There is a general sense of dissatisfaction with local councils; it has become the norm to speak breathlessly of how poor they are. Newspaper reports abound about infighting, scandal and incompetence – which many feel is due to perpetual rule by the same parties. One challenge with the use of the first-past-the-post electoral system in local elections is that in some English councils there is lacklustre opposition, or even none – which is not great for democracy. Having a system that encourages single-party rule tends to create a vicious circle of disenfranchisement, leaving little room for opposition parties to put resources into elections in which they have little chance of winning seats. Artificially inflated majorities are the result, particularly in London ...

Late night TV show hosts in the US positively adore Marjorie Taylor Greene. The Republican representative for Georgia's 14th congressional district is a far-right conspiracy theorist who fits pretty much every caricature of Donald Trump conservatism. The problem is, as risible as she may be, she also enjoys a significant political following. Her latest lunacy came during an interview with an extreme Catholic media platform called Church Militant, in which she said that Christians who give support to migrants show that “Satan’s controlling the church”. Satan was unavailable for comment. “The church is not doing its job,” she continued, “and it’s not adhering to the teachings of Christ, and it’s not adhering to what the word of God says we’re supposed to do ...

In the summer of 2009 I convinced my whole family to join me on a pilgrimage to the southernmost tip of Devon. We weren’t there for the verdant slopes or turquoise waters, nor were we there for the swimming, or the coast flecked with painted restaurants serving fresh fish and ice cream. We had come to Salcombe because I desperately wanted to visit the original Jack Wills store. I have been thinking about Jack Wills again because I have been watching the Netflix documentary White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie and Fitch, which portrays shops replete with perverse Aryan attractiveness and barely-veiled racism. There was a nostalgic hit from the intense smell of the aftershave, the barely-lit shops, the naked ...

As a parent of small children, Boris Johnson is unusual in having to worry about sticky finger prints on his golden wallpaper or potty training accidents in the Cabinet Room. But in another way he is entirely typical. The Prime Minister has reportedly noticed that childcare costs in Britain are extortionate, and is pushing for the relaxation of adult-to-child ratios in nurseries to help bring them down. It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on what childcare costs actually mean for a family. To give an example, my daughter’s nursery fees are around 70 per cent of my earnings. Without my husband’s income I couldn’t afford to work – a great loss to New Statesman readers everywhere. My situation is far ...

I observed a curious phenomenon recently, at lunch in central London. Diners at every table had upturned phones beside their knives. Despite the babble, one could tell, from twitching hands and nervous glances, the attention of the patrons was not entirely on the people accompanying them. The devices hummed so often that I wondered how these people had become so conditioned to not switching off that they didn’t just take the plunge and stab the phones with the cutlery. Then I received an email and lost my train of thought. Though some say it’s a blessing for productivity and livers everywhere that lunches are less liquid than once they were, it seems that the time spent on them has become a ...

There is something about the debate around “free speech” that can make one long for the comforting blanket of censorship. With the participants talking at cross purposes, it quickly ends up becoming the rhetorical equivalent of nails down the blackboard. This mind-numbing version of what is a fundamental debate about our liberties is set to come to the fore as Elon Musk -- the world’s richest man, and the inventor of buying up companies and then pretending you invented the thing -- has agreed a deal to buy Twitter and take it private. Musk, 50, has a maximalist conception of free speech usually adopted by teenage boys and libertarian men in their early 20s, before they realise its limitations and grow out ...

Rarely is business a psychodrama, but then Elon Musk isn’t an ordinary person. The South African billionaire’s purchase of Twitter, much mooted and at time of writing, due to be finally announced today (25 April), brings to an end weeks of breathless headlines, zigzagging tweets and plenty of social media commentary. But while Musk’s pursuit of Twitter seems to have come to an end that he finds successful, the story is only just beginning for the platform’s hundreds of millions of users. Musk is an idiosyncratic entrepreneur with strong feelings about divisive issues. The new boss of Twitter has a devoted following of 83 million on the platform, and uses his profile as a public stage from which to pronounce his ...

At last, the world got a break. The centre has held. Yesterday (24 April), 2022 stopped being 2022 just long enough for Emmanuel Macron to see off Marine Le Pen and secure re-election as the president of France. The result came as a great relief to millions around the world.Many are tempted to try and read into the result some grander narrative in which Europe remains a sort of liberal Hyperborea, a paradise from which the British expelled themselves in 2016 (together with Americans in electing Donald Trump). On closer inspection, however, this conception doesn't quite square with the bald reality: the Rassemblement National (RN), a party explicitly rooted in the post-fascist far right, has just taken 41 per cent ...