The Guardian

Despite warnings, Theresa May has maintained her dangerously obtuse attitude to Scotland and Northern IrelandTheresa May cannot say she has not been warned. Brexit poses a mounting threat to the unity of the UK. Nor can she dispute the eminence of those who have been doing the warning. During the referendum campaign in 2016, John Major counselled that a British exit could “

The rollout of these cuts is impoverishment by design, but the opposition’s response so far has been far too timidTheresa May’s premiership has managed to stitch together a vast array of ignominies, blunders and self-inflicted calamities, but one of its most monumental failures has to be universal credit. At a time when Britain’s children have suffered the biggest jump in poverty for nearly three decades, its nationwide rollout will

Theresa May is relying on MPs backing a deal out of fear and exhaustion. It is a shabby way to make such a momentous decision for the nationWhen it comes to building alliances over Brexit, Theresa May never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Her first big chance came in the period immediately after becoming prime minister. As a known Eurosceptic who had given tepid support to EU membership, Mrs May might have brokered a grand Brexit compromise, reflecting the closeness of a 48:52 referendum result. Instead she

More than a thousand women protested at Westminster about the impact of the stark increase in the pension age. Those hard hit by the changes need helpPeople support state pensions in large part because they expect them to be fair. This is obvious in principle, but fraught in practice. First, governments must guarantee a degree of certainty in a fast-changing world: people work hard for years in the expectation of rewards in old age. Second, complex social relations – between generations, genders and

Readers give their views on Donald Trump’s latest choice of supreme court judgeNesrine Malik suggests Martin Luther King’s “long arc of justice” has lost its way over the recent Ford-Kavanaugh debacle (

How we live can help, says

More than 300 academics call on the Israeli authorities to permit Lara Alqasem to enter Israel and pursue her studiesAs academics from multiple disciplines at universities across the United States and across the globe, we are dismayed at the decision of Israel’s Ministry of Interior to deny entry to American citizen Lara Alqasem (

Isn’t it better to assume his behaviour is deliberate, rather than that he’s losing his touch, says

Martin Smith

Bruce Vivash Jones

Twins | Flu vaccine | Taylor Swift and Trump | Shopping | Plumbing BrexitI am a twin. One thing that grated when my sister and I were growing up was the constant reference to us as “the twins” or “one of the twins”. You aren’t an individual. You’re something different, not even just sisters but a twin. Is it relevant to your report (

It was obvious from the start that a Russian video of a woman on the metro pouring ‘bleach’ on men was a hoax A woman boards the St Petersburg subway, carrying a bottle. She is beautifully groomed, in an anti-feminist manner, and yet she is about to commit an act of feminism. She approaches a classic manspreader, a guy casually occupying a seat and a half in homage to his gigantic tackle, and pours what we discover is diluted bleach all over his crotch. When a video of the incident inevitably went viral, media outlets asked: “Has she gone too far?” And broadly speaking, most people thought she had, who knows what Russian bleach is like,: it might be like our modern bleach, not terrifically dangerous, only there to make things smell as if someone’s been cleaning. Wherever his punishment fell on the spectrum from getting wet to permanent injury, it was disproportionate.

Susbsidised spruce plantations cover vast tracts of the Irish countryside. They don’t offset carbon emissions and are driving bird species to extinctionWe all love trees. We think of woods and forests as green lungs, peaceful spaces, brimming with wildlife. So when

Employers might boast about their in-house wellbeing apps, but they don’t address the underlying causes of problems So you’re sitting at work, sipping your first cup of anxiety of the day. (Let’s ignore for now where you got it from: an ambivalent boss, diffident colleagues, status worries, job insecurity, imminent change – the possibilities are endless.)

When

State-directed kidnappings, abductions and killings are on the rise – having a quiet word with the perpetrators will not sufficeThe disappearance, and possible murder, of

Why does the government promise of ‘parity of esteem’ for mental illness remain so elusive? It isn’t just about money Readers of a certain age may remember standing in line for the

A textbook claiming Caribbean fathers are ‘largely absent’ has rightly been shelved. Teach children about slavery insteadI remember sitting in geography in my Peterborough classroom in the 1980s, cringing and feeling embarrassed whenever we were shown images of Africans in mud huts, or another depiction of what might have been referred to as “savages”. The textbooks we used were simplistic and stereotypical. Some were downright supremacist. They were laced in ignorance, and viewed from the perspective of colonial-era ethnographers who were dependent on the empire for their work. As the only black boy at my school, I somehow felt responsible for those pictures, as though they revealed something primitive about me and my family.

We should resist simplistic calls in England and Wales for state ownership that wouldn’t automatically clean up our waterThere has been much discussion about the potential ownership structures of the water sector in England and Wales over recent months, but there has been very little thought given to actual operation of the industry. And nowhere is this clearer than when it comes to the environment. It simply isn’t good enough to assert that a

Perhaps Trump’s former officials were somehow suckered into salivating over him – but these fantasies are becoming ever distant Nikki Haley wants you to know that she’s not quitting her awesome, once-in-a-lifetime job to spend more time with her family. This is a rare thing among those permanently rising stars in the Republican party who just happen to announce their departures ahead of the expected train wreck of the midterm elections next month.

My constituents voted to leave, but what May is offering would make them and the whole of the UK far worse off. A people’s vote is needed

The government’s plans are an improvement, but still fatally flawed. We need a proper agriculture debateI’m a remainer, but there’s one result of Brexit I can’t wait to see: leaving the EU’s common agricultural policy. This is the farm subsidy system that spends

The small story of a battle over a market in the borough of Haringey has major lessons for anyone hoping for a radical alternativeWhat will a Corbyn government actually do? Brexit aside, British politics has no bigger known unknown. The prospect fills the rich with fear and the left with hope. Both sides assume that Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn will be defined by his radicalism, yet in one corner of Britain an arm of the state is already ruling in his name. And the early results are sobering. In the north London borough of Haringey, the Blairite council leadership was

Kenneth Roy, a gifted journalist, was preoccupied by the world of news for 60 years. One day that world suddenly shrankWhen the Scottish writer and journalist Kenneth Roy was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer a week or so ago, it took him a night to realise that the consultant’s straightforward words had changed everything. That new understanding came the next morning, when hospital staff came round with the newspapers. In the