Will Hutton

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Emmanuel Macron has found himself impossibly squeezed. Photograph: Eliot Blondet/Sipa/Rex/Shutterstock

France is both beautiful and brutally bleak. It is a country studded with towns and rural vistas that take your breath away, but pockmarked with districts of soulless, desolate concrete, especially in the suburbs of its cities, the banlieues. It’s as though French planners and architects, in their embrace of modernity, lost touch with what it means to be human. It has been an important trigger for a toxic brew of Islamophobia and wider cultural despair.

The political consequences, now playing themselves out, will ricochet around Europe and the west. The presidential elections this spring will be dominated by the right, overtly mouthing implacable opposition to immigration that even Nigel Farage, who shares similar sentiments, dares not use so openly in Britain.…  Seguir leyendo »

From Minsk to Hong Kong, people power just isn’t working any more

The west’s ineffectiveness in the face of the arrant use of torture, unlawful arrest, savage imprisonment without trial and flagrant abuse of international law, even close to home in Europe, is among the bleakest symptoms of our times. The people power we saw embodied in the strikes in the Gdańsk shipyards, the fall of the Berlin Wall and even the Arab spring has not presaged the new era of democracy we once hoped for. Instead, the 21st century is becoming defined as a new era of agile autocracy and vicious strong-man rule.

As the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, prepared the UK’s response to last Sunday’s forced landing of a Ryanair jet by a Belarusian MiG-29 over its airspace to secure the trumped-up detention of a well-known democracy activist, Roman Protasevich, it must have crossed his mind that Britain’s response would have been so much stronger within the EU.…  Seguir leyendo »

An Apple Store in Beijing, where the company’s sales figures have slumped. Photograph: Wu Hong/EPA

Our mental geography is bounded by what has gone before. What has happened in the recently remembered past is most likely to continue. Inflection points, when trends decisively change, are more infrequent than the many instances when things go on as they have done.

Two of today’s trends seem unstoppable. China’s astounding growth will continue, so the story runs, underwriting its arrival as the second economic superpower. To get a share in that China action, underpinning the entire growth of Asia, is one of the prime economic arguments for Brexit. Abandon sclerotic Europe, embrace the prosperity of Asia – even if it is a world of semi-democracy at best, authoritarian government at worst.…  Seguir leyendo »

Locals inspect the area around the Sahra hospital in Aleppo after a barrel bomb strike by Syrian government forces in October. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

To complete the infamies of 2016, now comes Bashar al-Assad’s impending victory in Aleppo – today’s Guernica, even if there is no Picasso to depict it. Events in Syria define the arrival of a new barbarism. Even in the most terrible days of 20th-century conflict, combatants would respect minimum rules. Civilians were not surrogates for the enemy. Organisations such as the Red Cross – independently and impartially alleviating suffering on either side on the basis of no other value than human need – were allowed to do their work.

No more. Aleppo completes a new, dark contemporary arc that trashes respect for humanitarian principles that once seemed inviolable.…  Seguir leyendo »

It was another bad week for the west's great Enlightenment tradition. On Monday, the Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán, leader of the highly conservative Fidesz party, introduced its controversial new constitution allowing itself discretionary authority over the media, courts, the central bank and even personal conscience.

There is to be no division of powers in Hungary between the executive, legislative and judiciary; no guaranteed freedom of the press, nor judicial impartiality; no freedom of worship. Abortion and same-sex marriages are outlawed. And echoing other horrific moments from Europe's dark past, Orbán proposes to offer ethnic Hungarians living in neighbouring countries Hungarian citizenship, rather as Hitler did for ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia.…  Seguir leyendo »

It must rank as one of the least fair deals in economic history. Over the last 12 months, western governments have taken unprecedented and extraordinary action to avoid what undoubtedly would have been a global slump. The good news is that they have succeeded. The bad news is that what caused the crisis – the stranglehold of a new financial oligarchy upon public policy – has hardly been touched. And not only is this grossly unfair, but unless there is change, a second and more serious crisis potentially awaits.

The communique from the G20 finance ministers in London yesterday, emerging after they met to prepare for the big meeting of their leaders in Pittsburgh later this month, perfectly illustrates the dilemma.…  Seguir leyendo »

Nobody wants to be an apologist for Mao. Even the Communist party, five years after his death, delivered the verdict that his crimes during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution meant that he had been 30% wrong. Mao was undoubtedly responsible for monstrous crimes, but if today's China ever completes the transition to a more plural economy and society it will be more obvious than ever that he was the man who partially laid the platform for today's China. And from this may one day emerge a country with the liberties of the rest of Asia and the west.…  Seguir leyendo »

Mention globalisation and a curious mist descends that prevents straight thinking. It is now a given on left and right that billions of low-paid workers are going to take away western jobs and make European welfare and taxation levels unaffordable luxuries. The only options are trade protection or a Darwinian low-tax, low-welfare fight to the finish - equipped with whatever education and training we can get. We must all accept our fate.

The problem is this nexus of givens is wrong. Globalisation and trade have greatly enlarged the world's economic cake and our economic options, rather than narrowing them. The problem is that too much of the world is an excluded onlooker, because the rules of the game are massively tilted in the west's favour.…  Seguir leyendo »