Politics

The Greens are having quite a moment. Since the anointing of Zack Polanski as leader of the party, there’s been a 45 per cent increase in the membership, which is now up to about a hundred thousand believers. The party is also doing very well, comparatively speaking, in opinion polling, reaching about 15 per cent, not very far behind the Tories. The Polanski surge has come courtesy of a Corbyn-esque policy blitz But while the Greens are keen to talk up their polling success and growing membership – which is, naturally, good for party coffers – it won’t necessarily correlate to wider electoral success. We’ve been here before: during Jeremy

Defenders of free expression can breathe a collective sigh of relief. Hamit Coskun – the man who burnt a Quran outside the Turkish Consulate in London in February and was found guilty of a ‘religiously aggravated public order offence’ – had his conviction overturned at Southwark Crown Court on Friday. People are still scared to blaspheme against Islam. We already live under unofficial blasphemy laws enforced by fear Coskun exercised his freedom of conscience and felt the iron fist of the law. His original trial even bordered on victim-blaming. The fact that he was attacked on the street by a Muslim man wielding a knife was effectively used against him,

A political party widely referred to as ‘the Tories’ has now existed – albeit with some rather serious discontinuities along the way – for just short of 350 years. The rise of Reform and apparently terminal decline of the Tories in the polls, Kemi Badenoch’s widely praised conference speech notwithstanding, has, however, made many start to think the hitherto unthinkable. Might the world’s oldest political party finally be on its way out? Could the Tories cease to be? The Tories’ current woes certainly appear to constitute their lowest ebb since 1906 or 1846, or even the mid-18th century The Tories’ current woes certainly appear to constitute their lowest ebb since

Hundreds of billions have been wiped off the value of the crypto currencies. A prominent Ukrainian blogger and influencer on digital coins has been found dead. And traders are bracing themselves for a rocky start to trading on Monday as markets start to tumble. We will have to see whether it develops into a full-blown crash or not. And yet, all the major equity indices were already wildly overvalued, and a correction was always inevitable – it was just a question of when it would start.  There may well be a rough few days ahead for investors. An estimated $400 billion was wiped off the value of the main crypto

On Friday evening in the Windrush Lounge at The World Transformed conference in Manchester, British socialism was autocannibalising. No more comrade this or comrade that. No other little politburo manners. In a storage unit in an industrial estate – this was the lounge – Max Shanly, an influential left-wing activist and former Momentum member, was jabbing his finger in the direction of Alan Gibbons, an independent councillor in Liverpool who is involved in building Jeremy Corbyn’s new party, which is for now confusingly named Your Party. ‘You are one of the select few!’ Max said. ‘You are the Comical Ali of Your Party!’ Max’s issue – in fact it seemed