So little appears at stake in the Northern Ireland protocol yet it’s at the heart of the Brexit deadlock. But then it’s a proxy for something else.
Northern Ireland—the unhappy ending Europe’s story must avoid
Europe has always had its anti-enlightenment side. Northern Ireland graphically presents its extreme manifestation.
Universal Basic Income: a disarmingly simple idea—and fad
Universal basic income is a disarmingly simple idea based on a disarmingly simple premise. The digital revolution threatens massive technological unemployment; ergo, every citizen should be paid a basic income regardless. Like all simple ideas, however, things get more complicated on closer scrutiny. For decades there have been jeremiads predicting that workers would be replaced […]
Social Europe Needs A Positive Vision
In his magisterial One Hundred Years of Socialism, Donald Sassoon described how, under the influence of the 19th century German leader Karl Kautsky, the European social democrat movement embraced a mechanistic scheme by which the immanent crisis of capitalism would somehow issue in a transition to socialism. This conveniently offered a reassuring fatalism about the […]