Lord Skidelsky of Tilton: 25 April 1939 – 15 April 2026 | Image courtesy of UK Parliament

4 min read7 min

A towering economic historian with a nomadic political career, and author of acclaimed studies of Keynes, what set Robert Skidelsky apart was not just his sense of mischief or his clarity of thought but his insistence on an ethical approach to economics

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Robert Skidelsky who died on 15 April 2026 will be remembered as a towering economic historian, a public intellectual, and a politician who was never afraid to speak or to change his mind.

In his political career he was something of a nomad, apparently uncomfortable with the constraints of politics. He left Labour in 1981 to become a founding member of the SDP. Appointed a life peer in 1991, he took the Conservative whip from 1992, briefly becoming a shadow culture, then Treasury, minister. In 2001 he crossed the floor to become a formidable crossbench peer from where he would interrogate ministers for their dependence on Treasury orthodoxy – whether applied to budgets, or the fallacies of austerity. In recent years he became a more controversial figure for his views on the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Robert was born in Harbin, China, shortly before the start of the Second World War, the son of wealthy British citizens of Russian ancestry. Interned by the Japanese but released during a prisoner exchange, the family came to Britain where he was educated. (Brighton College and then Jesus College, Oxford.) He remained engaged in the teaching and learning of history and economics and related controversies all his life, including a memorable spat with the revised GCSE history syllabus in 1990. In 2006 he retired from the University of Warwick after 28 years as professor, first of international studies and then of political economy.

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His intellectual life was much more consistent than his political journey and more celebrated. His magisterial biography of John Maynard Keynes, without doubt one of the greatest biographies of the last century, was originally intended for publication in 1972 as a modest volume. The first volume was published in 1983. The last of the trilogy was published – to enormous public acclaim – in 2000. It was described by then-chancellor Gordon Brown, himself a man of ideas, as “masterful”.

Most biographers grow to loath their subject. Even the keenest biographers draw the line at moving in with them. Robert revelled in it. He, Augusta, his beloved wife of over 55 years, and their three children, lived for many years In Tilton, where Keynes himself had lived from 1925-46, a stone’s throw from the Bells at Charleston Farmhouse where, in 1919, Keynes had written much of The Economic Consequences of the Peace.

His intellectual life was much more consistent than his political journey and more celebrated

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Even fewer biographers go on to apply their subject’s special subject to solve the problems of a contemporary world. Robert did. He re-introduced Keynes to a new generation facing a global economic challenge in 2008 and showed how when financial crises occur, Keynesian economics, as now prime minister Gordon Brown was to prove, would be critical to restoring economic stability in the place of free market chaos.

Robert drew all the lessons from this. His brilliant analysis of the credit crunch in Keynes: The Return of the Master (2009) was described as “righteous in [its] thunder”.

Robert was no abstract academic. What set him apart was not just clarity of thought and language (woe betide the sloppy generalisation or the misplaced allusion) and his sense of mischief, but also his insistence on the ethical foundations of economics and its human impacts. He was a cartographer of shifting ideas as much as a biographer. In his book How Much is Enough?,

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co-authored with his son Edward in 2012 and which decried the obsession with growth, he described his own discipline – economics – as “absurdly narrow”.

His final speech in the House of Lords, on 17 March, railed against youth unemployment. Ending with a 1933 quote from Keynes, it serves as Robert’s valedictory: “‘Look after unemployment, and the budget will look after itself.’ That may be too bold for our rulers today, but I say to the Chancellor that if one wishes to gain anything then one needs to dare in order to gain something.”

Robert dared to think and dared others to do so as well. That is his legacy.

Baroness Andrews is a Labour peer

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A Palestinian lawyer, who is an Israeli citizen, has been beaten to a pulp by police in Israel after they invaded his apartment in Be’er Sheva.

Saleh Khalil Faisal Na’ama‘s attack comes amid rampant and escalating Israeli violence and land theft perpetrated on Palestinians under the apartheid occupation.

Israel’s daily newspaper Haaretz got hold of body-worn camera footage from police during the illegal raid, which was triggered by a complaint from an off-duty cop about noise from the apartment.

The instigator of the complaint and two police officers forced their way into Na’ama’s apartment in southern Israel. They attacked him and his relatives, a doctor and nurse, it was reported.

Na’ama suffered serious injuries to his eyes, kidneys and nose, and underwent surgery.

Israel is a racist, terror state.

Featured image via Haaretz

By Skwawkbox

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The Times has continued its decline as a place with zero editorial standards by printing evidence-free anti-Irish shite that ought to have been thrown in the bin with a giant red ‘Citations Needed’ stamped across its face. The piece by Jon Ihle claims that the country is unique among European nations in its hostility towards Jewish people. He says:

…when I travel around Europe on my Irish passport, whether to Rome, Paris, Amsterdam or Cologne — every one of which was a site, within living memory, of Jewish persecution — I don’t worry at all.

Yet at home in Dublin, I do worry.

In fact, in deeply irresponsible fashion, Ihle goes on to engender fear in Ireland’s 2,000 member Jewish community by suggesting there are antisemitic child murderers waiting to strike at any moment:

I worry every time I attend a Jewish community event that this will be the time someone gets through the many layers of security to attack us. I worry that my partner, who is publicly visible as a Holocaust education activist and a Jewish business owner, will be targeted. I worry that when I bring my six-year-old son to places where other Jews are present, I’m putting him in danger.

The writer spends the best part of a dozen or so paragraphs providing precisely zero meaningful evidence to support this suggestion. His best attempt is – and you’ll be shocked – that strong pro-Palestine sentiment in Ireland is evidence of burning hatred of Jews. He pursues the smear beloved of those seeking to crush Palestine activism by conflating:

….a context of relentless protest against Israel and a boycott movement that is trying to isolate the country from the community of nations…

with “violence against diaspora Jews…around the world”. The latter is a real issue, and should be taken seriously. Notice, however, that Ihle is talking globally. There is no indication that Jewish people are under violent threat in Ireland.

We may have said this before – protesting ‘Israel’ isn’t antisemitic

Furthermore, the idea that it is linked in any way to the overwhelmingly peaceful Palestine solidarity demonstrations that often contain large Jewish contingents is a total fiction. Ihle goes on to claim an:

…atmosphere in Ireland [that] is almost febrile at times.

This is as he adds to his above comments by mentioning the campaign to stop the Ireland vs ‘Israel’ football match, and Ireland’s withdrawal from Eurovision.

It is entirely appropriate for so-called ‘Israel’ to be relentlessly protested and ostracised – this is the only meaningful way of holding the genocidal terror project to account. Especially in the absence of continued failure to act by governments across the world, including Ireland’s own complicit Taoiseach Micheál Martin.

Yet more egregiously, The Times’ own human reality distortion field generator proceeds to claim that “Irish Jews end up as collateral damage” through actions like the call for Herzog Park to be renamed.

Ihle says:

Before he was president of Israel, Chaim Herzog was an Irish Jew…

This is indeed correct. However, and significantly more pertinently, he was also a fucking war criminal piece of shit. As pointed out by the Canary, this brutish coloniser:

…served in the Zionist Haganah paramilitary group, which carried out atrocities in the years leading up to the Nakba, and during the mass ethnic cleansing process itself. Following this, he is described as having “built and led the establishment of IDF Military intelligence”. In 1967 he became military governor of occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and was integral in the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem’s Mughrabi Quarter, calling the area a “toilet” that the Zionists “decided to remove”.

No one in Ireland is objecting in the least to the park being named after another Irish Jewish person. Jews for Palestine Ireland backed the campaign to get rid of the Herzog stain, and replace it with one of:

…many worthy names to choose from – Harry Kernoff, Estella Solomons, Con Leventhal, David Marcus, and Robert Briscoe, to name just a few options.

The Times printing racist clairvoyance masquerading as fact

Ihle continues his descent by engaging in mindreading, saying:

If “horror in Gaza” is the first thing that springs to mind when you hear “Jew in London”, you should ask yourself some hard questions about why.

You should indeed, but given this is a rather over-ambitious attempt to engage in telepathy, we don’t have any actual – here’s that word again – EVIDENCE, to suggest such thinking is occurring. Apparently Ihle the Celt Whisperer has established that it is, however. Perhaps he can get his calipers out and instruct us that it’s the unique structure of the Irish skull that allows his brain waves to penetrate our feeble defences.

Ihle proceeds, further sans citations, through more fictions about supposed widespread latent Irish antisemitism on social media. So widespread apparently that he can’t find a single example to substantiate his case.

We then get a telling paragraph on so-called ‘Israel’ and Palestine, in which Palestinians are merely the “perceived underdog”. You know the ones who have had the equivalent of over six nukes dropped on them by Zionist butchers over the past two and a half years? Yeah, our mate Jon’s still on the fence about who’s the underdog there. Meanwhile, the Zionist entity’s indisputable status as a “colonial occupier” gets scare quotes.

So yeah, several hundred words, and nothing of any substance, amounting only to an anti-Irish diatribe. File this as case #20,231,007 under “more rubbish intended to smear Palestine activism via conflation with antisemitism”.

Featured image via the Canary

By Robert Freeman

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The makers of the award-winning Gaza: Doctors Under Attack had some choice words for the BBC after the documentary was honoured at this year’s TV Baftas.

On Sunday night, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack picked up the Best Current Affairs title at the TV awards show.

Although the BBC commissioned the documentary in 2024, and had originally planned to air it in February 2025, the project was eventually shelved by the national broadcaster due to concerns about impartiality.

The BBC said in a statement at the time: “We have come to the conclusion that broadcasting this material risked creating a perception of partiality that would not meet the high standards that the public rightly expect of the BBC.”

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In the end, the documentary aired on Channel 4 instead, with Doctors Under Attack – which highlighted the plight faced by medical professionals in the Middle East – among the winners at the TV Baftas over the weekend.

Journalist Ramita Navai said on stage: “Israel has killed over 47,000 children and women in Gaza. So far, Israel has bombed and targeted every single one of Gaza’s hospitals. It’s killed over 1,700 Palestinian doctors and health care workers. It has imprisoned over 400 in what the UN now calls the medicide.

“These are the findings of our investigation that the BBC paid for but refused to show. But we refuse to be silenced and censored. We thank Channel 4 for showing this film.”

After she dedicated the award to the Palestinian doctors and medical workers currently being detained in the Middle East, producer Ben De Pear concluded: “Just a question for the BBC – given you dropped our film, will you drop us from the Bafta screening later tonight?”

The BBC aired coverage of the TV Baftas on a two-hour time delay, featuring De Pear’s closing comment in the broadcast, as well as an edited version of Navai’s speech, omitting the statistics she provided on stage, but including her criticism of the BBC and praise for Channel 4.

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Earlier this year, the BBC faced backlash for editing out pro-Palestine comments from acceptance speeches in its coverage of Bafta’s film awards.

A spokesperson said in February: “The live event is three hours and it has to be reduced to two hours for its on-air slot. The same happened to other speeches made during the night and all edits were made to ensure the programme was delivered to time.”

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Illustration by Tracy Worrall

4 min read22 min

Lessons in political science. This week: sleep

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There was a night, many years ago, when I was drifting off to sleep listening to the radio and the last thing I heard before the land of nod was Geoff Hoon, on The World Tonight, doing a good job defending the indefensible. When the radio woke me up in the morning, there he was again, this time on the Today programme, still on a sticky wicket but batting with gusto.

The more critical of you might say that both falling asleep and waking up to Geoff Hoon is Too Much Hoon, and the sort of thing that only Mrs Hoon should experience, but he was then one of the university’s local MPs, always very helpful with student requests and the like, so there will be no cheap gags like this here. See it, instead, as a small and perhaps unremarkable example of the reservoirs of energy required by frontline politicians.

Ditto for the last day of April, which marked 21 years since I first appeared as an election night anorak. Election all-nighters, fuelled only by coffee and adrenaline, may be great fun for commentators and journalists – it’s one of the highlights of my year – but they seem much less enjoyable for politicians, many of whom have been campaigning for weeks before and would much rather feel a pillow beneath their head. Those whose parties are on the up at least get to enjoy the bragging rights, but the ones I’m always most impressed by are those who have got a right kicking from the electorate – ‘well, it’s certainly been a difficult night for us’ – but who are still there at 4am, fighting the good fight. 

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Or take that bit in Doctor Who, when the Doctor manages to undermine Harriet Jones, the prime minister, by whispering the phrase “Doesn’t she look tired?” to one of her aides; those four words prove to be enough to cause her downfall. It’s much quoted, but implausible. Of course she looks tired! She’s the prime minister; they all look like that. Exhaustion is part of the job description. 

It’s less obvious that this is all a good thing. There are plenty of studies on how sleep deprivation lowers your cognitive abilities (although you don’t need an academic study to know this if you’ve been a parent). Bill Clinton once said that every important mistake he’d made in his life, he’d made because he was too tired – although he clearly wasn’t too tired for some of his mistakes. 

New research just published in Political Psychology has now also found a link between the quality of sleep and political participation. Based on European Social Survey data from 12 countries, including the UK, researchers found that individuals who report good sleep are more likely to vote, even after controlling for a range of other variables. Those who don’t are more likely to take part in non-electoral politics. The effects don’t appear consistently across countries, which implies something else might be going on, although they are found in the UK. 

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The paper might be thought to slightly oversell itself by claiming that “creating societies where high-quality sleep is accessible to the public is vital to the sustainability of democratic regimes”, given that the size of the effects is relatively small; even if all were suffering cheese-inspired nightmares on a regular basis, turnout wouldn’t be all that much lower. Increased levels of education, for example, drive up turnout by roughly four to five times as much as improved sleep quality does. That, however, is just the direct effect. Sleep quality will also be working as a background factor, affecting many of the other variables that drive turnout, including education, health, and so on. ‘Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, And it makes you vote a bit more’. As Shakespeare could have written. 

Further reading: F Erol et al, Waking up to politics: How sleep quality relates to political participation, Political Psychology, 2026

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The establishment’s terror of the Greens has not diminished after the party’s powerful performance in last week’s 2026 local elections. Those elections saw the Greens more than quadruple their seats to 587, win more mayoral elections than any other party and win control of their first five councils ever. The party also gained hugely in the Scottish parliament elections, with fifteen MPs. So it’s unsurprising that the state-corporate media are still going after Green leader Zack Polanski – and getting owned for it.

Polanski has got this lot rattled

And the latest attempt shows just how nail-breakingly they are scraping the bottom of the barrel. The Telegraph is attacking Polanski for… claiming something that’s true. That its author even admits is true – though of course without acknowledging that’s what she’s admitting.

The latest hatchet-job has a headline that screams “Exclusive: Zack Polanski falsely claimed to have worked at the Ministry of Justice “. But as ‘senior reporter’ Janet Eastham admits:

Polanski falsely claimed to have worked at the Ministry of Justice while campaigning for elected office.
In reality, he was hired by an agency that supplies actors to a quango for courtroom role-play exercises.

So Polanski did work at the MOJ. He didn’t work for the MOJ, but even the Torygraph can’t claim that he ever said he did, as people promptly pointed out. Including Polanski himself:

Great memories of working inside the Ministry of Justice doing actor roleplay work – many of my former colleagues have remained friends!

Especially the time I went down to the foyer on a lunch break – and some of the staff were on strike. First time I met @UVWunion! pic.twitter.com/rF5FoRrW7Q

— Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) May 10, 2026

You really are the most stupid group of journalists. Doing freelance work at the Ministry of Justice is working at the Ministry of Justice. When are you lot going to learn that this stuff doesn’t land anymore?https://t.co/M2axpyxQoi

— Omar Baggili (@OmarBaggili) May 10, 2026

We are bored of this shit now. What he said wasn’t technically incorrect, so fuck off

— Austin (@LCAustin_) May 10, 2026

Polanski – then an actor – along with other actors played roles that helped the MOJ’s agency identify suitable judges, as the rag notes in the article:

As part of the recruitment process, judicial candidates take part in mock courtroom exercises in which actors play criminals, prison guards and lawyers.

Rot

The Telegraph has just been bought by a media firm that says anyone who isn’t prepared to be loyal to Israel should leave. Whyever would it publish such a thing about an anti-Zionist party leader? This point was also made in response to Eastham’s post:

Cosplay “ journo” say wha?

— Simon Birnstingl AI Free (@Leftwood) May 10, 2026

You write for a publication that forces you to write positive stories about an apartheid state. pic.twitter.com/2bNq5WcvJm

— bluedaysblacknights (@bluedaysbliz) May 10, 2026

EXCLUSIVE: REAL JOURNALISM BELOW.https://t.co/fvojbO7bNj

— salforddave (@saIforddave) May 10, 2026

The Telegraph claims it’s a newspape?

— Christopher Fox (@Yorkshirefoxy1) May 10, 2026

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Nobody will believe you. Torygraph just smeared @misanharriman

Maybe get a decent job with a decent paper.

— JEN BROOK (@JENBROOK8) May 10, 2026

Nonsense

And others simply dismissed the self-owning nonsense as what it was – some politely, some less so:

I like him all the more he pisses you lot off.

He doesn’t play by your rules, why should he?

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Why should anyone?

— extendbuzzard40 (@extendbuzzard40) May 10, 2026

This is getting boring- you don’t like the guy, we get it. He’ll go on to win elections and I strongly suggest you Cry More about that x

— SoTired (@so_very_tired) May 10, 2026

I don’t think this is the exclusive you think it is Janet

— Chutzpah (@shiftingshifter) May 10, 2026

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Nobody gives a flying fuck, Janet. You claim to be a journalist but write for the Telegraph.

— James (@jspalmer_1) May 10, 2026

You pretend to be a journalist, so, glass houses and that.

— Marl Karx (@BareLeft) May 10, 2026

I like him all the more he pisses you lot off.

He doesn’t play by your rules, why should he?

Why should anyone?

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— extendbuzzard40 (@extendbuzzard40) May 10, 2026

Yawn.

Try another scam guys we’re not playing along

— RobbieScowlz (@RobbieScowlz) May 10, 2026

Just fuck off now.

— Paul Harri (@PaulHar10765609) May 10, 2026

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Two of you wrote this?

— (@herd_member) May 10, 2026

Polanski has stumbled a couple of times in his handling of the establishment smears. But it seems he’s bounced back – and the election results have the ogres and elites more rattled than ever.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

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Hornsey and Friern Barnet Labour MP Catherine West has announced that she is prepared to try to challenge and depose Keir Starmer. West said that if no cabinet minister puts themselves forward by Monday, she will. A growing number of the party’s MPs have called for Starmer to resign after this week’s disastrous local election results. West told the BBC she currently has the backing of 10 MPs and is “confident” of gathering enough to trigger the contest.

Starmer has so far refused to step down, instead opting for a classic Titanic deckchair shuffle. In a transparent display of moral and political bankruptcy, his idea of ‘change’ is to dredge up two Blairite dinosaurs. 2010 loser Gordon Brown and paedophile advocate Harriet Harman have been brought back into government as advisers. Harman, in a ‘you couldn’t make it up’ moment, is the new ‘adviser for women and girls’. Clearly two or three paedophile pal scandals in Starmer’s set-up weren’t enough.

Labour — No panacea

West is anything but a panacea. An Israel supporter, she claimed to have left Labour Friends of Israel before the Gaza genocide over its backing for Israeli violence. However, during the genocide she voted in favour of banning Palestine Action as a terrorist group and did not sign letters for sanctions on Israel or for Britain to enact the International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu.

Still, at least it would mean no more listening to Starmer’s sociopathic whining.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

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