United Kingdom
The Chagos dilemma
The United Kingdom loves its islands, wherever they might be.
Today, it is continuing a dispute about a set of them in the middle of the Indian Ocean, known as the Chagos…
Practising politics in a moral wilderness
Book review: Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within, by Rory Stewart (Jonathan Cape, 2023)
To explain away their failures, errors and flaws, many politicians have consoled…
The Bletchley Park artificial intelligence summit: Good optics, less substance
The Lowy Institute’s Lydia Khalil gave us a guide in these pages to UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s two-day artificial intelligence summit, hosted by the United Kingdom this month…
AUKUS as Big Science?
Alvin Weinberg, integral contributor to the infamous Manhattan Project, coined the term “Big Science” to describe the large-scale, often multi-nationally funded methods devised to…
Voting “Yes” in the heart of empire
“Oh, they’ve had a hard run of it, haven’t they?”
In perhaps the understatement of the century, this was the reaction of a well-meaning Englishwoman on the platform at Oxford…
Boris Johnson: Does distance really lend enchantment to the view?
Book review: Johnson at 10: The Inside Story, by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell (Atlantic, 2023)
Are we better off waiting for tardy but considered analyses of our political…
The social licence for AUKUS has not yet been earned
The Australian Labor Party is firmly committed to the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines, at least according to the unopposed motion passed at last week’s ALP National Conference…
Stumped by the cricket controversy? Here’s how sport and politics collide
It’s been a good week for one-eyed Australian cricket fans, first watching the England men’s team self-destruct and then the English cricketing establishment forfeiting any claim…
Chemical weapons: Impunity is killing deterrence
In May of 2023, as anticipation of a long-awaited Ukrainian counter-offensive was building, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy touched down in the blistering heat of Saudi Arabia. This…
Australia: The lynchpin of a modernised Commonwealth
From glittering pageantry to a nationwide preponderance of underwhelming quiches, Saturday’s Coronation was a thoroughly British affair. It was, counterintuitively, also the most…