The Tepid Take

     Most Brits recognise that Donald Trump is a dangerous figurehead of a dangerous movement, one that’s stoked the fires of bigotry in ways we never thought possible, since its inception last year. He is widely recognised as being an incompetent buffoon – he is no longer allowed access to his own Twitter, for example – and yet, his support continues to be large. His rise is unprecedented; if he won, he would be only the fourth President of the United States not to have previously held political office. Why does he garner so much support from the average American if he stands for hurt and bigotry? It seems obvious, but the fact of the matter is that the underlying motivations of making America great again are not rooted in hatred, but hope.      Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is a bastion of the establishment. People support her for a variety of reasons, but one of the greatest is the sheer horror provoked by the idea of a Trump presidency. Hillary is knowab...

     I went to Leeds Festival this year. This wasn’t because I felt like I ought to try the whole festival experience (though I did), nor because a lot of my favourite bands were going to be there (though they were). No, I went because, if I went with Oxfam, I got to go for the outstanding price of 0, in whichever currency you’d like. Zip. Nada. Free. More pressingly, I didn’t have to find anyone to go with me, as is oft the struggle when all your university friends are strewn across the kingdom and your girlfriend is somewhere up a pike near Windermere. Oxfam provided the entertainment, the food, the electricity, the lodging (assuming you’d brought a tent), and the company. All we had to do was work a six hour shift each day and assist with opening and closing; the rest of the day was free for us to do as we wished. The one thing they didn’t provide us with, unfortunately, was the weather.      It rained like a Leeds summer. Which is epistemological...

Corbyn has triumphed, endearingly so, over Establishment odds. MPs with the closest links to the Blairite status quo have had their chance and failed. Though the movement against Corbyn spanned from stalwarts such as Tristram Hunt to more sideways characters such as Ed Miliband, it was fundamentally an attempt to pull Labour somewhere a tad closer to the range of ideas that lost the leadership only last year . A campaign for Owen Smith, which held all the cards in the context of factual observation, but almost none in terms of emotional clout, lost against passion, and a desire for that consistently appealing brand of ‘change’, ‘honest politics’, and so on. Corbyn could have walked on stage at the last debate, argued for nothing but the nationalisation of the Great British Bake Off for almost an hour, and he would have still won doubtless. He would have won because his niche, nascent cult of personality already exists in Labour. It’s the kind that might indiscriminately boo Owen Smit...

     This article is not supposed to be personal, but I am a firm believer in the Midlands. Having visited some parts of the UK at least some times, the evidence for me is near conclusive. Regardless of how carefully a line can be drawn across the ribcage of Great Britain, I will remain adamant that I have lived in the Midlands since my parents moved to Ipswich in 1998. As the butt of many a geographical joke, Ipswich cannot possibly be found in the South, but equally it is far too southerly on a map to be labelled Northern. While Danny Dorling, a professor from Sheffield and the definitive producer of an academic North-South Divide , acknowledges that “it would be possible to identify enclaves and exclaves”, many impoverished towns far south of a single Scouser make it clear that the Midlands exist, and this goes without even mentioning the golden goose that is the Black Country dialect. The Midlands does exist, and it is just as stalwart as the North and the South. ...

Is the Labour Party doing okay? Is Len Mccluskey still sane? Is anyone actually worried about these things? The short answer: No. The upcoming leadership election in the Labour Party has gained so much interior traction that it’s forgotten that a world exists outside committees and secret ballots. Labour’s presence in the papers over the past months has had nought to do with a serious response to the newly minted May, aside from minor policy punts by the would-be usurper, Owen Smith. Truthfully, the man is unassuming, clever in the least offensive kind of way, and as in-demand as a Tony Blair lookalike post-Iraq. Similes aside, Smith is the man for the job, where the job is ‘head of making it obvious how farcical a state the Labour Party is in’. Bereft of any good option, the party is choosing between a man who stands for oblivion, and a man who stands for oblivion. I’ve based that last sentence on an average of the rhetoric of Smith & Corbyn supporters. But who’s telling the t...

A belief in unilateral nuclear disarmament for moral reasons is an unfounded belief that puts the lives of every person living on this grey old island at risk. A belief in multilateral nuclear disarmament, however, is just as unfounded. The cold war between Russia and the United States that started more than half a century ago is ongoing, and the matchup between their nuclear arsenals (and that of upcoming superpowers such as China) does not falter . The sad truth is that the numbers alone tell a story of a bleak future. Our future will be one where mutually assured destruction is always a risk, no matter how petite that risk may be. Given that, why bother to oppose Trident? If the American stockpile is worth holding onto, why not the same for the United Kingdom? In complete honesty, it can be proven; all you need is A2 Economics, basic political theory, and the omnipresent Prisoner’s Dilemma (Cooperation Problem). To further explain why nuclear winter will never cease to be a r...

It seems as though the experiment of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party is coming to an end. However, the left wing of party supporters are fighting to the end for his survival as leader, despite the fact that any prolonging of the infighting the party has become famed for in the past year will only make the struggle harder. What remains to be seen is what the next leader of the Labour Party needs to hold close when it comes to their values, policies and ideology in order to maintain what the labour movement stands for, whilst simultaneously appealing to the voters that are by and large turning to populist movements such as UKIP and away from the values Corbyn’s Labour stands for, as evidenced by recent elections in the North and the EU referendum: “ if you haven’t got money, you vote out ” . We must be prepared to admit that Corbyn has made multiple mistakes in his time in office. His heavy anti-Zionist bias, for example, has created division amongst Labour’s Jewis...