The Guardian offered its readers what is certainly the most comic and hyperreal sentence of the week when it reported that “Boris Johnson accused the EU of preparing to go to ‘extreme and unreasonable lengths’ in Brexit talks as he defended breaching international law amid a mounting...
On February 3, Prime Minister Boris Johnson laid bare his long-awaited vision of a “global Britain” in a world after Brexit. Speaking amidst the imperial grandeur of Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, Johnson’s message was that the United Kingdom, liberated from the...
“Can we please go back to talking about Brexit?” For the past few weeks, I got used to seeing this message on Twitter at least once a day, breaking the monopoly of news about the novel coronavirus. For some, it was a joke, half-nostalgically taking us back to the...
Like many of the leaders of developed nations, Boris Johnson has been struggling to assert his leadership role in the thankless combat against the current scourge of humanity: a particularly aggressive infectious disease that has now landed even the prime minister himself in hospital. Boris has...
In 1978-79, the United Kingdom experienced the winter of discontent. Trade unions around the country went on strike. On January 22, 1979, the UK experienced the largest strike action since the General Strike of 1926. Even gravediggers and waste collectors joined in, leaving corpses and...
To make money in the world of self-help books, being realistic and balanced, and where failure is accepted as a good thing, will not work. It seems that the leaders of America and the United Kingdom have cottoned on to this. It is well documented that Donald Trump is a big fan of the...
If I were the European Union, I’d be wiping my hands, sighing in relief and slamming the door after the United Kingdom’s long-delayed departure. Britain had been a noisy, pushy houseguest for 47 years, and it was only growing ruder. It spent the last three years hanging out in the foyer,...
In early 2017, Europe’s far-right parliamentary bloc met in Koblenz, Germany, to plot its political future. The meeting of the bloc’s leaders — which included Marine le Pen from France, Matteo Salvini from Italy and Geert Wilders from the Netherlands — took place shortly after the...
I dutifully got a shot this winter to inoculate myself against four different flu viruses. By exposing myself to weakened strains of these diseases, and preemptively suffering some mild flu symptoms, I can ward off the more serious consequences of a full-on infection and do my part to help stop...
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has given Jeremy Corbyn a good old-fashioned thumping. The Conservatives won 365 seats out of 650 in Parliament, gaining 47. They smashed the “red wall” of solid Labour seats in northern England. The Johnson-led Conservatives achieved the highest vote swing...
Dominic Cummings, the UK’s answer to Steve Bannon, unveils the essential truth behind British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s victory in the general election. It’s all about the misplaced prestige of traditional education, which has no place in modern society. Education is not only overrated,...
The vast majority of voters got it right. They knew that Thursday’s election could only produce a meaningless result, and they acted in consequence. Although unambiguous, the result answers no questions, but opens up new ones. To anyone with an understanding of historical processes, the idea...
The outcome of the election in the United Kingdom is just one more piece of evidence of a pernicious trend that has increasingly infested liberal democracies — extreme polarization. While it will take some time to get a complete picture of what happened, one thing is clear: The result of the...
Just days before the December 12 election, The Guardian’s opinion poll tracker finds the Tories to “have a significant lead” over Labour even as support for the Liberal Democrats and the Brexit Party has slumped. In recent years, opinion polls have been notoriously unreliable. Rob Watson,...
Elections are almost invariably termed historic. For once, the use of the term is not an exaggeration. When British voters go to the polls on December 12, they will indeed be making a historic choice. Scroll down to read more in this 360° series British democracy...
