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...
“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...
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,...
Halloween has passed, the date at which British Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised Brexit would be finalized. The suspense continues and will shortly attain a new level of intensity as the British electorate prepares for what will certainly be the most hyperreal UK general election in the...
When Steve Bannon left the Trump administration in 2017 after having established the new dogma of “America First,” few assumed that his new vocation would be to convert Europe to his doctrine. No one expected an opportunist who had dallied with the movie industry and alt-right journalism at...
We have in our midst two political leaders who possess remarkably similar characteristics. This is not just in their demeanor, but also in how they share a political perspective on the world, and what it means for global politics as populism remains on the rise and division and discord are sewn as...
Elected by the Conservative Party as everyone predicted to replace Theresa May as the UK’s prime minister, Boris Johnson’s victory speech reveals as much as it conceals about the future of Britain. Above all, it reveals much of what we already knew about what we might call Johnson’s “speech...
The history of England and indeed the United Kingdom can be summed up as a ding-dong battle between cavaliers and roundheads. Like Gordon Brown, Theresa May is a roundhead. Both are children of men of the church. They work hard, find it hard to delegate and are not exactly the life of the party....
Banishing the notion of things that are “statistically significant” means that uncertainty is destined to become a more significant part of our lives. Though in a very deep sense we are a civilization governed by statistics, most people show little interest in a mathematical discipline that...
Politicians and intelligence operatives always prefer to present vague, ambiguous and uncertain suppositions as unequivocal facts because people will be more likely to believe them. In the same week, according to NBC News, “Theresa May told British lawmakers that U.S. policy of separating...
