United Kingdom

Opium and the colonial narco-state
Opium and the colonial narco-state
Book review: Smoke and ashes: Opium’s hidden histories by Amitav Ghosh (Murray, 2024) Switching for a while from fiction to fact, Amitav Ghosh has written an account of …
Reverse colonialism? India and Britain’s free trade agreements
Reverse colonialism? India and Britain’s free trade agreements
As elections loom, India is in free trade agreement mode. Hot on the heels of announcing the signing of a “landmark” deal with a group of non-EU European countries, India has also…
A role for nuclear in Australia’s climate response?
A role for nuclear in Australia’s climate response?
Dron Parashar, writing in The Interpreter last month, notes that other countries are actively exploring nuclear options for electricity generation, while the current Australian…
AUKUS is a Trump-style deal
AUKUS is a Trump-style deal
Donald Trump’s recent outburst about lax European defence efforts once again made headlines. Trump went further than earlier suggestions he would pull the United States out of…
Is AUKUS Pillar I unworkable?
Is AUKUS Pillar I unworkable?
The AUKUS security pact is an ambitious undertaking. The sale of three to five Virginia­-class nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) to Australia in the early 2030s would be…
The Chagos dilemma
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
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 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?
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
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…