The UK is now in a new and very sharp phase of what can only realistically be called class politics.  Pay offers are not keeping pace with inflation, meaning wage cuts. Public services are under huge stress: some are threatened with severe job cuts. Inflation is at a 40-year high of 9 per cent, squeezing people on low and middle incomes. Energy costs are soaring while the energy companies record massive profits. The cost-of-living crisis caused by rising household energy bills is so extreme that, even if ministers are forced to accept Labour’s policy of a windfall tax on firms, it will inevitably face pressure for further measures.  So the government is now briefing that it wants new measures to curb the principal ...

On Wednesday morning (25 May) the world woke up to news of yet another US mass shooting. This time 19 primary school children were killed in Uvalde, Texas. This is the deadliest school shooting since the Sandy Hook massacre ten years ago, where another lone teenage boy murdered 20 children in their classrooms. The evidence so far indicates that this was a random act of violence by a teenager directing his anger and self-hatred outwards. Details are still being established, but it feels like America is stuck on a loop, a surrealist nightmare of grief, outrage and powerlessness in which nothing will ever change. The reason nothing will change is that, to many Americans, guns are not simply guns. Like the pipe ...

Monkeypox has reached community transmission in a growing number of countries in the West with predominantly white populations, including France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands. In the UK the total number of cases reported by Tuesday afternoon (24 May) was 71, with experts warning that the disease is likely to continue to spread and No 10 monitoring the situation. Despite these numbers, it has been hard not to notice that western media have often used images of the disease on only black skin. At the start of the outbreak it seemed as if many outlets did not have any other photos. Given that monkeypox is caused by a virus originating from West Africa, it was not inherently wrong to initially depict it on ...

So it’s all true. Sue Gray’s report uses the desiccated language of the civil service, but it nonetheless corroborates all that has been written and broadcast by the media over the past six months. There were gatherings galore in No 10 that breached the draconian Covid rules drawn up and imposed on the rest of the country by Boris Johnson. Some lasted for hours and continued until the small hours of the morning. There were “Wine Time Fridays”, “excessive alcohol consumption”, music, things broken, a drunken altercation, a panic alarm accidentally triggered.  Gray’s report includes internal messages showing that senior staff knew full well that what they were doing was wrong. One flags up a simultaneous press conference in Downing Street “so ...

Pitch invasions were, until recently, the glorious no-man’s land between stolid, rule-abiding football supporters and the anarchy of hooliganism. To clamber over the advertising boards and cavort on the carefully mowed grass during a once-in-a generation cup win was the most delicious sort of transgression. My football-devoted mother and I shared sacred moments genteelly invading pitches with thousands of others when our club, Portsmouth, celebrated rare successes in the early 1990s. Stewards watched blankly on, knowing we were only there to dance, sing and studiously avoid the defeated opposition players as they fled from the pitch. Judging by the past week, those opposition players are no longer being studiously avoided. Pitch invasions appear to have changed. On Sunday (22 May) the ...

Boris Bondarev did not mince his words. Resigning his post at the Russian mission to the United Nations in Geneva on 23 May, the career diplomat said that he was “ashamed” of his country and the “aggressive war unleashed by Vladimir Putin against Ukraine, and in fact against the entire Western world”. “Long overdue,” Bondarev wrote in a statement that he emailed to fellow diplomats and also posted to his personal LinkedIn account. “But today I resign from civil service. Enough is enough.” “Those who conceived this war want only one thing,” he continued. “To remain in power forever, live in pompous tasteless palaces, sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian Navy, enjoying unlimited power and complete ...

Nancy Pelosi’s eternal soul is in deep, dark danger. This, at least, is the opinion of Salvatore Cordileone, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco. In a public statement entitled “Letter to the faithful on the Notification sent to Speaker Nancy Pelosi” he wrote: “After numerous attempts to speak with her to help her understand the grave evil she is perpetrating, the scandal she is causing, and the danger to her own soul she is risking, I have determined that the point has come in which I must make a public declaration that she is not to be admitted to Holy Communion unless and until she publicly repudiate her support for abortion ‘rights’ and confess and receive absolution for her ...

Who is leaking these pictures? That's the question I keep coming back to. Here we are, just days after a Metropolitan Police investigation apparently exonerated the Prime Minister, and suddenly they appear on ITV News. In the foreground is a table, covered in half-empty wine bottles and open packets of biscuits; behind it stands Boris Johnson, smirking, his glass up-raised. The only concession to the pandemic then raging, the only slight dampener on the mood, is the tub of hand wipes. Other than that, it’s an image so familiar to anybody who has ever gone to a slightly depressing work do that I can almost taste the unsettlingly room-temperature wine. However disappointing it looks, though, it is very, very clearly a ...