New Statesman Magazine
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The New Statesman is a leading progressive political and cultural magazine in the United States and around the world. Visit our website to view the latest news and features. The New Statesman is celebrated for its progressive and liberal politics, as well as the intelligence, range and quality of its writing and analysis.
New Statesman Magazine
49m ago
On the 25 March, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) voted on Resolution 2728, demanding a ceasefire in Gaza for the remainder of the month of Ramadan – which ends on 9 April. The resolution also called for the immediate, unconditional release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas, as well as “emphasising the urgent need to expand the flow of humanitarian assistance” to the Gaza Strip.
For the first time since 7 October, the US did not use its veto to protect its ally Israel on the international stage, but rather abstained from the vote in a move that has infuriated the embattled Isra ..read more
New Statesman Magazine
49m ago
Your Great-Uncle Harry built Fort Worth: that’s the story I was raised on. We were New York Jews, unobservant, but gathering at my grandmother’s every Friday nonetheless, my grandfather with a glass of Manischewitz in his hand. Family stories came in fragments. My great-uncle was Harry Friedman, my grandfather’s older brother; my grandfather had changed his last name to Franklin, because he knew he’d do better on Wall Street if he didn’t have a Jewish name. Another brother took the last name Donald, which can make family history tricky to track down. Anyway, who wants to think about the past ..read more
New Statesman Magazine
49m ago
Donald Trump told a conference of religious broadcasters in February that if re-elected as president he would not only “defend Christian values” but even Christian iconography. He informed the delegates that his opponents wanted “to tear down crosses where they can, and cover them up with social justice flags”. He continued, “every communist regime throughout history has tried to stamp out the churches, just like every fascist regime has tried to co-opt them and control them”. The hundreds of people gathered at the National Religious Broadcasters International Christian Media Convention in Nas ..read more
New Statesman Magazine
15h ago
Are you ready to power up Britain? The boffins over at Labour HQ have devised a substitute for Boris Johnson’s much-pilloried “levelling-up” agenda. At the launch of Labour’s local election campaign in Dudley today, Angela Rayner, Labour’s levelling-up secretary, described the slogan as a “burnt-out shell” and said she would “finally put out the dying embers of this patronising game the Tories play”. She pointed to the Oliver Twist process in which councils have to apply to Whitehall for funding, and argued that Labour would move away from the Tories’ failed system to deliver on that famous pr ..read more
New Statesman Magazine
18h ago
A pattern is emerging: one political party releases an attack advert at an angle to the truth; then the target decries a descent into Trumpian politics, before publishing their own montage that mangles reality to trigger fear in the pursuit of votes.
It’s a tit-for-tat online wrestle. Both parties have embraced the memeified derision at which social media excels. Adverts that barely resemble the truth aren’t new. Remember Vote Leave’s warning that Turkey was joining the EU, or the Conservatives’ line that Gordon Brown released 80,000 criminals early.
Digital teams in each party have now dunked ..read more
New Statesman Magazine
18h ago
Welcome to the Research Brief, where Spotlight, the New Statesman’s policy section, brings you the pick of recent publications from the think tank, charity and NGO world. See more editions of the Research Brief here.
What are we talking about this week? The desperate state of the NHS (again). While the health service contends with record high waiting lists, it is also facing record lows of public approval. According to the latest annual British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey, less than one in four Britons (24 per cent) reported that they were satisfied with the NHS in 2023, a 5 per cent drop fr ..read more
New Statesman Magazine
18h ago
Shareholders in Thames Water, the largest and most indebted of the private companies that supply Britain’s water and sewerage services, have withdrawn from a plan to invest a further £500 million investment in the company. Thames had been seeking higher bills and lower penalties from the regulator, Ofwat, but now say they see the company as “uninvestable”. The government has reportedly drawn up plans for its insolvency – a process that would, like the rescues of Britain’s privatised and deregulated energy companies, come at huge cost to the public. Who’s to blame?
Sajid Javid
He’s not an obvio ..read more
New Statesman Magazine
22h ago
Returning to think tanking after 15 years away, I am struck by how wide the chasm between political rhetoric and the mechanics of delivering on policy objectives has grown. Think about the gap between the Rwanda plan and what is really needed to address irregular migration, or the difference between promises to solve the housing crises and what is actually being done.
This month, a report by my colleagues at the New Economics Foundation (NEF) revealed the gap between promises of a green transition and the reality of a workforce that isn’t ready to deliver on the necessary scale. They showed th ..read more
New Statesman Magazine
1d ago
“If you take a look right now, the ‘nuclear’ word is being mentioned all the time,” Donald Trump observed last year. The former (and perhaps future) US president blamed his weak-willed successor, rather dubiously, for the proliferation of what he described as one of two “N-words” better left unsaid by political leaders. But he was on to something nevertheless. After decades of relative dormancy, nuclear concern has emerged again. Trump himself was perhaps the original cause, as the most conspicuously unstable quarterback ever to handle the American nuclear “football”. But in the last eight yea ..read more
New Statesman Magazine
1d ago
Even Labour – with all its history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory – believes that the next general election is won.
Where there is less confidence – to the extent that anyone in Labour dares to think about it – is the election after that. Historically, a landslide election victory meant that a government could expect to be in office after the next election, too. Labour might be thinking that they are on the cusp of winning not just the 2024 general election but the 2029 one as well, just as Tony Blair had as good as won the 2001 general election in May 1997. This time, however, t ..read more