Ashley Church: Is the west really moving to the far right?

Why are voters really abandoning traditional political parties?

Election results, last week, confirmed a trend that seems to be moving across the western world: the rise of the far right.

Reform UK surged through councils across England, gaining 1,349 council seats, taking control of 14 councils, and winning mayoralties – establishing itself as a major political force and claiming territory once dominated by Labour and the Conservatives.

Dr Oliver Harwich: The long estrangement

It is strange to observe a nation act irrationally and against its own interests. Stranger still when that nation is your own.

I grew up in Germany. I still think in German. Yet Germany’s political psychology feels increasingly alien to me.

Damien Grant: Are we living in the third pre-world war calm?

In 1919, after the calamity of the Great War, economist John Maynard Keynes wrote a pamphlet, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Keynes was part of the delegation that formalised the Treaty of Versailles, of which he was critical for being too onerous.

Thinking back to the pre-war era Keynes wrote, “Very few of us realise with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organisation by which Western Europe has lived for the last half century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly.”

Are we living in the third pre-world war calm?

Brendan O'Neill: Hamas alone is to blame for the deaths of the hostages

The West needs to stop making excuses for the atrocities of anti-Semitic terrorists.

A bizarre debate has blown up. All over social media, people want to know: who’s responsible for the deaths of the six Israeli hostages whose bodies were discovered by the IDF in a tunnel in Khan Younis this week? Initial reports suggest the men might have died from suffocation after the IDF bombed a nearby Hamas position, causing carbon dioxide to flood the dank lair in which they were chained up. So it’s on Israel? They did this? CNN reports that the IDF was asked if it ‘killed the hostages’ at a recent press conference. Others are more brutal: those six poor souls were ‘butchered by the Israeli military onslaught’, says Owen Jones of the Guardian.

Mike's Minute: The West is losing to Russia and China

Liz Truss has a book out.

It's what you do when you have been Prime Minister, even though she was only Prime Minister for about three and a half minutes.

Slight digression - I am going to be fascinated to see how they promote Jacinda Ardern's book when it finally arrives.