You must know the drill by now. Global recession? That’s Labour’s fault. Brexit deadlock? That’s also Labour’s fault. Dropped your phone in the toilet? Don’t worry, that’s Labour’s fault too.  It might not make a great deal of sense to you, but that’s OK. Just remember: if anything bad happens, blame Labour. The latest iteration of this narrative is soon to be coming to a station near you. Three days of strikes by railway workers over pay and working hours are set to paralyse national rail networks. The Centre for Economics and Business Research has predicted that strikes could cost the UK economy almost £100 million, with 250,000 people unable to work on the first day of walkouts. Ugh. Thanks a lot, ...

This week workers on British railways will take part in the largest strike for over 30 years. The Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union has said that it plans to "shut down the rail system" on 21, 23 and 25 June, with huge support from its members for industrial action protesting planned redundancies and demanding pay rises. Like many other industries, those employed on the railways have suffered from a pandemic-induced pay freeze while eye-watering inflation has diminished the real value of their wages. Governments are never happy with strikes. The Labour Party too has so far failed to come out in full support of workers standing up for a better quality of life during a cost-of-living crisis. But this time, ...

Liz Cheney is no liberal hero. Since assuming the Wyoming congressional seat once held by her father, the former vice-president and occasional stand-in for Darth Vader, Dick Cheney, Liz has maintained a solid conservative voting record.  That record includes everything from being pro-guns, to warmongering, to voting for Supreme Court justices she knew would limit abortion rights. The conservative action group, Heritage Action has bestowed upon her an 87 per cent session score and says she is in the 89th percentile of the most conservative House Republicans. This puts her on the bona fide, hardcore right of right-wing Republicans. She supported Donald Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, and she did not vote to impeach him after he tried bribing ...

We are, at time of writing, just six days out from the latest instalment of that hit series, Today Could Mean The End For Boris Johnson. Thursday 23 June will bring by-elections in both Wakefield, which the Tories won from Labour for the first time in nearly nine decades in 2019, and Tiverton and Honiton, a part of south Devon that the Tories have held essentially forever. Polling suggests that the Tories may well be on course to lose both, to Labour and Lib Dems respectively. That means we might – just might – get a day in which we can watch both Red and Blue Walls crumbling simultaneously, live on BBC One. At the very least, Joshua is looking meaningfully ...

Next Thursday marks six years since Britain voted to exit the European Union. Although I was too young to vote, I was a committed supporter of leaving. And along with most of those ticking the Leave box, I hoped our exit would remove the spectre of Brussels from our politics forever. Yet we are marking this anniversary amid headlines about the ongoing influence of the European Court of Human Rights, the government's controversial proposals over the Northern Ireland Protocol of the Brexit agreement, and whether Labour wants to rejoin the EU's single market or not. All of this comes, of course, after several years of bitter debate over whether we should actually leave, and what an exit would look like. So contrary ...

“What’s the European Convention on Human Rights ever done for us?” You might have seen the video doing the rounds on social media. Patrick Stewart as a Pythonesque prime minister, his advisers spelling out for him the various things the ECHR has done, from preventing domestic violence to restoring peace in Northern Ireland. The video was made in 2016, when Theresa May suggested we should leave the ECHR instead of the EU (and indeed, she was not the first). The sketch is as good an example of British humour as the ECHR is of British diplomacy and law-making. It is too easy today to make drastic comparisons to the 1930s and 40s when fascism stalked Europe against the backdrop of economic devastation. The ...

Not even a month has passed since the heartfelt final episode of Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls and already its hopeful message about the future of Northern Ireland looks out of date. Though the Channel 4 series was ostensibly a sitcom, it always took pains to remind its audience how fragile and hard-won peace in the region was. Just before credits, the final scene of the pointedly titled "The Agreement" depicts Grandpa Joe leaving the polling station at Derry’s Guildhall hand in hand with his youngest granddaughter. The date was 22 May 1998 and the verdict of two referendums on the Good Friday Agreement was as close to consensus as the island of Ireland is ever likely to get: 71.1 per ...

There is no greater, more frequent lie than a morning mutter of, “I’m never drinking again.” We’ve all said it – head throbbing, mouth carpeted with fuzz, bile stinging the deep, dark chambers of our nostrils – and we’ve all meant it, too. It’s easy to mean it in the morning. But by the time night comes around… well. Obviously we didn’t literally mean it. Obviously we are going to drink again. This same cycle seems to be playing out with ITV’s Love Island, the reality dating show that has been running for seven years. Last year the media regulator Ofcom received almost 25,000 complaints after a vicious argument on the show; viewers found it alarming and were troubled that producers ...