British political television and radio coverage is obsessed with the vox pop. This has been going on for decades, of course, but has become much worse in the last fifteen years. Every political story must be assessed by the person in the street as a matter of course, often as

I'm back in the archives again to find this post, written on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, that begins with U.S. President Eisenhower's coining of the Military-Industrial Complex and ends with questions about the economic and political rise of China and India. Shaping the

I have been rummaging in my archive again. During 2011, I wrote a series of articles for an online political magazine, DeAlign. This piece on Rupert Murdoch, phone hacking and the relationship between press ownership and our politics, seems particularly relevant given Jeff Bezos' recent edict to his Washington

Each year, on the 12th of May, The Mass Observation Archive invites Britons to write an account of their day. I try to remember to do it each year. Here's what I wrote in 2020, in the midst of the first Covid-19 lockdown and its aftermath. The alarm

The other night, somewhere in its dark middle, I woke from an unusual dream. Deep in that imaginative but unconscious landscape, my mind had conjured an unusual evening for me: In a small concert hall, while a band of some kind played on the stage in front of me, I