This is the opening to my essay on the forgotten relationship between opera and the working class, published in the Observer on 12 October 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer. “Opera and ballet will be at the heart of the culture of many people who live in London and the south of England”, former Conservative minister Jake Berry (now a member of Reform UK) once told parliament.…
This is the opening to my essay on the need to distinguish between criticism of liberalism and the politics of illiberalism, published in the Observer on 5 October 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer. The threat of mass deportations.The erosion of the right to protest. Treating protest groups as terrorists. The enforcement of blasphemy laws through the back door. Imprisonment for…
This is the opening to my essay on Mark Mazower s argument about how the meaning of antisemitism transformed in the postwar decades , published in the Observer on 28 September 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer. “Anti-Zionism is one of the modern forms of antisemitism”, said the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in 2019, for which claim he won considerable praise from Jewish…
This is the opening to my essay on Tommy Robinson s Unite the Kingdom rally, published in the Observer on 21 September 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer. Mixenden lies at the edge of Halifax, West Yorkshire, a working-class town, very white and very poor. I went there more than 20 years ago, making a film for Channel 4 about multiculturalism. A British National Party candidate,…
This is the opening to my essay on the murder of Charlie Kirk and the responses to it, published in the Observer on 14 September 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer. We still know little about Tyler Robinson, the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk. What we do know, or at least should know, is that, whatever his motive, there is no political or moral measure by which killing someone…
This is the opening to my essay on Operation Raise the Colours , published in the Observer on 7 September 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer. About 10 years ago, we stayed in a cottage in Littondale, a beautiful valley in the Yorkshire Dales. The first night, we went for a drink at the local. It was plastered inside and out with Union Jacks. The moment I saw the flags, the hairs…
This is the opening to my essay on the consequences of a policy of mass deportations, published in the Observer on 31 August 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer. Who said this? “I m not going to get dragged down the route of mass deportations or anything like that… It’s a political impossibility to deport hundreds of thousands of people. We simply can t do it.” Keir Starmer? Some…
This is the opening to my essay on the debate about Lucy Connolly, published in the Observer on 24 August 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer. Somehow, Lucy Connolly has become a hero. Released last week after serving 10 months, 12 including time on remand, of a 31-month sentence, she has become lionised as a free-speech champion, a figurehead for immigration reform and the…
This is the opening to my essay on what old debates about Jewish refugees tell us about the immigration debate today, published in the Observer on 17 August 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer. “East of Aldgate one walks into a foreign town”, foreigners “swamping whole areas once populated by English people”. The “substitution of a foreign for an English population” has created…
This is the opening to my essay on immigration and the debate about broken Britain , published in the Observer on 10 August 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer. Is the UK “a rich country”, asked the economist Max Mosley earlier this year in a report by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). It might, he observed, seem “a surprising question to ask” about…