Breaking the silence on Brexit
Keir Starmer is right to pursue a “reset” with the EU. But he risks pleasing no one.
ByThe Magazine
In this week’s issue
The New Gods of AI
Letter of the week: Class dismissed
Write to letters@newstatesman.co.uk to have your thoughts voiced in the New Statesman magazine.
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The Tories go from SW1A to CR0
Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.
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A trade war with China won’t help Trump
His tariffs could hurt Americans as much as the countries he is targeting.
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The show must go on for the Oscars
Also this week: The Wild Robot’s ode to mums and the triumph of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter.
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William Waldegrave: “The hereditary House of Lords element must end”
The former Conservative cabinet minister – and life peer – on the ancien régime.
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Defenceless Britain
Keir Starmer must rebuild the UK’s enfeebled armed forces – but he faces an almighty row first.
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Reform is coming for Labour in its old heartlands
In the wake of Trump’s victory, Nigel Farage is upbeat and promising “the biggest political change this country has…
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The plot to asset-strip American government
Even the radical architects of Project 2025 didn’t propose what Elon Musk is doing to US democracy.
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The British media goes bendy bananas over Europe (again)
Also this week: Trump’s Pentagon press purge and a new mission for Toby Jones.
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Why is it still legal to make deepfake porn?
Criminalising the use of a woman’s image without her consent shouldn’t be a complex issue.
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The race to God Mode
China and America’s AI battle is about more than just tech supremacy – it’s about controlling the future.
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The Do No Harm dilemma
What happens when a drug that can save lives could also ruin them?
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The brutal world of the Brothers Grimm
The folklorists’ fairy tales, in which moral laws are suspended and violence abounds, were no stranger than the progressive…
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“There is no such thing as Starmerism”
An account of the Labour Party’s rise to power presents the PM as a man with a deep aversion…
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Bridget Jones’s hollow feminism
The novels portrayed the working woman of the Nineties as a hot mess. By laughing at her, we laughed…
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The NS Poem: Her Birth
A new poem by Kim Moore.
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From Paul Theroux to Tash Aw: new books reviewed in short
Also featuring The Way Ancient Greeks Matters by Reviel Netz and Gary Lineker: A Portrait of a Football Icon.
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Han Kang’s radical empathy
As with all the Nobel Prize-winning South Korean writer’s stories, We Do Not Part rejects escapism to reach into…
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Remembering the real Marianne Faithfull
The singer who embodied the Swinging Sixties in her youth gained a power in her later years that suited…
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Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig is an act of resistance
The director risks imprisonment with this film, which reveals the brutality of tyranny in Iran following the 2022 Women,…
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Long live Amandaland!
The Motherland spin-off’s star returns diminished but undimmed.
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Why we should always expect the worst
The BBC podcast At Your Own Peril explores the history of risk and the importance of disaster planning.
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Visions of an English occult
The British surrealist Ithell Colquhoun combined magic and mythology to create art from buried folklore.
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New York is an environmental Armageddon
On all sides the urban machine is operating at full tilt, churning out volcanic volumes of steam and fumes.
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Thought experiment 7: The Veil of Ignorance
Rawlsian social justice is the bedrock of contemporary liberalism.
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The wisdom of residents’ associations
There is a term used in the council for people like this: solutionisers.
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Let’s share the cultural experience, but not our food
When the pizza arrived mid sex scene, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
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This England: All part of the plan
This column – which, though named after a line in Shakespeare’s “Richard II”, refers to the whole of Britain…
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Subscriber of the week: Madeleine Sage
Please email zuzanna.lachendro@newstatesman.co.uk if you would like to be featured.
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Adam Zeman Q&A: “Life is a fatal condition but creativity is limitless”
The neurologist on the science of subjectivity, and the irony of sophisticated tech that makes simple jobs harder.
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