The Guardian e-paper Journal
What happens when the taps run dry? Soon we will find out
You get up and go to the loo, only to find the flush doesn’t work. You try the shower, except nothing comes out. You want a glass of water, but on turning the tap there is not a drop. Your day stumbles on, stripped of its essentials: no washing hands,...
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It’s Brooklyn v Beckham Inc: a family feud for our online age
The way 2026 has started, none of us wants to see the word “nuclear” in a headline, so on some level you have to feel glad that Monday night’s news alerts announcing in real time that someone “goes nuclear” and “launches nuclear attack” related to...
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The free world now needs a new plan – and new leadership
A European-wide chorus of resistance, led on Monday morning by Keir Starmer, has greeted Donald Trump’s plan to take over Greenland, by force if necessary, and to start a tariff war if any country stands in his way. Have no doubt, this is a moment: if...
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Don’t just look away as the people of Iran cry out for help
Did you notice history being made this week? I am not referring to what may have been the most pathetic moment in recorded time – Donald Trump gratefully taking the Nobel peace prize medal from the woman who actually won it – nor the defection of a...
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While the right wields its might, Keir Starmer fixes potholes
Last weekend, as the world wondered whether Donald Trump would swipe Greenland, Keir Starmer made his own big geographic intervention: he published a map of which councils were fixing potholes. Yes, potholes. Yes, a map. Barely 18 months into office,...
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Take a lesson from the past, and light the way forward
From Greenland’s icy mountains, from India’s coral strand, as the old hymn has it, we seem to inhabit a world that is more seriously troubled in more places than many can ever remember. In the UK, national morale feels all but shot. Politics commands...
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Who’s to blame for the crude Starmer songs? I’m afraid he is
It’s the world darts championships on the first day of the year, and a well-lubricated early afternoon audience at London’s Alexandra Palace is belting out one of the more recent additions to its songbook. Up on the stage, the then world No 20, Ryan...
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Two horrifying truths have come from a lying president
For a serial liar, Donald Trump can be bracingly honest. We’ve known about the mendacity for years – consider the 30,573 documented falsehoods from his first term, culminating in the big lie, his claim to have won the 2020 election – but the examples...
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Trump’s pitch for Greenland is a climate crisis land grab
Another week, another freak weather phenomenon you’ve probably never heard of. If it’s not the “weather bomb” of extreme wind and snow that Britain is hunkering down for as I write, it’s reports in the Guardian of reindeer in the Arctic struggling with...
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Is Starmer being astute – or does he just not have a plan?
For an inveterate liar, Donald Trump is remarkably honest. The best guide to what he thinks is what he says. When forecasting his likely course of action, start with his declared intentions – removing the president of Venezuela, for example – and...
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A new world order is coming – and Venezuela is just the start
As Venezuela’s skyline lit up under American bombs, we were watching the morbid symptoms of a declining empire. That may sound counterintuitive. After all, the United States has kidnapped a foreign leader, and Donald Trump has announced that he will...
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From Trump to Netanyahu, let 2026 be a year of reckoning
It’s not quite a new year resolution, and it’s certainly not a prediction. Think of it instead as a hope or even a plea for the next 12 months. May the coming year see those leaders who have done so much damage to their own countries, and far beyond,...
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The best way to get round a tricky problem? Do nothing
If you really want to solve a problem, try doing nothing about it. Fold some laundry. Stir a risotto. Go for a run, watch a film, try to entertain someone else’s baby: anything that involves pottering about in an undemanding yet still vaguely engaged...
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What if racists say ‘Go home’, but you come from 15 places?
While accepting that David Lammy, the deputy prime minister and justice secretary, is, for many, the human embodiment of Marmite – loved or hated, with not much in between – one can still question whether, for all his faults, he should “go home to the...
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Abd el-Fattah’s tweets were wrong, but do not define him
What is the proper punishment for hateful social media posts? Should you lose your account? Your job? Your citizenship? Go to jail? Die? For the people who have launched a campaign against the British-Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, no...
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The BBC tells the whole story of our nation. Let’s fight for it
Don’t let President Trump cloud the real debate about the BBC. Of course, his demand for damages of no less than $5bn has dominated our thinking about the corporation over the past few weeks, as has its cause. But let’s get this into perspective. This...
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Trump’s legacy will be a blotch – not a Maga masterpiece
The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 was an unforgettable moment for those who lived through the cold war. The sinister watch towers with their searchlights and armed guards, the minefields in no-man’s land, the notorious Checkpoint Charlie...
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Only the rich can afford to be in denial about climate crisis
Looking back on this crazy year, one event, right at the start, seems to me to encapsulate the whole. In January, recording his podcast in a studio in Austin, Texas, the host, Joe Rogan, and the actor Mel Gibson merrily dissed climate science. At the...
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Was 2025 the end of British democracy as we know it?
Was this the year that British democracy as we have known it began to turn into something else? Politicians, voters and journalists have made this claim before – when their side has been out of power for a long while or an elected government has been...
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When the AI bubble bursts, people can take back control
If AI did not change your life in 2025, next year it will. That is one of few forecasts that can be made with confidence in unpredictable times. This is not an invitation to believe the hype about what the technology can do today, or may one day...
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Yes, it’s flawed, but I see Labour delivering for those in need
Warning. This column contains good news, when it is an (un) truth widely acknowledged that only grim stories attract public attention. News must be something someone somewhere doesn’t want printed, says the old maxim. Well, battalions of interests want...
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In a dark year, these heroes have shown us there is light
Some traditions are getting harder to maintain. Among them, my own custom of devoting the last column before Christmas to reasons to be hopeful. In recent years, amid war and bloodshed, that task has been especially challenging – and this week was no...
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A lesson from 2025: Reform is surprisingly vulnerable
Imagine a classroom with almost nothing in it, save some hard wooden benches and a stack of Bibles. Imagine the school it is in has only one loo, no canteen, gets freezing cold in winter – oh, and the playground is full of gravestones. If this sounds...
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Playing out in real time: a tragedy foretold 20 years ago
An Englishman drives into a new town and can’t see the warning signs. Richard Pearson is visiting Surrey to close down his late father’s home and settle his affairs and, everywhere he looks, the flag of St George is flying “from suburban gardens and...
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Putin wants to export chaos – but democracy can fight back
I once spent an exasperating week showing a Russian friend around London. He insisted on seeing everything and admiring nothing. Museums, monuments, shops – all compared unfavourably with St Petersburg and Moscow. This got tiresome after a few days, so...
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Finally it’s dawning on us: there is life beyond phones
It’s only a small rectangular sticker, but it symbolises a joyous sense of resistance. Some of Berlin’s most renowned clubs have long insisted that the camera lenses on their clientele’s phones must be covered up using this simple method, to ensure...
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Donald Trump is pursuing regime change – in Europe
When are we going to get the message? I joked a few months back that, when it comes to Donald Trump, Europe needs to learn from Sex and the City’s Miranda Hobbes and realise that “He’s just not that into you.” After this past week, it’s clear that...
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Europe must open the door to migrants – or face extinction
Iknow what “civilisational erasure” looks like: I’ve seen the graph. The European Commission published it in March. It’s a chart of total fertility rate: the average number of children born per woman. After a minor bump over the past 20 years, the EU...
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The cost of Starmer’s deal with Trump? British lives
Of Arthur Scargill it was said that he began each day with two newspapers. The miners’ leader read the Morning Star of course, but only after consulting the Financial Times. Why did a class warrior from Yorkshire accord such importance to the house...
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The real battle on the right: who will be the Maga stooge?
In free societies, when you don’t like the government, you support the opposition. In dictatorships, or under military occupation, you join the resistance. The distinction isn’t precise but it matters. All European democracies have radical...
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Children need us to grasp AI’s flaws, before the worst happens
It was just past 4am when a suicidal Zane Shamblin sent one last message from his car, where he had been drinking steadily for hours. “Cider’s empty. Anyways … Think this is the final adios,” he typed into his phone. The response was quick: “Alright...
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Streeting must not join the ‘overdiagnosis’ bandwagon
Wes Streeting is a politician whose interest in the zeitgeist is only matched by his seeming drive to be as close to the heart of it as possible. It is, therefore, not much of a surprise that the secretary of state for health and social care should end...
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What words are left to describe Trump’s global rampage?
The Trump administration looks ever more like a criminal enterprise – and now it seems to have added war crimes to its repertoire. Though even that may be too generous a description. On Thursday, word came that the US military had launched yet another...
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How a pint and a chat about soil led to a seismic discovery
It felt like walking up a mountain during a temperature inversion. You struggle through fog so dense you can scarcely see where you’re going. Suddenly, you break through the top of the cloud, and the world is laid out before you. It was that rare and...
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Europe and its allies can hold him back. But for how long?
The failure of this week’s peace talks between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff fits into a now well-established pattern of standoffs on Ukraine during Trump’s second term. But the dynamic that produced these talks may be becoming...
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The misleading thing about the budget? Who it was really for
The charge is a grave one: that Rachel Reeves has just lied to Britons, spooking them into paying billions in extra taxes that she can splash out on higher benefits. However hyperbolic, this isn’t the usual Westminster sparring; this time, someone...
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The ‘squeezed middle’ is back. Labour upsets them at its peril
Just over 15 years ago, a realisation began to dawn on British politicians, triggered by the financial crash of 2008 and its effects on millions of ordinary lives. Before that rupture, they had clung to the idea that a huge chunk of the public was made...
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These Farage allegations matter – look at who he is today
Nigel Farage could have strangled this story at birth. Confronted with the testimony of more than 20 former schoolmates, who shared with the Guardian their memories of a young Farage taunting Jews and other minorities in the most appalling terms –...
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Keir Starmer’s Mr Rules act is unsuited to the times
This Labour government loves rules. Fiscal rules, stability rules, investment rules, immigration rules and rules restricting protests: this government’s first impulse, when faced with the fluidity and chaos of the modern world, is to put in boundaries...
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Rachel Reeves’s budget is more like Operation Save Our Skins
Imagine it: you are the chancellor of a government in mortal peril. Poll ratings are down the U-bend; your backbenchers are mutinous and colleagues are circling around the prime minister, readying themselves to land the fatal blow. You have a budget,...
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The solution to Labour’s crisis lies in Europe. Dare it say so?
Rachel Reeves has approached this week’s budget like a reluctant swimmer inching into freezing water. The chancellor started paddling delicately around the problem of insufficient revenue at the end of the summer. First, she refused to stand by former...
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My guide to protecting our fragile, ailing democracies
How can we defend our democracies against those who would destroy them? We talk a lot about strategies for keeping anti-liberal, nationalist populists out of power, but Donald Trump’s daily wielding of a wrecking ball shows it’s equally important to...
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Meet Reform’s real voters: can Farage hold them together?
Who are Nigel Farage’s army, the voters who want him as our next prime minister? Few questions are as important in British politics. Were an election called tomorrow, the favourite for No 10 would be Farage. A few months ago, many in Westminster and...
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Who in their right mind would want to be a BBC boss?
Listen, I hate to ruin a yarn wall but I don’t think it’s at all helpful to start framing the current crisis at the BBC as a giant conspiracy or coup by dark rightwing forces, and get stuck in the weeds of that. The fact is, the three mistakes that...
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The war against the BBC is a war against all of us: let’s fight back
Gotcha! The BBC’s enemies have taken two scalps and inflicted maximum damage. The sheer viciousness of President Trump’s $1bn lawsuit threat will thrill the right, threatening the foundations of the corporation they detest. Meanwhile, the shock...
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What is politics now? Simply a bitter revolt against power
Westminster has a habit of staging occasions that are at once both lacklustre and ridiculous, and last Tuesday saw yet another one. Rachel Reeves’s speech, we were told, was an act of “pitch-rolling”, performed because – in the words of Treasury...
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As Democrats rejoice, Trump begins to plot his revenge
After the joy, the trepidation. Or at least the preparation. Democrats, along with many others around the world, cheered this week’s wins in a clutch of off-year elections that saw Donald Trump’s Republicans defeated from sea to shining sea. But now...
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After the two-party system? A new kind of British politics
Politics as we have known it in Britain for more than a century seems to be falling apart. Only six years ago, at the 2019 election, the Conservatives and Labour got 76% of the vote between them, coming first and second in both votes and seats, as they...
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Mamdani’s lesson for progressives: fight the right
Zohran Mamdani was forged in the era of Donald Trump. He came to socialism through watching Bernie Sanders run for the US presidency in 2016, a contest that ultimately gave us Trump I. Last November, a few days after the election of Trump II, he asked...
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The truth has set Rachel free – and just in time for budget day
It would actually have been quite an understandable day for Rachel Reeves to cry at work. “I’m really clear,” the chancellor told the CBI less than a year ago, “I’m not coming back with more borrowing or more taxes.” Can I shock you …? “We did wipe the...
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Cutting away at human rights will only leave Britain in tatters
In the latest series of Blue Lights, the BBC drama about police officers in Belfast, there’s a scene where a constable insists on staying with a mentally ill man until a nurse arrives. “This is an article two issue,” the officer tells his colleague –...
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Sudan’s horror is much worse than ‘forgotten’: it is tolerated
It unfolded in plain sight over 18 months. The city of El Fasher in the Darfur region of Sudan, besieged by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), fell to the militia group last week, and what has followed is a catastrophe. Mass killings are under way. There...
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Now Andrew’s got his P45, a nation wonders: who’ll be next?
Incredible news for residents of the likes of Prince Andrew Drive and Prince Andrew Way, who in recent years have sought name changes from their local councils to remove the unfortunate association with You Know Who. Thanks to last night’s historically...
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What are you doing to stop the dismantling of democracy?
How would you behave if your democracy was being dismantled? In most western countries, that used to be an academic question. Societies where this process had happened, such as Germany in the 1930s, seemed increasingly distant. The contrasting ways...
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It takes fight to sell tax rises to voters. Labour is too cowardly
Scroll back three years. The person sitting opposite me is yet to take their place at the top of Keir Starmer’s government. Instead, they are a star of the Labour opposition, for whom power advances or recedes with every poll and front page. They have...
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A hotel scandal that was never really about asylum seekers
A young man lounges under a beach umbrella in shorts, the sunny Dubai skyline visible over his shoulder. You, too, he tells his followers, can live the millionaire lifestyle plastered all over his social media accounts; the secret is housing vulnerable...
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How did Britain get to the point where racism is just priced in?
Cast your mind back to the furore when the shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, said he “didn’t see another white face” in the Handsworth area of Birmingham. It was reported as if it would be of real consequence to his political future – but...
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More than TV – Blue Lights is a reckoning with the Troubles
Forgive me if I’ve mentioned him before, but at moments like this I remember a news editor I worked for as a young reporter at the BBC. When it came to the interests of our audience, he said, there was a key fact to bear in mind: “The two most boring...
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A very British crime story: cramped and squalid HMOs
Fan of true crime? Then this column is for you. Rather than some cold case told through yellowing newspapers and sepia photos, this one is still happening. And just wait for the plot twist! But first let me outline the key facts; your challenge is to...
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Fortify British democracy – or risk losing it to darkness
After two years in Brazil, I felt I understood its political system better than I understand the UK’s. The reason is a short book in simple language that almost everyone owned: the constitution, published in 1988. Admittedly, I discovered its...
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Reform is a hot mess in power. But I’m not sure voters will care
‘I’m meant to be on bloody holiday this week, Paul! I don’t want to be having this meeting!” There is much to enjoy about the patriotic revolution in government promised by the leaked footage obtained by the Guardian of the Reform UK group of...
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Is siding with football thugs what passes for patriotism now?
If social media posts are anything to go by, Tommy Robinson is planning to visit Villa Park next month as a Maccabi Tel Aviv fan. What can possibly have attracted the Luton-born political activist to the Israeli Premier League’s second-placed club? The...
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The city that shows the most urgent problem in UK politics
Here is the dream, if you can afford it: gleaming apartments, close to Liverpool’s waterfront, complete with penthouse swimming pools with views of the north Wales mountains, and sumptuous rooftop gardens. They are mostly bought by investors who then...
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Peace abroad, civil war at home: that’s the Trump credo
Donald Trump had better hope the members of the Nobel committee are not paying attention to what’s happening inside the United States. If they did take a look, they’d notice a jarring pattern. While the US president likes to play the peacemaker abroad,...
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Millennial dads are caught in a struggle mums know so well
Can men really have it all? It’s a ridiculous question, obviously; a loaded assumption that women spent years clambering out from under. Mothers have worked long and hard to dispel the myth that anyone should be able to single-handedly juggle a job,...
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Build, baby, build, he said. This is what happened next
If the name Steve Reed means little to you, rest assured that is a pothole he is eager to fill. Having replaced Angela Rayner as housing secretary, he bounded around Labour conference last month dishing out Maga-red caps stamped with his credo “Build,...
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Macron’s crisis contains a warning for Keir Starmer
Britain and France do not share a fixed quota of political stability such that reduced volatility on one side of the Channel causes chaos across the water. It was just a coincidence that Keir Starmer won a huge majority at precisely the moment last...
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If the war in Gaza is over, who is going to keep the peace?
The streets of Tel Aviv felt empty yesterday morning. Apart from people rushing to work or walking their dogs, the place seemed relatively deserted. Even some of the most popular coffee spots had more vacant seats than occupied ones. The day felt like...
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The enablers of this hell can’t now pose as Gaza’s saviours
Today, Sharm el-Sheikh will host the most high-profile gathering of global leaders in the Middle East of recent years. Donald Trump, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Pedro Sánchez and others are meeting “to end the war in the Gaza Strip, enhance efforts...
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Trump’s task now is to hold Netanyahu’s feet to the fire
After so many images of death and devastation, what sweet relief to see pictures of joy. On the world’s TV news broadcasts, the screen was split on Thursday: celebrations in Gaza and celebrations in Israel, the scenes of cheering and clapping mirroring...
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It’s clear that Badenoch is failing – but let me tell you why
British politics is starting to look post-Conservative. That isn’t a forecast of extinction for Kemi Badenoch’s party, just an observation of decline. Their agenda-setting days are behind them. Their loyal voters are old and they are not recruiting new...
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Let’s Boriswave goodbye to a party on its way to annihilation
Spare a thought for the Conservative party. It’s hard believing in meritocracy while finding yourself polling at 15%. It’s even harder having wanged on mercilessly for decades about natural selection, yet now constantly finding yourself appearing in...
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Two years after Oct 7, hate is in fashion. We need a new way
So much about the past two years has been horrific, but let me tell you how it began for me. On the morning of 7 October 2023, I was sitting on a train with my son and husband, on our much-anticipated way to pick up a new puppy. Life...
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