"This New Age of Nationalism"

"For more than a decade, leaders have not only been slow to respond to the millions who feel left out and left behind, but also to the changing balance of global economic power, moving us from a unipolar world once dominated by the US to a multipolar world of competing superpowers, and from a rules-based order to a power-based one. The ethnic nationalism that this has incited means free trade is giving way to protectionism. Where economics used to drive politics, the politics of nationalism is now driving economic decisions, and already more than 100 countries are running mercantilist policies marked out by reshoring and friend-shoring and by bans on cross-border trade, investment and technology transfer, sinking international cooperation to its lowest ebb since 1945." 

At The Guardian, Gordon Brown argues that "the hard right can be stopped in their tracks."

The British Bernie Sanders

"So what exactly is Corbyn’s worldview, and how might he govern if elected prime minister of the United Kingdom? Corbyn is a self-described 'socialist' or 'democratic socialist,' an old-school tax-and-spend left-winger who believes government spending—not austerity—is the key to economic stimulus. He wants to close the U.K.'s budget deficit by, in part, raising taxes on the rich and ending corporate subsidies.
"Domestically, he wants to renationalize the country's much-maligned railways, scrap university tuition, and introduce rent controls. Many of these positions enjoy widespread support, though another—his support of mass immigration to the United Kingdom—does not."

Ahead of the Labour Party's leadership election, Krishnadev Calamur in The Atlantic looks at frontrunner Jeremy Corbyn.

As does Matthew D'Ancona in The Guardian.

"The Future of the U.K. Looks Increasingly Like a United States of Great Britain"

"Although the 'No' campaign won in the end, British Prime Minister David Cameron's all-or-nothing strategy on Scottish independence failed. During referendum negotiations with Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond two years ago, Cameron pushed for a yes-or-no vote in the hopes of spooking voters into choosing the latter. But when a YouGov poll two weeks ago showed the 'Yes' campaign in the lead for the first time, he and other U.K. leaders suddenly reversed course and pledged far greater powers to Scottish voters if they remained in the union. They decided to do so. The prime minister had wanted a choice between independence or the status quo. Instead, he had to offer independence or devolution of powers to save the United Kingdom. Now he has to deliver the latter."


Matt Ford at The Atlantic looks at the aftermath of the Scottish referendum.

"The Filthy Lens of Political Extremism"

"In Trilling’s portrait of the last decade, the BNP was a predictable phenomenon, one that naturally accompanies cynical Blairite politics and a growing gap between rich and poor. But the 2000s look like a golden age compared to the perpetual desolation of the Cameron era. Miliband’s reviving Labour Party and the less ideologically blinkered press have to make the case for government and against the mindless dogma of austerity—austerity that doesn’t just destroy communities and ruin lives in the long run, but that hasn't even succeeded on its own short-run fiscal terms to lower deficits or stimulate private sector demand. Otherwise we may see not only the continuation of this British nightmare, but an even darker time in which the only alternative for most Britons is Griffin and his ilk."

Jason Farago in The New Republic reviews Daniel Trilling's Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain’s Far Right.

"This Will Welcome the Crown into the Modern Age"

"The announcement in Perth comes after Cameron wrote last month to the other leaders calling for change. Legislation will have to be introduced in Britain and some of the other 15 realms to amend laws including the Bill of Rights 1688, the Act of Settlement 1700, the Act of Union with Scotland 1706 and the Coronation Oaths Act 1688."

In The Guardian, Nicholas Watt reports on a constitutional change to the British monarchy that would end male primogeniture and allow a monarch to marry a Catholic.

"One of Triumph of the Person over the Politics, or of the Politics over the Person"

"Eager to refute accusations in the British press that he was 'Bush’s poodle' or enabler, Mr. Blair reminds the reader of his own belief in an interventionist and morally driven foreign policy, articulated years earlier during the Kosovo crisis. He also argues that by being in the room, he hoped to press the United States to go the United Nations route and 'pitch to George the issue of the Israel-Palestine peace process.' 'If you wanted to be part of the planning,' he writes, 'you had to be, at least in principle, open to being part of the action.'
"Left unaddressed is the contention of many politicians and journalists that Mr. Blair failed to get the Bush administration to embrace a multilateral approach and a broader 'road map' for Middle East peace, because, in the words of the Blair biographer Anthony Seldon, 'he committed the greatest error in diplomacy: he declared his hand too early,' thereby enabling the Americans to take him for granted."

In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews Tony Blair's A Journey: My Political Life.

Get It Signed by the Heads of State

Guardian columnists Jackie Ashley, Julian Glover, and Martin Kettle react to the pact between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats that has allowed David Cameron to become prime minister.

Now, What's the Matter with Britain?

"But Clegg could still snatch an important change in the Liberal Democrats' future status and experience of government–so long as he goes into negotiations with the other two parties in a more grown-up and intelligent way. He must now show that the Liberal Democrats are a serious party of government, able to take responsibility in difficult times. If they turn nervously away for fear of taking office now, the party's fortunes may be wrecked for a generation. The need to push through big changes in state spending, cut public borrowing and get out of the recession provide a perfect rationale for insisting on the UK's first peacetime coalition government since the 1920s."

Patrick Dunleavy in the London Evening Standard sifts through the results of the British election.

What's the Matter with Britain?

"They're made up of a few classical liberal types and rather more bearded, sandal-wearing geography teachers, many of whom, the suspicion has always been, also knit their own yogurt. In American terms, then, they're a bizarro mash-up of New Hampshire and Vermont."

Alex Massie in The New Republic attempts an explanation of the Liberal Democrats.

And The Guardian endorses the Liberal Democrats

For Your Eyes Only

"Sir Nigel further observed that 'Obama is cool. He looks cool, tall, slim … and maybe aloof, insensitive.' Obama, he wrote, 'is tough and competitive. This is of course the Chicago school.' (Presumably he was referring to the rough-and-tumble of Chicago's ward politics, not to the rough-and-tumble of the University of Chicago's neoclassical economics, with which the phrase is more typically associated.)"

Bonnie Goldstein in Slate presents part of a briefing on Barack Obama written by British Ambassador Sir Nigel Sheinwald for Prime Minister Gordon Brown in anticipation of Obama's visit to Britain last summer.