I fucking hate losing. 2016 obviously; the collapse of our party a year before. Few, though, have stung as much as 2019. Not just a Liberal Democrat disappointment, but a huge majority for a party of sleazeballs, crackpots, and authoritarians, strung…
I cannot bring myself to campaign for Sarah Green and the Liberal Democrats this by-election. This isn’t because I don’t think she’ll be a better MP than another Boris stooge—of course she will. The reason is one, simple, policy issue: housebuilding.
Most theories of politics, in my view, are theories of content rather than of structure. Political philosophers are too keen to tell us what we should be discussing, rather than how we should be discussing it.
Voltaire is my liberal icon because he was a man of many talents and imparted his views on the world through almost every channel possible: he was a philosopher, author, historian, economist, human rights activist, and scientist.
In the 21st century it is difficult to have icons. Finding historical figures who didn’t engage in problematic behaviour when viewed in the light of today is a challenge in and of itself. Even figures such as…
The liberal icon I’ve chosen is George Eliot, although I haven’t yet read most of what she wrote. She has been described as both a romantic conservative and a radical Millian liberal, and no doubt was both at different points in her life. But whatever…
“He don’t miss.” On the face of it, the notification I just received from a friend makes little sense. Invariably, however, it’ll be followed by a tweet from Oz Katerji with a based take on a foreign policy issue. The kind of take that…
In 1847 Lord Rothschild visited Athens during the Orthodox Easter. The Greek government, anxious not to offend their moneyed Jewish visitor, forbade the burning of Judas’s effigy during his stay. Deprived of their traditional outlet for antisemitism, the locals…
We liberals identify ourselves as such because we hold liberty to be the highest political principle—a privilege that has been afforded to us on the basis of our having had the fortune to have been born after that greatest flowering of human thought, the Enlightenment.
Ah, NIMBYs. The middling middle-class campaigners we all love to hate. For those who are blissfully unaware, the acronym stands for “Not In My Back Yard”, referring to those implacable objectors to any development that could provide jobs…