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Jan 15, 2025 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Sebastian Milbank
Anglicans leaving Twitter for Bluesky is just a craving for liberal respectability Imagine there’s no Twitter, it’s easy if you try, no trolls below us, above us only Bluesky. Or, for those who prefer the BCP — I am the LORD thy bishop, which have brought thee out of the land of Elon, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other social media platforms before me. Yes, turn your bibles to Exodus, for the Church of England is departing Twitter for the promised land of Bluesky.
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Jan 13, 2025 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Sebastian Milbank
Britain is becoming diplomatically isolated, economically stagnant, and socially divided Just how early can one decide that a year has been a disaster for a government? At the end? Six months in? How about two weeks? Because fourteen days into the year, and five months after taking office, Keir Starmer’s government is utterly foundering. On grooming gangs, voters fundamentally disagree with Labour’s approach, with two thirds of Labour’s own voters backing a national inquiry into abuse.
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Jan 10, 2025 | 
firstthings.com | Sebastian Milbank
Goethe:His Faustian Lifeby a. n. wilsonbloomsbury, 416 pages, $35
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is among the most confusing and compelling of all European figures, but one thing everyone can agree on is that he was a great man. Indeed, it was Goethe’s most notable popularizer in the English world, Thomas Carlyle, who gave us the “great man” theory of history.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Sebastian Milbank
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Jan 5, 2025 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Sebastian Milbank
Ignoring and enabling horrendous crimes has encouraged a nativist backlash Imagine if, in Britain, there was an ethnic minority that was legally disadvantaged when applying for jobs and university places. This same group is regularly denounced in the press, ridiculed online and mocked by comedians. Imagine that their history is rewritten by academics, who represent them as villains and monsters.
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Dec 5, 2024 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Sebastian Milbank
National renewal must start with the capital What is London for? It’s not a question that, for most of its millennia-long history, the city has ever needed to ask. London is older than England itself, its significance and purpose a raw fact of geography. The answers were all around, and visible everywhere. A traveller could just look about, and see goods being loaded and unloaded, ships being built, textiles, timber, meat poultry and fish being exchanged in bustling markets.
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Nov 28, 2024 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Sebastian Milbank
This afternoon, MPs will have scarcely five hours to debate an issue that not only has life and death implications for countless individuals, but the potential to shape British society profoundly — and permanently. It is not the first time such terrible responsibility has fallen on parliament, but it comes at a moment of unique mistrust in our institutions.
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Nov 18, 2024 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Sebastian Milbank
Populist political victories do nothing to change the reality of progressive institutional dominance Have we reached “peak woke”? That’s certainly what many have suggested, especially in the wake of the American election. Kamala Harris barely made mention of her historic candidacy as the first black woman to run for President, and much of the familiar tropes of progressive political campaigning had been dropped for the sake of the election.
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Nov 6, 2024 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Sebastian Milbank
Its arrogance and complacency have been exposed How often can the same brutal lesson be taught to a complacent Democratic establishment? In 2016, they were certain that the unlikable, entitled Hilary Clinton would romp to victory over Trump, so long as the mainstream press and party machine swung efficiently behind her. This year, they didn’t even bother with a primary process as Joe Biden was hustled off stage as soon as his decrepitude was made manifest to all.
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Sebastian Milbank
American partisan divisions are the result of social atomisation Reporting on the American elections today is a matter less of political analysis than it is sociological reflection on the phenomenon of political partisanship. Like much of the Western world, American politics is no longer “normal”. Rather than debates, however harsh and divisive, over divergent policy directions, we get fundamental clashes of identity mediated via post-modern rows over the nature of reality itself.
