The Guardian e-paper Journal
Trump’s terrible final act will be to carve up the world into three
In the final two years of a US presidency, when Congress has been lost, approval ratings have sunk like a stone and their party has started to think about who’s coming next, the person occupying the Oval Office can feel their power draining away....
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A simple plea to Labour: tell the truth about immigration
My mum’s carer was uncharacteristically late one morning. She didn’t want to say why at first, but it turned out she’d found her previous client – an elderly lady living all alone, with no family to visit – collapsed on the floor, barely alive. It was...
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Labour’s unity is imperilled with the foolish stroke of a pen
When the news broke that the UK government had approved the Jackdaw gasfield, I was at a Guardian climate event at the Royal Geographical Society. Appropriately, the theme suggested by readers was what the public can actually do in the face of what...
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From France to the UK, chaos is what rightwing populists crave
An election where one side represents chaos will nearly always be won by the party that promises order instead. Public fatigue after years of turbulent Tory rule accounted for Labour’s 2024 landslide victory more than any policy in Keir Starmer’s...
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Another EU referendum? Only when we are sure to win
When I hear that word again, a shudder runs down my spine. I want to groan, hold my head in my hands and wail. The horror! No, never again, not another referendum. But the idea is back in play as Andy Burnham looks for ways to reverse a decade of...
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This housing crisis is global, and a bellwether for democracies
In the summer of 2021, I visited a homeless community in a park in Toronto, Canada, and spoke to one of the residents. He was living in a tent in the shadow of brand new skyscrapers, and had been homeless for about five years. At one point he swivelled...
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Is Trump an ally? No, he is master of the art of betrayal
Donald Trump must find it oddly frustrating. He keeps showing the world exactly who he is, and yet the world keeps refusing to believe it. As clearly as he can, he is announcing that he is not the leader of the free world, that he is not even a...
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This new era of politics has cut the populists down to size
Ask a straight question, get a straight answer. It’s how politics is supposed to work but almost never does, which is why on the rare occasions it happens the result can be faintly chaotic. What did Andy Burnham mean when he said – in response to a...
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For now, the world economy is afloat. But a storm looms
Not much has gone right for the global economy this year, and plenty has gone wrong. Two big regional wars are destabilising prices and supply chains everywhere. Businesses and consumers are feeling the effects of a serious energy shock. Rising...
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Brexiters hate the fact that Putin was slyly urging them on
Russian territorial aggression against Ukraine didn’t feature much in the Brexit referendum campaign. It made headlines briefly when Boris Johnson blamed Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea on the European Union. According to the Vote Leave frontman,...
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Residents with advanced dementia lined the day room, with that terrible human vacancy everyone most fears for their own end days. This was Millvina House in Anfield, Liverpool, which I visited with Louise Casey,
who is heading the commission on social care in England. Here is a snippet of what she saw: an angry man jolting into life, shooting out his arm at her and bellowing: “Out! Get out! Get out!” A young care assistant went to stroke his back and calm him...
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A moment of hope and peril for our mental health crises
Back in 2025, the then health secretary, Wes Streeting, commissioned what the government called its “Independent review into prevalence and support for mental health conditions, ADHD and autism”. Here, it seemed, was not just an inquiry into England’s...
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PM Burnham is lucky – all his enemies seem to help him
I don’t know where Andy Burnham found his magic lamp, but I hope he’s taking good care of it. In the early hours of Friday morning, the genie that’s looked so kindly on him these past few months granted him yet another wish, with a byelection win in...
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The UK faces a security crisis – and a threat to our principles
The first time the window-rattling roar of a B-1 bomber woke me up this summer, I thought for one crazed second we were under attack. By the second time, I’d learned to recognise the sound of US planes taking off from their base at RAF Fairford for...
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Prepare, we are told, by leaders who make the bad risks worse
Would you mind fixing the NHS? And while you’re at it, could you also please build an anti-missile system in your garden? Then regulate the banks, replace the water mains, tax the very rich and use the proceeds to rebuild our schools. Well, come on...
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Polanski could have shown real leadership – but he blew it
When Donald Trump calls someone a socialist he is not using the word in the same way that, say, Zohran Mamdani does. The mayor of New York espouses democratic socialism as a mission of equitable distribution of wealth and opportunity. Trump says...
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Badenoch has the Tories in a dance of death with Farage
You can walk all the way from Somerset to Sussex without crossing a Tory constituency, if you wish. You could also travel through each of the counties of Wiltshire, Hampshire, Dorset and Surrey without setting foot in Tory lands. They are now mainly...
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Disabled adults such as my son need a working care service too
Seemingly brilliant conference speeches are often followed by a hangover, and so it has arguably proved with Andy Burnham’s. It was, it has to be said, something of a triumph, but there is now a sense of angst over how a national care service would...
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It’s my last column: you have 24 hours to gripe before my inbox self-destructs
Journalism 101 – a course I have yet to complete – dictates that if you have something salient to say you should get there fast. So right now, I should mention that this is my last ever column for the Guardian. I’ll level with you: I spent a long time...
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It shouldn’t just be mothers talking to their sons about rape
There were seven men in all, and it lasted almost seven hours. What followed, according to the woman at the heart of the Cornell University case that has gripped student campuses around the world, was less a sexual encounter than a grim pack-bonding...
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Our economic agenda must be wrested back from the right
Andy Burnham does a nice line in nostalgia. His first party conference speech as prime minister was full of fond memories for the Britain of the 1950s and 1960s, when working-class families could sense their lives steadily getting better. The...
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Burnham has a plan for Britain. Can it work in a troubled world?
Andy Burnham is at home at Labour conference, and not only because it is in Liverpool and he has Merseyside roots. The prime minister is native to his political tribe wherever it gathers. He is fluent in its sentimental vocabulary and indigenous to its...
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Risks lie ahead, but at last this is a party that travels in hope
His ambition is big enough to see from space as he promises the “biggest change to Britain in 40 years”. Andy Burnham pledges what no prime minister until now has dared to, breaking the long spell of Thatcherism. Her monopoly markets in public services...
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Pining for an era of two-party politics won’t help Labour win
As I wrote last week, whatever its current troubles, Reform UK has hardly disappeared. Meanwhile, those black-clad quasi-paramilitaries may well be another augury of a frightening immediate future. One more English settlement – the town of Barnham, in...
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7 Up set out to examine class. What it did was more profound
For an hour or two this week, I’ve been in the company of people whose lives I’ve seen unfold, almost from the beginning, almost to the end. They are people whom, with one exception, I’ve never met. And yet I’ve shared in their triumphs and...
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Here’s a realistic plan to deliver public control of our utilities
Andy Burnham came to power promising greater “public control” over the UK’s utilities, such as water and energy. His reasons for doing so were to cut what is described as the “privatisation premium” paid for public services by consumers, and to improve...
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ME sufferers needed help. Instead they were betrayed
I’ve spent my working life covering neglected issues. But few are neglected like the devastating chronic condition ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome). In severe cases, the illness shuts down people’s lives almost entirely,...
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Many doubt the Davey method now, but the plan may work
No politician craves obscurity, but it is better to be unknown than despised. That is consolation for Liberal Democrats, gathered in Brighton for their annual conference, fretting about Ed Davey’s low profile and wondering whether a more prominent...
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Face this fact: the UK can’t stay shackled by the triple lock
There is always something oddly unreal about party conference season. In theory, everyone is getting away from Westminster to better reflect on the state of the nation. In practice, the whole circus just briefly relocates to the coast to live off warm...
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Democracy can be rescued, but hurry: Reform is down not out
Despite the energised start Andy Burnham has made as prime minister, plenty of his party’s MPs and hardcore activists are still haunted by a familiar sense of insecurity. Underpinned by a political version of impostor syndrome, it runs deep – and, bar...
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Slowly, then all at once: it’s the great British isles unravelling
Monday must have been a historical first. Never before have three of the four “nations” of the UK jointly demanded freedom to vote for its dissolution. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have lost confidence in England. They declared in Cardiff that...
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It’s the Miliband doctrine – and it’s right for the age of Trump
Almost 30 years ago, Robin Cook announced his arrival at the Foreign Office with what would be described as an “ethical foreign policy”. The UK, he said, “must support the demands of other peoples for the democratic rights on which we insist for...
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25 years on from 9/11, Osama bin Laden’s grand plan has failed
On 11 September, 25 years ago, Osama bin Laden drove with a small number of al-Qaida aides to a remote location in eastern Afghanistan. His convoy of SUVs was accompanied by a minivan that had been converted into a makeshift communications centre. The...
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Why is Labour taking such a huge risk with fossil fuels?
Pinch yourself, it’s happening again. Here is a Labour government spending a vast amount of political capital to earn tiny material gains while risking huge political losses. It occurred repeatedly under Keir Starmer, and now – with the impending...
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Europe can see the far-right abyss. But will it turn away?
Not all that long ago, Europe was a beacon of liberal idealism. One memoir recalls it as an era “comfortably saturated with confidence in the unfailing and binding power of tolerance and conciliation”. The economic system seemed obviously preferable to...
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Israel’s policies are being set by extremists – so why the silence?
The gap between what is being inflicted on Palestinians and the appropriate reaction on the part of the international community has always been vast. But now it yawns so wide that it swallows reality itself. As arms export licences for Israel from...
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Trump can’t be trying to lose the midterms. Or can he?
What is Donald Trump playing at? If it’s true that the best way of understanding the behaviour of an organisation is to assume it’s controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies, perhaps that same logic extends to the current conduct of the president of...
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‘Capitalism has not worked.’ In Luton, a moral tale of our times
After everything, why would anyone still back Nigel Farage? In some of the comments below my piece last week about Reform UK, I spot the usual answers: Farage’s supporters are dim, racist, deplorable. Yet away from Westminster, Reform voters are being...
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The US thought the AI race was won. China has proved it wrong
Almost from the moment it began, the end of the Chinese economic miracle has been much anticipated. Thick and fast, the books have come explaining how it will end badly. Overinvestment. A country wallowing in debt. The collapse of the property market....
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Big ambitions need space. That’s scarce in Westminster
Nothing stays fresh for long in parliament and no one sounds normal. The air, thick with convention, suffocates originality, tuning every voice to the same Westminster pitch. The need to escape that climate is one reason why Andy Burnham quit his...
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Global heating is melting the Earth’s ice – and this is the result
You may not have felt it, but the earth beneath our feet is getting twitchier, and global heating is to blame. As temperatures surge and climate breakdown accelerates, interactions between the climate and geology are becoming ever more apparent – as...
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Devolution is great for cities. What about the rest of England?
Andy Burnham seems to be a prime minister in a hurry – and for good reason. If he decides that his first term is going to run to its maximum length, he has three years, which is a maddening time-frame: too long for him to just tinker here and there,...
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$18bn payouts don’t hurt him. Maybe breaking up Meta will
Follow the money. If you want to know how the tech giant Meta really feels about the $18bn it agreed to fork out to end a landmark lawsuit against it – an outcome widely hailed as a victory for campaigners – just look at its share price. It didn’t go...
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It’s not just Farage: MPs must end their freebies-for-all
How has your summer been? Done anything nice? As MPs prepare to head back to parliament next week, you’ll be relieved to hear that some of the most prominent figures in British politics have been enjoying the season’s cultural highlights – and without...
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An anti-Farage army exists. The question is how to deploy it
Who can stop Nigel Farage? Which voters would actually dig out their ID and schlep down to the polling booth to fight him? Over the past year, these two questions have come to shape British politics. From Runcorn and Helsby to Caerphilly and Aberdeen...
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Peace, rights, solidarity: that’s what the world’s citizens want
Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, is already having to make one of his gravest decisions. He has to issue the instructions that he alone gives to the military, setting out the UK response in a doomsday scenario of a nuclear weapons attack on...
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Canadians do not seek a trade war – but we won’t be bullied
The Canadians are exceedingly angry. I realise this can sometimes be difficult for foreigners to deduce, given our struggle to express the full range of human emotion outside ice hockey riots. However, let me assure you that the prime minister...
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The fight for an inclusive Britain is taking place in the countryside
A fortnight or so ago, my two teenage children and I set out on a threenight visit to the Peak District. We stayed at a youth hostel – more of which in a moment – and began the trip with the 20-minute ascent of Mam Tor, a modest peak yet one with a...
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Back in Blighty: the Sussexes in the travel show no one wanted
Wednesday night brought an absolute cloudburst of psychic rain for our parched land as it emerged that Prince Harry and Meghan were reversing their self-styled “freedom flight” to California and returning to live in the UK. Nature is healing! Is that …...
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Make money, make lots of it – that’s the art of this presidency
Many years ago, in the crowded corridor of a Manhattan hotel, I was surprised to find myself standing face-to-face with Imelda Marcos – who was then first lady of the Philippines. At that time, she was said to possess 3,000 pairs of shoes. I really...
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Welcome to the age of climate whiplash: bone-dry and soaked
This summer could be the hottest, driest and deadliest in the history of England. Successive heatwaves have so far claimed almost 3,000 lives. Nearly three-quarters of England and the whole of Wales is in drought, while key reservoirs are parched....
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The far right is tightening its grip on the EU from the inside
The EU exists because its nations swore never to repeat the past. European integration is the insurance policy against the oldest temptation of power: that a majority decides who does not belong. So countries across the continent agreed to share power...
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If ‘Woke 1.0 is over’ in the US, did progressives get it all wrong?
Every once in a while, the discourse gods send a tablet down to the people, announcing that a previous era is dead and a new age is upon us. Recently, it was the “vibe shift”, a post-pandemic change in culture that encompassed everything from fashion...
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Unlike the PM, British workers can’t ignore the climate crisis
I don’t think I have ever written before about a British strike directly related to the climate emergency. But that’s exactly what began late last week in north London, with picket lines outside bus depots and massed walkouts, while the temperatures in...
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The masters of failure: they are good for stunts, and little else
It’s a shame Nigel Farage ducked the announcement of his victory in the Clacton byelection, which confirmed his return as MP for the seat he had needlessly resigned from just a few weeks earlier. You’d have thought he would have loved it. It was the...
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Has drought-hit Britain planned for a food crisis? Not on your life
When a business makes long-term plans, they call it prudence. When a government makes longterm plans, they call it communism. Any sustained state intervention attracts the prefix “Soviet-style”, and triggers vicious attacks across the billionaire...
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The right will use the Jason Arday scandal to halt society’s progress. Don’t let them do it
In 1987, a college at the University of Cambridge considered offering a prestigious position to a black man in what would be the first appointment of its kind. Not only did the man not have a degree, but he had left school at the age of 13, struggling...
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Nigel Farage is looking trapped – now the tide can be turned
Nigel Farage can be confident of victory against a man posing as an ennobled space traveller with a dustbin on his head. At least, in Clacton he can. The refusal of major parties to contest this week’s byelection sets the bar low. But even if the...
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As the PM sets off around the country, will the cash follow?
Andy Burnham begins his travels this week, aiming to reconnect No 10 and the government with voters across the UK. But just weeks before he set out his stall as prime minister, promising to rebalance the economy with growth in every postcode, a...
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Britain’s AI boom is already threatening the places we love
Amid headlines about drought, wildfires and global temperatures, it was 28C when I arrived in Slough last Monday. I was there to look around Slough Trading Estate, a place that might once have conjured up images of the TV comedy The Office, many of the...
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One summer doesn’t make a Keminaissance. Not even close
The Keminaissance will be delayed. For nearly a year, Conservative optimists and a clutch of supportive pundits have been forecasting an upturn in the fortunes of Kemi Badenoch, confident that her party will emerge from the crater it fell into in 2024,...
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Big food firms are panicking. Their time may be running out
It is rare for people to drop dead holding the incriminating packaging, but there is no longer any serious doubt that consuming a diet of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) risks life-shortening illnesses from heart disease and stroke to diabetes and cancer....
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The right made DEI a weapon, and the left just let it happen
‘To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me.” That was the breathtaking response of Prof Jason Arday when the Guardian interrogated the details he provided of an alleged racist campaign of intimidation against him, which involved a severed...
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When artificial intelligence meets human foolishness
When I am woken by the sound of my dog whining, I understand that she wants me to get up. When my alarm clock goes off, I don’t consider its needs. It is following an instruction to rouse me but it doesn’t care if I stay in bed. It doesn’t try to get...
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Amid the rage and misery, the right has hit the jackpot in Ceuta
The live streams are still running, training their cameras on the beach at Ceuta, where nothing is happening. The self-styled citizen journalists are still pounding the streets, capturing their shaky smartphone footage. Zia Yusuf of Reform UK was out...
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He’s a PM for the age. But being camera-ready isn’t enough
Andy Burnham is having a good time. I can’t remember the last time a PM (or indeed any high-profile British politician) actually looked as though they were enjoying what they were doing. I saw a clip the other day in which Burnham remembered arguing...
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Will Trump be Burnham’s undoing, or the making of him?
There is an orange cloud in the sky. I’m not referring to the wildfires ravaging parts of Europe and East Anglia, though they are connected. I mean the looming pall from across the Atlantic that threatens to spoil the sunny start to the premiership of...
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Nothing is safe from this global assault on our human rights
No more resistance in the US. The era of human rights is over, and dissent is once more forbidden. This is what certain billionaires and their concierges want, and this is the model they’re also seeking to project across the world. If we fail to...
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This battle for social care will define us. And it must be won
‘People pleaser!” That’s the insult Andy Burnham’s enemies sneer at him. And yes, he will need all his mightiest people-pleasing talents to win over voters to contribute to a new national care service. Choosing this forever failed policy (22 major...
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A political chill has gripped the right. It’s cold in the PM’s shadow
Andy Burnham’s recollections of Britain in the 1970s must be pretty hazy. He was nine when the decade ended. Kemi Badenoch, born in 1980, can remember nothing. Lacking first-hand experience, the Conservative leader evokes the turmoil of a bygone era...
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