“Don’t they know there’s a war on?” said the front page of today’s Daily Mail, which excoriates those calling for Boris Johnson’s resignation after he was fined by the Met Police for attending a party during lockdown. Across the land, Jacob Rees-Mogg, loyal cabinet ministers and Conservative MPs are running the same line: the nation needs Johnson now more than ever as he defends the country against Russia. Back in the real world, however, Britain is not at war in Ukraine. The nation’s armed forces are not engaged in combat operations against Russia. And Johnson is not a wartime leader. The rhetoric from Conservative politicians and sections from the media is shameful and callous political positioning. Ordinary people in Ukraine are fighting ...

“Time is short and history will not forgive a failure to act now.” These were the words with which Labour leader Keir Starmer demanded more climate action from the government last August. So it is somewhat surprising that, on 11 April 2022, his party railed against climate protesters for doing the same thing. “Drivers are being hammered by rising petrol prices and now millions of motorists can’t access fuel. The government must stop standing idly by and immediately impose injunctions,” the same Keir Starmer tweeted in response to Just Stop Oil protesters’ blockade of 11 fuel depots in southern England. More than surprising, though, opposing peaceful protest is a dangerous tactic for the Labour Party: one that risks making activism the target of public wrath over ...

It is, right now, quite a fraught time to be LGBT in the UK. The visceral, incredibly polarising and toxic trans rights debate is being used as a battleground in the culture war in a way that is making the broader LGBT community feel vulnerable. Stonewall is being vilified, older gay activists are seeing rhetoric from the 1980s reused in new contexts. The mood is febrile enough that the UK government has decided to cancel an international LGBT rights conference it was organising, after losing all support from British LGBT groups and failing to attract commercial sponsors. The cancellation of the event, in turn, sparks fresh fears that LGBT rights are going to be thrown under the bus, despite widespread ...

In July 2020, as the UK emerged from its first lockdown and questions appeared about what might come next for the economy, the BBC news team made a cartoon video portraying Rishi Sunak as Superman. The video was, of course, completely doolally: there might not be a standard journalistic rule against this sort of thing, but only in the way there’s no rule against slaughtering your sources. It’s just kind of assumed you already know not to do it. One shot of the video showed him comforting an elderly lady with a hug against his implausibly muscular chest. Her head came up to his nipples. Not only were the BBC giving the impression that a Tory chancellor was the sort ...