James Butler is a contributing editor at the LRB. He co-founded Novara Media in 2011 and hosted its weekly radio show for several years.
This month’s elections in England were significant without being surprising. They were dire for the Labour Party and cataclysmic for the Conservatives: neither has ever lost such a high proportion of the seats it was defending. The day belonged to Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, which took 30 per cent in projected national vote share. Labour narrowly lost the Runcorn by-election to...
Francis assumed the papacy in 2013 in the teeth of a crisis. His predecessor, Benedict XVI, the first pope in centuries to resign, was strongly associated with theological and ritual conservatism. His resignation was widely interpreted as an admission of defeat by proliferating sexual abuse scandals, which had shattered the moral authority of the priesthood, even among many of the faithful....
Last Thursday evening, more than twenty Metropolitan police officers broke down the doors of the Quaker meeting house in Westminster to arrest six young women. The women were attending a welcome meeting of Youth Demand, a small, non-violent activist group currently dedicated to action against climate change and the genocide in Gaza. None has been charged.
The fire at Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017 killed 72 people, 18 of them children. Most died from asphyxiation after inhaling toxic smoke from the cladding on the block, which acted like a coat of petrol on the walls. Some died leaping from the building. Families died together, huddled under beds, having been told to stay where they were. Disabled residents died waiting for a rescue that...
The first time the man heard God, he uprooted his entire life, though he was very old. Then God appeared to him in person, an event which would embarrass later thinkers. God made the man an impossible promise in the shape of a son. His wife was ninety, and she laughed. When the child arrived, it was hardly unreasonable to think it a miracle. They named the child after the laughter.
Then,...
In the run up to the local elections, and following his recent piece on the care crisis, James Butler joins Tom to discuss some of the other problems facing the UK, and what the two major parties are promising...
James Butler and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite talk to Tom about Britain's new monarch and Prime Minister.
James Butler joins Tom to consider the fall of Boris Johnson, the candidates hoping to replace him, and what the next few years of British politics might look like.
Geoff Mann talks to James Butler about the economic models developed by William Nordhaus and others, widely used by governments around the world as a tool to tackle climate change.
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