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Special relationship: the British right’s appeasement of Donald Trump

Special relationship: the British right’s appeasement of Donald Trump

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Barring a much bloodier insurrection than the one mounted two weeks ago, Joe Biden will assume the presidency of the United States on Wednesday.  Where does that leave the UK? Britain has long prided itself on its special relationship with the US, choosing to overlook the fact that the US tells France that is its oldest ally, that it has a strategic partnership with Israel and so on.  For many Leavers, focusing on the Anglosphere was a central rationale for…

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Two things we don’t yet know

Two things we don’t yet know

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Donald Rumsfeld once famously said: “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know”. For that, he won the Plain English Campaign’s Foot In Mouth award…

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YangGangAgain? – Betting on the next Mayor of NYC

YangGangAgain? – Betting on the next Mayor of NYC

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, Sadiq Khan is cruising to victory in the delayed London elections, but it’s all to play for across the pond. Bill de Blasio is term-limited, and Democrats have 5 months to choose his successor (in their primary, the Republicans have little chance in the general). There are 38 candidates who have filed and the frontrunner is the both the wildcard and the only one you may have heard of… Andrew Yang (2/1 at Ladbrokes) may have come 9th in…

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Leave looks like…Has Brexit met Vote Leave’s prospectus?

Leave looks like…Has Brexit met Vote Leave’s prospectus?

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Has Brexit matched your expectations?  Let’s start by considering what your expectations should have been.  Shortly before the referendum in 2016, Vote Leave issued a document called Leave Looks Like… which is the closest thing they had to a manifesto.  Their bullet point commitments were as follows: We end the supremacy of EU law and the European Court. We will be able to kick out those who make our laws. Europe yes, EU no. We have a new UK-EU Treaty based on…

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Jabbing the Unjabbable (or, for the less polite, Pricking the Pricks)

Jabbing the Unjabbable (or, for the less polite, Pricking the Pricks)

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A guest slot by Stocky I saw a friend recently who is an enthusiast of myriad butt-clenching conspiracy theories.  “My intention was to calmly, cleverly and succinctly knock down each piece of nonsense one-by-one and emerge victorious, chest swelled and buttocks relaxed. My plan quickly got caught up in the weeds.” He quickly got into his patter: Covid is no worse than flu; the death figures are deliberately inflated; long-Covid is largely made up; the pandemic is a fiction created by…

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Of talking dogs and politicians

Of talking dogs and politicians

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We’re still allowed to take daily exercise and I expect that most readers do.  If, like me, you go for a walk, you have no doubt been treated to the experience of an unleashed dog bounding up to you. As it barks and jumps, you regularly hear the owner breezily assure you: “don’t worry, he won’t bite”. On such occasions, an ex of mine used to reply sardonically: “fuck me, a talking dog”. Academics working in political science have spent many years…

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This is not about Trump (except of course it is)

This is not about Trump (except of course it is)

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A guest slot by Richard Tyndall Trump’s second to last tweet before he was banned permanently from Twitter began with the sentence: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future.” “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future.” Ignoring for a moment the fact that Trump…

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