan revealed that he expected to be at war with China over Taiwan by 2025. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had raised the stakes, as had Beijing’s consistent refusal to rule out military action. But is a full-scale invasion the real threat, or is the territory’s struggle for independence already well under way? On a recent trip to Taiwan, the New Statesman ’s China and global affairs editor Katie Stallard visits Kinmen, site of t...
Apr 01, 2023•22 min
After a series of bad bets on the post-pandemic economy, California-based Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) lost 60% of its value on the evening of 8 March 2023, and $42bn in withdrawals the following day. Its collapse triggered panic across the US, and in Europe, where Switzerland’s second-largest lender Credit Suisse (already dubbed ‘Debit Suisse’) was already looking shaky; its subsequent bail-out was the first the world’s big banks had received since the 2008 crash. In this week’s magazine cover sto...
Mar 25, 2023•21 min
It started as an accident of geography: after one RAF runway closed, the bodies of British soldiers killed in action were repatriated from Iraq and Afghanistan to RAF Lyneham and then through the Wiltshire market town of Wootton Bassett, on their way to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. From April 2007 until August 2011 the town became the site of unofficial national mourning: relatives, tourists, foreign media, politicians and dignitaries came to pay their respects as the funeral corteges ...
Mar 18, 2023•1 hr 3 min
Once the envy of the world, British universities are being hollowed out by a managerial class, argues Adrian Pabst, a New Statesman contributing writer and professor of politics at the University of Kent. Instead of intellectual excellence and civic responsibility, the emphasis is increasingly on “churning out graduates who will serve the interests of City firms and the non-governmental organisation industry”. Where did the rot set in, and can it be cured? Pabst traces the university’s decline f...
Mar 11, 2023•22 min
Much ink has been spilled in recent years on the woes of centre-left parties across the West – some of it prematurely, as Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz, Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, Australia’s Anthony Albanese and perhaps soon Keir Starmer in Britain can attest. The bigger and quite possibly more lasting story of political decline, however, is on the centre-right. A decade ago, moderate conservative figures like David Cameron and Angela Merkel were pre-eminent. Today the tendencies those leaders represented...
Mar 04, 2023•26 min
The New Statesman ’s Scotland editor Chris Deerin has been reporting on the SNP since 1996, when as a young political correspondent he sparred with its then leader Alex Salmond. The party was then an outlier, with only three Scottish MPs to Labour’s 49. Just over ten years later, in 2007, Salmond became first minister and appointed a shy, ambitious protégé as his deputy: Nicola Sturgeon. In this definitive account, Deerin traces Sturgeon’s political journey – to the top of her party, through the...
Feb 25, 2023•21 min
When her mother died Johanna Thomas-Corr, the literary editor of the Sunday Times, fretted that she was misremembering her somehow. “I kept reaching for my own figures of speech, only for them to writhe out of my hands,” she writes. “Writing about her was easy: she was so distinctive. But writing about my relationship with her – this was a slippery business.” In this essay, struggling to find a language for her loss, Thomas-Corr turns to literature for answers. She draws on a rich tradition of w...
Feb 18, 2023•18 min
Every year since 2009 new records have been set for UK house prices , and every year people have asked how long the market can continue to defy gravity. But this year is different. Mortgage rates have risen steeply, while the cost of living accelerates; the past four months have seen the longest sustained drop in property prices since 2008. And it’s a global issue, as central bankers make borrowing more expensive in an attempt to curb inflation. Is this a necessary correction or the dawn of a ca...
Feb 11, 2023•27 min
In late January 2023 the New Statesman ’s Bruno Macaes travelled to the front lines in Ukraine. In the Donbas, in the east, he found scenes of total devastation – levelled villages and burned forests, the remaining residents “walking the streets like ghosts”. At the front the Russian army is sending wave after wave of troops in the hope of making the Ukrainians despair, making them believe that the war will only be won when they have killed every one of them. In this vivid and sometimes surreal ...
Feb 04, 2023•17 min
In November 2022 Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, told parliament that the south coast of England faced “an invasion” of small boats. “If Labour were in charge,” she said, “they would be allowing all the Albanian criminals to come to this country.” Since then, others have suggested that the nearly 200 unaccompanied children found to have gone missing in the UK were Albanians “willingly joining” organised gangs. In this moving and often funny personal piece, Lea Ypi reflects on life as an Al...
Jan 28, 2023•14 min
In south-west England, where Phil Whitaker practises as a GP, his colleagues have frequently resorted to driving critically ill patients to hospital – because there are no ambulances, or because the queue for emergency care is typically eight hours long. In January 2023 the Royal College of Emergency Medicine estimated that 500 patients were dying weekly because of delays and, along with other NHS bodies, it has called on the government to take emergency action. After a sleepless night in a hos...
Jan 21, 2023•20 min
As Twitter and Facebook stumble through Elon Musk’s takeover and Mark Zuckerberg’s insistence on the metaverse, questions abound about the future of social media. What sort of news and discussion should it host and encourage? What should be its attitude to participation, networking, user rights and free speech? What should be its business model? What societal role should it seek to play? What, ultimately, is it for? In this essay for the New Statesman ’s special Christmas issue of 2022, Jeremy C...
Jan 14, 2023•23 min
In a second archive edition of the audio long read, we bring you two classic magazine articles. In the first, the then editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin, visits Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1937, where the Russian communist revolutionary was the guest of the artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (here referred to only as “Rivera’s wife”, though she was also Trotsky’s lover, or about to be). Martin wanted to ask the exile about the show trials then being held in Moscow, in which Stalin ext...
Jan 07, 2023•18 min
HG Wells’s interview with Stalin in 1934, and the debate that followed, was one of the most striking episodes in the history of the New Statesman . Wells – the novelist and socialist famous for science fiction such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds – used the interview to try to coax Stalin into a more conciliatory position, challenging (too gently for some) his views on international relations, the rhetoric of class war and freedom of expression for writers. The interview took place...
Dec 31, 2022•43 min
It is 23 December, some time in the future, and a storm rages outside the house. Inside there are supplies and an expectant mother sleeps. Is it safe to venture out and fetch her gift? In this post-apocalyptic story the novelist and short story writer Sarah Hall ( The Electric Michaelangelo , Burntcoat ) imagines a mysterious landscape ravaged by weather: is it still Christmas, when the world seems to have stopped? Warning: contains scenes that younger listeners may find disturbing. Read by Emma...
Dec 24, 2022•34 min
Why do we read? In this essay, the Norwegian author explores meaning and purpose in the novel, from the work of Claire Keegan to Dostoevsky and DH Lawrence. The form’s power lies in its openness, he writes, its capacity to defy the absolutes of politics, philosophy or science: “It pulls any abstract conception about life… into the human sphere, where it no longer stands alone but collides with myriad impressions, thoughts, emotions and actions.” Knausgaard considers how best to achieve this – th...
Dec 17, 2022•20 min
Speaking in the House of Commons on 18 October, the Home Secretary Suella Braverman denounced the opposition to her proposed Public Order Bill as “the Guardian -reading, tofu-eating wokerati”. The next day, she posted her resignation letter on Twitter. It had been a busy 24 hours in the war on woke. On TalkTV, Piers Morgan had bemoaned the rise of the “ultra-woke”. In New York, Elon Musk was finalising the paperwork for his takeover of Twitter, after his ex-wife Talulah Riley urged him to “fight...
Dec 10, 2022•45 min
If Europe today has a dominant leader, it is Emmanuel Macron. He has big, deeply thought-through ideas about his country's role in Europe and the world, and grand ambitions for enhancing it. Following his re-election as French president in April, he is now secure in office until 2027. And having lost his legislative majority at elections in June, he is turning to the world stage with all the more vigour. Now, then is a good time to ask: what is the Macron Doctrine? In his cover essay for the mag...
Dec 03, 2022•30 min
Roy Jenkins, while serving as president of the European Commission, used to spend his mornings writing. The heads of state who visited him were often keener to speak about his biographies of Asquith or Gladstone than about new legislation. This integration of politics, scholarship and the media was once a feature of British intellectual life, from AJP Taylor to CP Snow, but today the space to think and work has become ever more constrained. It is difficult to imagine Ursula von der Leyen, the cu...
Nov 26, 2022•18 min
On 15 November, despite a poor showing in the US midterm elections for the candidates he had backed, Donald Trump surprised no one in announcing his second run for the presidency. What does his official return to the political stage mean for the Republican Party – and for America, Russia and China? In this essay, the New Statesman ’s China and global affairs editor Katie Stallard reflects on the ugly civil war on the right of the Republican party between supporters of the Florida governor Ron De...
Nov 19, 2022•18 min
In 2001 Margaret Atwood began writing the novel Oryx and Crake . She started from the idea of species extinction, including human extinction. How long have we got? And would we bring about our own demise? The premise of Oryx and Crake was that, since we have the capability to bioengineer a virus capable of wiping out humanity, someone might be tempted to do just that – in order to save everything else. In this imagined future, humans have been replaced with a vegan, peace-loving, self-healing up...
Nov 12, 2022•16 min
On both sides of the Atlantic, the number of people being diagnosed with ADHD is rising. Psychiatry UK, which provides both private and NHS-funded assessments, reports that it is receiving around 150 ADHD referrals a day; in 2022 the organisation expanded its prescribing team from ten to 60. Why are more people being told they have ADHD? Partly, this is a course correction: adults who were diagnosed with depression or a personality disorder are now receiving a more nuanced, helpful assessment. B...
Nov 05, 2022•28 min
Four years ago, the New Statesman published a long read by Jude Rogers marking the reissue of two landmark British films released at the height of the Cold War: Threads in 1984, and When the Wind Blows in 1986. Both films explore the devastating effects of nuclear attacks on ordinary people, and hoped to educate the public, as well as politicians, on the danger. For anyone who has seen these films, both will have lingered long in the mind. When this piece was published, the nuclear threat was re...
Oct 29, 2022•27 min
Rebecca Solnit has been writing about hope for nearly 20 years, starting with her 2003 essay "Hope in the Dark", which became a bestselling book of the same name. What began as a response to the cynicism that followed the invasion of Iraq ("we didn’t stop the war, we have no power, we can’t win") has evolved into a sustained argument for the value of protest. You have to take the long view, says Solnit, to see the positive social and political changes that have occurred in the past half-century:...
Oct 22, 2022•20 min
In 2014, the Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry guest-edited the New Statesman on the theme of the “Great White Male”. Perry, who is known for his subversive ceramics and tapestries as well as his cross-dressing alter-ego Claire, wanted to explore issues of gender, masculinity, Britishness, class and the grip that white male power still exerts on the UK’s culture and politics. In his signature essay for the issue, he characterised this force as “Default Man”. Default Men are middle-class,...
Oct 15, 2022•27 min
Even the most ardent carnivore might struggle to argue that meat is a force for good. The global livestock industry produces more greenhouse gases than the exhaust from every form of transport on the planet combined. And while doctors try to curb antibiotic prescription, 80 per cent of antibiotics used in the US are administered to healthy animals to minimise infections on crammed farms. Industrial animal farming is also a major cause of deforestation, water waste, water pollution, eutrophicatio...
Oct 08, 2022•26 min
On 23 September 2022, the UK’s new prime minister and her chancellor delivered their explosive “mini-Budget”, cutting taxes for the richest in society and increasing government borrowing. Global markets were alarmed – but should the reality of Trussonomics have taken anyone by surprise? In this reported long read, the New Statesman ’s writer at large Jeremy Cliffe looks at the ideas, institutions and thinkers who have shaped Truss’s politics for decades, from a society of free-market thinkers wh...
Oct 01, 2022•28 min
Giorgia Meloni started out as the awkward outsider, a woman from humble Roman roots in an Italy whose politics have long been dominated by alpha men from the north – Silvio Berlusconi, Matteo Renzi, Beppe Grillo, Matteo Salvini. Now the post-fascist party she fronts - Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy, or FdI) – is widely expected to take the largest share of the vote in the 2022 general election. How did it get there, having scraped 4% in 2018? Earlier this month, the New Statesman writer at...
Sep 24, 2022•25 min
