The Saturday Read: The Saturday Read Feature

Who is Zack Polanski?

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 05:41:35 GMT

Good afternoon. This is Ailbhe Rea, political editor of the New Statesman.

One summer’s evening in 2016, Jeremy Corbyn held a rally with hundreds of his supporters in London, as Labour MPs prepared to mount a leadership challenge against him. Addressing the crowd on the pavement outside Soas University, Corbyn declared he would fight on, continuing to champion his anti-austerity, left-populist politics. “What about Europe, Jeremy? Where were you when we needed you?” a lone heckler called out from the crowd. It was Zack Polanski, a Lib Dem council candidate, who had joined the party just as many were deserting it. Today, of course, he is the Green Party leader, the “eco-populist” hammering Labour from the left, on a platform that in style and substance is not a million miles away from the Corbyn project he once heckled.

Illustration by Anthony Gerace

Polanski has been on quite a journey to become the left populist leader he is today. For this week’s magazine, he sat down with me to talk about it, including some or his profound changes of mind on huge questions for British Jews and British progressives. He told me how he was “lost in the propaganda” around Corbyn back then, that he is sorry for once saying that he couldn’t vote for Corbyn as a Jewish man, and that his views have changed on the anti-Semitism complaints that Labour faced under his leadership. He told me, too, about the lessons he is drawing from the Corbyn project, the last time the British populist left had its moment. So who is Zack Polanski?

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Keir Starmer is all alone

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 06:49:37 GMT

Good morning. This is Tom McTague, editor-in-chief of the New Statesman.

British politics has been stuck for much of the past year. From my countless conversations with MPs, civil servants, aides, cabinet ministers and advisors I keep hearing the same thing repeated: Keir Starmer is not up to the job. If we look to the polls, we know the electorate feels much the same. MPs say the status quo is no longer tenable, and nevertheless stasis has reigned.

The events of last week might change that. Technically, nothing new has emerged – we know that the Prime Minister made a poor judgement in the appointment of Peter Mandelson to ambassador of the United States, a decision for which he has already paid a price. But this is not why his premiership is ailing. Instead, Starmer’s reaction to the crisis – the way he has chosen to fight for survival – reveals a deeper failure of leadership than just one lapse in judgement. Starmer has shown us his instincts in power, how he holds everyone to account but himself.

But what happens next? Is the herd starting to move?

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Should Keir Starmer resign?

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 11:52:00 GMT

Good afternoon. This is Andrew Marr, editor-at-large of the New Statesman.

Keir Starmer will address the House of Commons this afternoon, as questions pile up over how Peter Mandelson was appointed US ambassador, despite failing his security vetting.

As so often in these political crises, the final decision about the future of the Prime Minister rests not with his media critics, his grandstanding enemies in politics, the analysed intricacies of a fiddly Whitehall plot – or, indeed, with the voters.

All these groups will have their time. But there are only two people who will make the final decision. One is the person who shaves Keir Starmer’s chin in the morning, brushes his teeth and drinks his coffee. The other, perhaps more important, is a Labour-supporting lawyer called Victoria Starmer. She knows the almost impossible pressures of the job and the pain, frustration and anger her husband increasingly feels.

Once this crisis is over, there is an urgent conversation to be had about whether we have made the job of leading Britain impossible – loading too many problems onto too flimsy a centre – whether we are talking about Tory, Labour or in the future, perhaps, Reform politicians.

That’s for another day. For now, let’s look at the case for Starmer deciding to go. However strange it might seem to say so right now, Peter Mandelson’s vetting is a side issue. As a people we face horrendous problems: lack of growth, threats from abroad, lack of hope and self-belief. Starmer did well to keep us out of the Iran war but, across the rest of the picture, his government isn’t working…

Read on here

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Angry young women

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 06:55:55 GMT

Good morning. This is Finn McRedmond, staff writer at the New Statesman and editor of the Saturday Read.

By now, we are used to hearing about the radicalisation of young men – that unfortunate cohort, captured by the manosphere, enchanted by men’s rights activists, veering to the populist right.

But what about the young women? If we want to understand why the political gender gap is widening, we need to look to those moving sharply to the left. To do so, Emily Lawford, the New Statesman’s online editor, has spent months in the femosphere – at The Feminist Library, deep in their TikTok feeds, at university feminist societies and Palestinian solidarity marches.

With exclusive polling from Scarlett Maguire, the director and founder of Merlin Strategy, our cover this week asks: Who are these radical young women? What do they believe? And how will their feelings of disenfranchisement and isolation manifest at the polls?

You can read an extract of Emily’s piece down below, and click through here to read it in full. Some of Scarlett’s polling is available down below, and you can click through to see the rest. It is free for subscribers, and if not a subscriber? We still have a great deal on. As ever, thank you for reading and have a good week.

“Isolated”

It was a Wednesday night and seven members of the University of Leeds’ feminist society had invited me to join their book swap. We were in a classroom in the healthcare wing, and there was a pile of books on the table: Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Someone had brought Heather Morris’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz. We’d debated whether Harry Potter gets more respect than The Hunger Games because the main character is male, the racial politics of Wuthering Heights, the sexual politics of Sally Rooney.

The literary conversation was winding down. I asked the table how they felt about the young men they knew. “I don’t care for them,” said a girl called Ruby imperiously. She had red hair and lots of silver jewellery. “They’re not bad people, but they refuse to call out their friends who make other girls uncomfortable. They’ll laugh at jokes that are sexist, racist, homophobic, they don’t care about political issues… I don’t think they like women a lot.” If a man is attracted to you, she said, he might talk about things like toxic misogyny…

These women weren’t outliers. According to the New Statesman’s polling, young women are twice as likely to not want children as young men. All the Leeds women told me they feared a Reform government pressuring them to have babies. One woman mentioned Suella Braverman’s pledge to scrap the Equality Act and repeal other human rights laws. “It just feels… out of control.”

It all felt impossibly bleak. Most of the women I met were educated, engaging, bright and charismatic. But they weren’t excited about their futures.

Merlin Strategy

Thanks again, see you on Saturday.

AI's silent coup

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 07:20:44 GMT

Good morning. This Will Dunn, business editor of the New Statesman.

Over the past year I have conducted dozens of interviews with current and former ministers, officials and advisors, technologists and MPs about our government’s headlong rush into the AI future. The UK has committed to adopt AI more quickly than any other G7 economy. Plenty see it as a source of economic growth and a means to produce a smaller, more effective state.

But what I found in this investigation shocked me: a government that was wholly unprepared for the arrival of a transformative technology; officials and advisors whose belief in AI borders on religious faith; a network of vested interests; and a technology that has already been given power to shape every conversation, to write political speeches, to influence major economic decisions. “Make no mistake”, one former No 10 adviser told me, “this is a war.”

You can read an extract of my piece below, or click through to read it in full. It is free for paying subscribers (click here!). If you do not subscribe, you can avail of our Spring deal. Thanks for reading. Finn will be back on Saturday with a run down of the week in full.

Who is in charge?

On 20 April 2025, an official in the British government emailed their colleagues a story from that day’s Financial Times. The headline read: “UAE set to use AI to write laws in world first”. The officials, all of whom are involved in implementing AI in the running of the British state, read the article with amusement. “We were tempted to say: ‘We got there first,’” one of them told me. But they felt that the UK was “not fighting for the crown of the first AI-written line of legislation”, so they decided not to make public a fact very few people know: text composed by a large language model has made its way into an act of parliament. British laws are already being written by AI.
This is a matter of sovereignty. The software products we refer to as “AI” are all built on advanced “foundational models” from the US and China. This is a technology we do not control, but which plays an increasingly active role at every level of the British power structure. It is part of every conversation, drafting emails between officials, summarising ministers’ briefings and composing speeches delivered in the House of Commons. The Bank of England is using machine learning to inform its decisions on interest rates. The BBC uses AI to redraft articles. Every student at Oxford – where 31 of our previous prime ministers were educated – is now being educated with the help of OpenAI. There is little public understanding of how quickly this technology is moving through the institutions of power, or how enthusiastically it’s being pursued by a government that believes AI software could solve all its problems…

Read here

Thanks again, see you on Saturday.

John Gray on the end of the American empire

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 06:56:57 GMT

Good morning. This is Tom McTague, editor of the New Statesman.

For this week’s cover story, the philosopher John Gray writes about the consequences of Donald Trump’s mindless war in Iran. Late last night the president announced a two week ceasefire, if Iran agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

But this is no guaranteed silver bullet – an enduring settlement still needs to be negotiated. And beyond the regional destruction, the impacts of this war will still travel far beyond the Middle East. Below is a sweeping essay on America’s imperial overreach – from Vietnam to Iraq – and how national hubris and self-deception can lead to ruin.

You can read an extract of the piece down below, or click through to read it in full. The New Statesman is only available to paying subscribers at the moment. The good news is that you can save some money if you buy now. Much more from us on Iran over the coming days. Until then, thanks for reading and have a great week.

The unravelling

Trump-whisperers such as the Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte believe they can inject a sliver of reason into his deliberations. But Trump’s logic is instinctual not rational. As his lifting of sanctions on Russian oil has demonstrated, he has visceral sympathy for Vladimir Putin’s blend of tyranny and oligarchy. Détente with Russia will create many lucrative business opportunities. While Nato may linger on in name, the transatlantic alliance is operationally defunct. America is returning to its pre-1914 trajectory as a civilisation separate from Europe.
In the UK, the default position is to wait out the storm until sanity returns to Washington. Why Putin or Xi Jinping should exhibit similar patience is not explained. Could there be a better time for them to act? Ramping up hybrid warfare in under-defended Europe will give Putin leverage in any peace deal in Ukraine. With Trump having shifted military assets from the Asia-Pacific to the Middle East and running down munitions, Xi may be able to absorb Taiwan without firing a shot. There has been talk of an Anglo-Gaullism in which the UK relies on itself and European allies for its security. Obviously, this presupposes much higher defence spending, and soon. But renewing Britain’s defence capacity requires reindustrialising the economy, an enterprise that could take decades. Without an actionable plan, British Gaullism is an idle dream.

Thanks again, see you on Saturday.

One must read

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 06:56:10 GMT

Good morning. This is Finn McRedmond, staff writer at the New Statesman and editor of the Saturday Read. I wanted to draw your attention to one more piece from our Easter Special – just in case you missed it over the weekend.

Alfreda Bikowsky may not be a household name – not least because she operates under a pseudonym now. But my colleague Faye Curran knows exactly who she is: once the leader of the CIA unit that captured Bin Laden, turned women’s life coach. Or to the New Yorker? The “queen of torture”. Over the course of several months Faye spoke with Bikowsky, and found a woman "unfailingly polite” but gripped by a profound cognitive dissonance. What emerges is this twisty piece of old school, long form reportage. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

You can read an extract of the piece down below, or click through to read it in full. The New Statesman is only available to paying subscribers at the moment. The good news is that you can save some money if you buy now. I will be back with you on Saturday, as usual, for a rundown of the week. Until then, happy Easter. And as ever, thanks for reading and have a great week.

What she did next

To the clients of her women’s life coaching business, YBeU Life Coaching, she is Freda Scheuer. For $397 for three sessions or $597 for six, you can “feel heard, understood and supported as you get clear on exactly what you want, what is holding you back, and how you will overcome it”. A lot of the women who want to work with Bikowsky are from similar career backgrounds – some law enforcement or military officers.
For both business and personal reasons, it makes perfect sense for Bikowsky, now 61, to no longer use her birth name. That name and various other pseudonyms she has been known by over the years – Frances (her middle name), deputy chief of Alec Station, or as she was referred to in the New Yorker, the “Unidentified Queen of Torture” – carry some weight.
As the former deputy and head of Alec Station – a specialised CIA unit that was dedicated to tracking Osama bin Laden and his associates between 1996 and 2005 – and later the global jihad unit, Bikowsky has been widely reported to have been among the senior officials associated with the development, implementation and defence of what the CIA described as “enhanced interrogation techniques”…

Thanks again, see you on Saturday.

The Rory Stewart interview

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 07:38:58 GMT

Good morning. This is Oli Dugmore, an executive editor at the New Statesman.

Last week I sat down with Rory Stewart, a man who I have been interviewing for ten years – first as a leadership contender for the Conservative Party, then as a hopeful for London mayor, now as a broadcaster and commentator. It comes three years after my colleague Will Lloyd met the man and wrote this 4,000 word epic profile.

Stewart possesses a style of conservatism that is fading from public life – as much of the British right hardens, or spins out into populist bombast. He is, perhaps, a man out of place in time. Below we talk about political evil, boarding school, nuclear proliferation and whether we should rewild wolves.

This is the latest episode in our new podcast series The Exchange – long form, one-to-one interviews between me (your host) and some of the leading figures of our day; those who shape, explain and define the political moment.

Photographed for the New Statesman by Robbie Lawrence, 2023

You can read an extract of our conversation down below, or you can click through to read it in full. You can watch us on YouTube in our brand new studio, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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“Huge acceleration”

Oli: Much of this has centred around Iranian attempts or lack thereof to pursue their own viable nuclear weapons

Rory: No, exactly. There will be a huge acceleration of people getting nuclear weapons because they will conclude it’s the only thing that can defend you. And that this begins really with Gaddafi. A huge amount of effort was put into telling Gaddafi that if he gave up on his nuclear programme, we would lift sanctions and he could become a friend of the West. He gives up on his nuclear programme and then a couple years later we invade and kill him. Ditto with Saddam Hussein, basically, who was put under huge pressure to step away from his nuclear programmes and from his chemical weapon programmes. He actually turned out to have abandoned his chemical weapon programmes entirely, under international pressure. And the only result was that we killed them. Ukraine very similar situation, was encouraged to give up its nuclear weapons and it actually had them, unlike the others. It physically had nuclear weapons, gave them up because it was told they would be safer if they didn’t have the weapons. What happens? Russia invades.

Thanks again, see you on Saturday.

My evening with Robert De Niro

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 07:13:01 GMT

Good morning. This is Freddie Hayward, the US correspondent at the New Statesman.

When I got into the room with Robert De Niro, I found a man who did not understand America. He was confused, frustrated and angry about the type of nation that Donald Trump was forging. I met the great actor at an anti-Trump rally in Washington DC, where he implored his fellow liberals to take their country back.

His version of “resistance” is trying to mimic the president: that exuberant, rebellious and unpredictable manner of politics. But no matter their shared tactics, there is a chasmic gulf of understanding between the two sides.

We talked some more. I couldn’t help but think: how could De Niro – a man who has spent his life inhabiting the American id – fail so dramatically when it comes to understanding its pure embodiment, in the form of President Donald Trump?

You can read an extract of my piece down below, or you can click through to read it in full. The NS is only available to paying subscribers at the moment (with thanks, again, to those of you who already subscribe). You can subscribe here for 75% off. Thanks for reading.

An audience with the anti-Trump

“I know where De Niro is, but I can’t tell you,” one of the organisers told me. So I ferreted my way through several corridors with pale lights and squeaky floors and eventually found his press handler who said he could maybe get me a couple minutes with the great man if I stood silently over there next to that filing cabinet beside the two security guards who were whispering about how to protect De Niro once he got on stage.
I leaned against the filing cabinet about ten feet away from the handler in a narrow hallway, approaching him every now and then to ask whether De Niro had said yes, only for him to shoo me away as though I were a disobedient goat. “I’ll ask, I’ll ask,” was all he would say. I assumed De Niro was elsewhere in this warren of corridors. But after about ten minutes the handler waved me over and opened the very door he was standing right next to.

Thanks again, see you on Saturday.

Ed Miliband knows he's right

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:08:15 GMT

Good morning. This is Will Lloyd, deputy editor of the New Statesman.

I’ve spent the last four months profiling Ed Miliband. The interviews started around the time that a briefing war broke out between Wes Streeting and Number 10 Downing Street and ended when an actual war had broken out between the United States, Israel, and Iran.

By Tori Ferenc

To say that the months in between were difficult for the government would be an understatement. Miliband inspires unusual emotions for a cabinet minister: awe, fear, devotion, loathing. He is a human lightning rod, and hopefully this profile makes Ed Miliband make more sense.

Social democracy, at scale

The story of the post-Blair Labour party, if it can be contained in one individual, is the story of Ed Miliband. This is not a story about backstabbing brothers, back room deals with “union paymasters”, election promises printed on tomb stones, questionable slogans on mugs, bacon sandwiches, or double kitchens; nor anything as vulgar as retail policies aimed at marginal constituencies.
Miliband’s story is really about the exhilaration of ideas: where they come from, why some of us fall in love with them, and what propels those ideas from the fringes of the debate to the fulcrum of an era. This is not an argument about whether those ideas and the policies they eventually become are right or wrong. It’s a story about the long-term political power that commanding those ideas allows an individual to wield. It is about the years of Edward Samuel Miliband - and Milibandism - which might be seen as the latest, or perhaps even the last, attempt to restore a social democratic political economy in Britain.
Since July 2024, when Labour returned to government, it has been hard to work out precisely the point of this administration: to spend a bit more here and there, but leave an abject economic settlement largely intact; or to be much more than that, to fundamentally reshape Britain?
For the last 20 months, Miliband has stood distinctly apart from those growing doubts. Even his enemies admit that the Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero knows what he is doing. That, in large part, is why he is so hated by his opponents. Miliband is getting social democratic things done at scale: during an era of uncontrollable global conflict, which began with the Ukraine war and is spiralling in Iran, when the direction of energy policy has become the most fiercely disputed issue in British politics.

Thanks again, see you on Saturday.

The war in Ukraine is nowhere near over

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 07:15:48 GMT

Good morning. This is Will Lloyd, deputy editor of the New Statesman.

“There’s obviously a conflict in Iran going on, in the Middle East, but we can’t lose focus on what’s going on in Ukraine”, Keir Starmer said on Tuesday morning.

I agree with the Prime Minister. Over the last four years the war in Ukraine has warped the world into strange new shapes. For our cover story this week, I returned to the country during its darkest, deepest winter to find out what this long conflict is doing to Ukrainian society. If we hear about this war at all now, the focus invariably turns to drones, machines and weapons.

In my experience they are less interesting than the men and women who wield these weapons, or find their lives destroyed by them. I always leave Ukraine with a nauseous sense that what they are enduring there may one day happen to us.

You can read an extract of my piece down below. And you can click through to read it in full. It is only available to paying subscribers for now. You can save 75% on a subscription by clicking on this link, or the red button down below. Thank you for reading, and we will back with you on Saturday.

“Over the horizon, the frontline”

Before I returned in February a British official told me that Ukraine’s population, which had been estimated at just over 40 million in 2014, had shrunk to something like 20 million by 2025, significantly less than most estimates in the public domain. What would be left after this war, if it ever ended?

Not everything made exact sense in Ukraine this winter. One afternoon my friend took me to the outskirts of Kharkiv: I had to meet a guy there. He was in his sixties and he lived alone in a 16-storey Soviet apartment block. The top of the building had been chewed up by a Russian missile in 2022. Snow filled the empty floors. The building smelled of rotten concrete. The man’s only company was a dog outside chained to a crate and the circling crows in the grey sky.

This man, the Robinson Crusoe of the block, had no electricity and no heating. He cooked with a camp stove, collected food from a local charity and smelled unwashed, sour. I felt very sorry for him. He was trying to exist. What else could he do? He took me to a window, with panoramic views of the edge of the city, out into the flat, frozen white countryside. His bottom lip trembled while he spoke. He was tense, on the edge of something bad, trying not to cry.

Thanks again, see you on Saturday.

Farage, Trump and the future of the special relationship

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:31:12 GMT

Good morning. This is Freddie Hayward, the US correspondent at the New Statesman.

The “special relationship” has long bewitched prime ministers of this country. Keir Starmer is no exception, flip-flopping between Trump flattery and chesty declarations of Britain’s energy-independence. But the war in the Middle East has been a clarifying moment for London and Washington.

This week I have been speaking to officials in both capitals. And I have been to Palm Beach to interview Nigel Farage. The left and the right can agree on one thing – the so-called special relationship is in the worst shape it has been in decades. My piece this week asks why.

You can read an extract of the story below, and you can click through to read the piece in full. The New Statesman is available only to paying subscribers at the moment – but the good news is that we are still running a £1 per week deal. Thanks for reading, Finn will be back with you on Saturday for a run down of the week in full.

What Labour doesn’t understand

Part of what Starmer and his team did not understand when they left the White House last February was that the Maga movement believes Britain is a sinking nation, one overwhelmed by “third-world” immigration and vulnerable to woke institutions. Maga looks at the UK as a country that has become so powerless in the face of its internal malaise that it can no longer be a reliable ally. The Maga guru Steve Bannon told me that Britain is “not a post-Christian nation, [but] a pre-Islamic” one. When he mentions London on his talkshow it’s as a shorthand for an ethnically divided dystopia. “A Labour Party with 15 Muslim MPs would never let Starmer bomb a Muslim country,” he told me. (Labour has 19 Muslim MPs.)
Americans’ reverence for British culture was once as much a glue as joint military operations. The power of institutions that bound the UK and the US together, such as the Rhodes scholarship and the Council on Foreign Relations, has eroded in the 21st century. JFK once modelled himself on Queen Victoria’s Whig prime minister, Lord Melbourne. Today, even a moderate appreciation for British literature feels anachronistic among Washington’s current political milieu. London no longer captivates the Washington right-wing foreign policy elite in a way that it once did. “For a younger generation the Gulf is what London used to be,” one administration official told me.
“We are behaving as though we are in a pre-Trumpian world,” the former head of the Foreign Office, Simon McDonald, told me. “The American separation from Europe has been underway for a long time and has been given a huge shove by Trump,” he continued. In the medium term, he thinks Britain must “make a much bigger offer to Brussels”. But in the short term, “Everything is about the US. This is the unavoidable fact of the day.”

Have a good week, and see you on Saturday. Thank you.

British decline is not inevitable

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 07:23:18 GMT

Good morning. This is Tom McTague, editor of the New Statesman.

There is no one better to explain the nature of the present upheaval facing the United Kingdom than Professor John Bew. An advisor to four Prime Ministers and governments formed by two political parties, John has a deep understanding of geopolitics, Westminster and British history that may be familiar to readers of the New Statesman from previous essays as well as his award-winning books on British politics.

Cover art: Alex Williamson

In our cover story this week, he takes readers on a tour of the great disruptions that rocked the British state in centuries past. Each time, governments – eventually – responded with creativity and nous to the crisis facing them, forming new and durable political settlements. Today, John argues, Britain faces what he calls “The Fourth Great Disruption” – a many sided crisis that has felled government after government in recent years.

.You can read an extract of the essay below, and you can click through to read the piece in full. The New Statesman is available only to paying subscribers at the moment – but the good news is that we are still running a £1 per week deal. Thanks for reading, you can write in by replying to this email.

The British governing class and the fourth great disruption

The fidelity of our political and official classes to the current order comes from an assumption, deeply ingrained in the generation who are coming close to retirement, that liberal or social-market economies were the only possible future and that the rest of the world was destined to become more like us. It is partly why austerity – like appeasement – had far more political support than we care to remember. It is why we spent 0.7 per cent of GDP on development assistance at the start of the last decade and barely 2 per cent on defence. It is why, after 1989, we added even more international and human rights law on top of the international legal order crafted out of 1945. It is why Brexit was such a psychological shock to this world-view. It is why we sometimes look like the last man at the bar at Davos, nursing a cocktail as the lights go off and facing a treacherous and icy route to an unclear destination.
So as one world collapses around us, what are the shape of things to come? Here are some hard truths. The current social contract – particularly around welfare, health and pensions – is unsustainable on current levels of growth. A domestic and international legal system that does not allow us to control our borders has lost legitimacy at home. We have the highest energy prices in the Western world, just at the moment when energy is vital to our ability to take advantage of relative national strengths in technology. And there is currently no route to higher defence spending – which is inevitable unless the nation is content to continue on a path towards greater insecurity and irrelevance – without major cuts elsewhere in the public spending stack.
At moments of relative political equilibrium these are problems of policy for specialists in each of those areas. At moments of great structural upheaval, these are grand strategic problems that can only be confronted as a coherent whole.

Have a good week, and see you on Saturday. Thank you.

Left populism is here to stay

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 08:41:43 GMT

Good morning. This is Andrew Marr, editor-at-large of the New Statesman.

Since the Greens emerged victorious in the Gorton and Denton by-election last week, one thing has become abundantly clear: we are living through an age of two rival populisms.

Much energy has been dedicated to understanding the right-wing populists – those behind the giant eruptions of Brexit and the Donald Trump electoral victories; the rise of Maga and Reform; the backwash of Victor Orbán and Giorgia Meloni.

Where the right explains its insurgency as driven by anxiety about mass migration and the decline of Christian culture, the left focuses its attention on Gaza, trans rights and hostility to Keir Starmer. But both are fundamentally driven by a sense of economic betrayal. And both are competing to represent the dispossessed – so where does this all take us?

You can read an extract of my piece down below, and you can click through here to read in full. The NS is only available to paying subscribers at the moment. But you can take out a subscription here, with thanks to those who already have.

Have a great day, and we will be back with you on Saturday as usual.

“Great deal of grievance politics”

The criticism of populism is that it offers too-simple solutions to hard and complex problems. On the right, it’s that if only we can get to zero immigration and kick out enough Muslims, Britain would become a law-abiding, happy, productive nation.

Left, or “Green” populism, is very different. Its language is couched in inclusion and fairness, projecting a sunny optimism. But its policy responses, from “eat the rich” to “leave Nato”, from open borders to the legalisation of all drugs, are radical and equally threatening to what’s left of the middle ground.

Yet, because it doesn’t address the economic tidal wave behind this spreading sense of dispossession, grief and anger, the conservative response is pathetically inadequate. The taxation proposals are impractical! Don’t care. Open borders would bring in more criminals and threaten more working-class livelihoods! Don’t believe you. Don’t care. Leaving Nato would embolden Vladimir Putin. Don’t care. And so on. If you aren’t connected to society, if you have no personal stake in it, then you don’t care about its norms or offending them.

Have a good week, and see you on Saturday. Thank you.

The choice before the Labour Party

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 07:07:58 GMT

Good morning. This is Tom McTague, editor of the New Statesman.

One year on from Labour’s wipeout in the 1931 General Election, economic historian RH Tawney wrote a post-mortem of the administration. In “The choice before the Labour Party” he diagnosed a government that was “hesitant in action and divided in mind” and he described a party that could not achieve what it wanted, on account of not knowing what it wanted. In the end it was a “pernicious anaemia” and “general futility” that undid the project, nothing so dramatic as sabotage or genuine misadventure.

You won’t be alone in thinking that all that sounds rather resonant now. In the wake of the Gorton and Denton by-election – which saw Labour come in third behind the Green Party and Reform – David Miliband rediscovers Tawney, and concludes that his lessons from nearly one century ago are essential reading for the party now. 16 years since leaving his post as Foreign Secretary, Miliband exhorts the Starmer administration in the pages of the New Statesman.

David Miliband, photographed for the New Statesman by Tom Jamieson

You can read an extract of the essay below, and you can click through to read the piece in full. The New Statesman is available only to paying subscribers at the moment – but the good news is that we are still running a £1 per week deal. Thanks for reading, you can write in by replying to this email. More from us to come on Labour, Iran and everything in between. And as usual, Finn will be back with you on Saturday for a full rundown of the week.

“Clarifying principles”

That is what gave New Labour political and ideological energy in the 1990s. It was the openness on means that created the best, most radical and sustained progress towards progressive ends – from education reform to Bank of England independence, gay rights to welfare, to work, social inclusion and the Belfast Agreement. The culture came before the policies. And it was when the culture became closed that the policy innovation dried up and the electorate had enough.
Ihave not been in government for more than 15 years, nor in politics for 13. There is no doubt that it is tougher than ever – tougher in the policy choices, tougher in the international environment, tougher in the online madness. But the prerequisites for a successful political project have not been upended. The government should learn from its war footing on Ukraine. It needs the same willingness to lead, to champion new ways of working and to embrace new coalitions on the domestic front.
Labour won the last election with the dividing line of change vs no change. That is always an attractive formula. It will be the foundation of Reform’s effort next time. For Labour, as the incumbent party, the dividing line needs to be good change vs bad change. That is in our power to establish.

Have a good week, and see you on Saturday. Thank you.

What did the Windsors know?

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 07:11:07 GMT

Good morning. This is Will Lloyd, deputy editor of the New Statesman.

What did they know and when? Those six words are shaking the House of Windsor to its foundations. Following the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on 19 February, that question will now be answered not by the palace, nor by the press, but by the Thames Valley Police. For the first time anybody can remember the royal family is being stripped of its externals, cut down in status, reduced to taking questions from coppers, not giving pre-prepared answers to soft queries sent to them in advance.

Andrew denies all of the allegations against him.

Cover art: Gregori Saavedra

Monarchists are right about at least one thing. The monarchy truly matters. It’s not just about palace gift shops, screaming tabloid headlines, silly documentaries, obscure prerogatives and Netflix extravaganzas. They are our mirror. The Windsors’ undeniable failure is the spiritual equivalent of the non-construction of HS2 or the Post Office Scandal. The family’s downfall, happening now in faster and faster motion, may end up being one of those moments that remakes Britain.

You can read an extract of the piece down below. You can click through to read in full. Finn will be back with you on Saturday, as usual, for a rundown of the week. In the meantime, please consider subscribing to the New Statesman. You can do so here, or by clicking that enticing red button below. Thanks for reading, and don’t hesitate to get in touch by replying to this email.

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The trials of Windsor

Let’s follow the line pumped out like water from a holed schooner by Buckingham Palace and its hard-working proxies for a moment. After the arrest, His Majesty the King put out a rare statement written in the first person on 19 February. He asked that the law be allowed to take its course. The King had already promised to cooperate with the police. Charles had “felt powerfully about this issue in his in-tray”, a friend told the Sunday Times, forcing us to imagine the ageing King staring hard and feeling “powerfully” at pieces of paper marked “ANDREW” since 2023. This, the Windsorists wittered in print and across the airwaves, was the screeching sound of a line being drawn under the matter. Radioactive Andrew would be placed in a lead-lined box…
Can our legal system cope with the trial of Windsor, should it come to that? At first sight that sounds like a hysterical question. Even a year ago most of us would have laughed at it. But can you have a fair trial of the King’s brother in the King’s Court, overseen by a judge who has sworn a personal oath to that same King, sitting under the King’s royal coat of arms? The mind boggles. It’s not just judges. Magistrates and KCs, soldiers and MPs and the police, privy counsellors, bishops, archbishops: they swear their allegiance to the Crown, not to you. And you can only understand the Andrew story in all its proportions when you know that to cause potential embarrassment to the firm – to ask the wrong questions, to speak out, to raise tedious little concerns – was not a way to open up one’s professional horizons within our multitudinous oath-taking bureaucracies.

Read on

Thanks again, see you on Saturday.

Class war with Bridget Phillipson

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 07:57:42 GMT

Good morning, this is Pippa, an executive editor at the New Statesman. I wanted to send you our cover story early this week.

Bridget Phillipson entered the Department for Education in July 2024. Since, various critics have called her a “Nazi”, a “Marxist” and “the most dangerous woman in Britain”.

Her reforming agenda – on Send, on academies, on private school fees – is considered a direct rebuke to the Tory education secretary of the 2010s, Michael Gove. And in a sense, it is. Phillipson does want to challenge the Westminster orthodoxy that Gove’s reforms were a universal success, and that to change his policies would be to imperil England’s children.

Photographed for the New Statesman by Kate Peters

But with Keir Starmer’s government in a precarious position, there is a lot at stake for Phillipson too. If she can steer her reforms through, she could be a transformative figure. If she cannot, she risks becoming just another emblem of an administration without boldness or vision.

I have spent several months with the Education Secretary to find out who this “most dangerous woman” really is. You can read an extract of the piece below. To read the piece in full you can subscribe here – for just £1 a week. If you are already a subscriber, you will find it here.

Thank you for reading. Finn will see you on Saturday as usual.

On the Supreme Court ruling

Her time at the refuge inevitably informs her view on women’s right to single-sex spaces. “I’ve always believed that women deserve and have a right to services on the basis of sex,” Phillipson tells me, “and that does mean biological sex. After women have experienced appalling violence, sexual violence, from men… they deserve the time and space to be able to heal properly. The service that I ran was for women only; we could provide other options for trans women, but accommodation services had to be on the basis of biology.”
Phillipson’s views on the necessity of those single-sex spaces should make her an ally to gender-critical feminists such as JK Rowling. She tells me she is “a big fan” of Rowling’s work: “I’ve spent a lot of time reading Harry Potter over the years with my kids. I think she’s clearly a phenomenal writer, she’s a phenomenal campaigner, and the reason she cares so deeply about this issue is because of her own personal experiences. That’s why lots of women feel strongly about it: because we know how important it is to have access to spaces that are just for women.”
Yet last December, Rowling tweeted that the Education Secretary and others “determined to push their unfalsifiable ideas about gender on to the whole of society… will rightly be judged by history as having enabled harm to women and girls in service of a dangerous, quasi-religious ideology”.

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Thanks again, see you on Saturday.

The scandal on Britain's maternity wards

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:07:08 GMT

Good afternoon. This is Hannah Barnes, the investigations editor of the New Statesman.

Two mothers, Beth and Sophie, had much in common: both were expecting sons; both had decided to name their baby Felix. They were members of the same antenatal group. Yet within weeks both suffered the devastating loss of their children after being cared for by the same hospital.

For the past eight months, I’ve been looking closely at multiple maternity failings in England, something the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, has branded systemic and scandalous, and an issue that keeps him awake at night.

In this week’s magazine, I’ve turned my focus to one trust – University Hospitals Sussex – where the government promised nine families an independent review after their babies died. I have been working with Michael Buchanan from BBC News, and together we have found problems at the trust that are likely to reach far beyond what has already been reported.

You can read an extract of the story below and then click through to read the piece in full. We’re currently offering access for just £1 per week. Finn will be back with you as usual on Saturday. Thanks for reading.

Untold harm

The TFOB group believe there are more families in Sussex whose babies’ deaths may have been avoidable. “I am convinced, partly because I’ve spoken to other families that have lost children but aren’t yet part of this review,” says Katie Fowler. “And secondly, because I believe the trust does a good job of persuading people that nothing could have been done. I think there will be cases where parents may not realise that their child could have been saved.”

There is a raft of data that supports this belief. Responses to freedom of information requests show that the deaths of at least 55 babies at Sussex hospitals between 2019 and 2023 might have been avoidable.

Whenever a baby dies from 22-weeks (including from miscarriage and stillbirth), hospitals are required to carry out an internal investigation. Sussex’s reports show that, in at least 55 cases, it was judged that the care provided to mothers might have or was likely to have made a difference to the outcome for their babies.

A total of 227 internal investigations were carried in Sussex during this period, meaning around a quarter (at least 24 per cent) of deaths might have been avoidable. When compared to the national average during this period, Sussex had a significantly higher proportion of potentially avoidable deaths.

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Starmer in freefall

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 08:08:15 GMT

Good morning, this is Finn, NS staff writer and editor of the Saturday Read. Welcome to our special (and early!) Labour crisis issue.

Britain could be facing its seventh prime minister in eight years. Labour is adrift in a post-Brexit, post-crash world. The government is run by a man who is cannibalising his own authority. And the sense – that perhaps Keir Starmer never had a purpose of his own – is becoming harder to ignore.

Below you will find all you need to navigate the mire, from our editor-in-chief Tom McTague, our political editor Ailbhe Rea, and editor-at-large Andrew Marr.

These articles are only available to New Statesman subscribers. The good news is that a subscription won’t cost you very much at all right now – five weeks for £5. That New Year’s sale I will not stop going on about continues, though it is stretching the definition of “New Year” rather thin. If you already subscribe – thank you, you will find everything you need here.

As ever, thanks for reading and have a great day. You can write in by replying to this email. I will be back on Saturday for a rundown of the week in full.