I’m in Albania, one of the European countries with a Muslim majority. When people talk about Islam in Europe, the conversation often starts in the 1950s or 1960s, with immigration from former colonies and labour migration into countries such as Britain, France and Germany. Increasingly, it degenerates into conspiracy theories about Muslim invasions or the … Read more
This summer I visited Northern Ireland for the first time in more than twenty years. The last time I had been there was shortly after the Good Friday Agreement. I worked for a while with Mo Mowlam when she was MP for Redcar, and my memories of Northern Ireland were inevitably bound up with that … Read more
We all know what GPs used to look like. Mostly men with beards, they made house calls, wore tweed jackets and carried their patient notes around in battered Lloyd George envelopes. Those days have largely disappeared. Home visits are now rare, many practices no longer have a single full-time partner, and patients are often more … Read more
The Trump administration has made MAHA – Make America Healthy Again one of its defining domestic initiatives. The movement promises to tackle chronic disease, improve diets and reverse the decline in Americans’ health. Some of its proposals have attracted widespread criticism and may well make matters worse. Central to the MAHA world view is the … Read more
Two sets of photographs 24 hours apart. One was at the Durham Miners’ Gala. The other was in Horden, a former pit village a few miles from where I grew up. At first glance they seem to tell completely different stories. One is a celebration of brass bands, banners and working-class history. The other has … Read more
Clacton is back in the news a few months after I visited it. Once again it’s politics are a matter of national debate. When we think about deindustrialisation, we think about pit villages, silent steelworks and abandoned shipyards. We picture rusting blast furnaces, boarded-up factories and communities that lost the industries on which they had … Read more
I promised myself that the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference would be my last encounter with the organised far right for a while. Then I remembered that one of Britain’s oldest far-right religious organisations meets only a few yards from my house. For years the British-Israel World Federation held meetings in Durham. Today it meets … Read more
I went to a far-right rally last week. It wasn’t big. Fewer than 75 people turned up. They were outnumbered by a left-wing counter-demonstration of nearly 500. The police outnumbered the right-wing protesters by roughly three to one. At the heart of these arguments is integration: the idea that immigration has changed Britain and that … Read more
The number of people crossing the Channel in small boats fell again in May. In May 2025, 3,738 people crossed the Channel in small boats. In May 2026, that figure was 2,713 — a reduction of 1,025 people. More importantly, this is not a one-off. Crossings have now fallen in eight of the last ten … Read more
This is the second in a series looking at Britain’s post-war new towns and planned communities across the North East, in light of the Government’s decision to build more new towns. Last time I visited Peterlee and Newton Aycliffe, places that turned out to be rather better than their reputations suggest. This time the story … Read more