Sidhartha Jha

The reality of British politics is that there is a high degree of consensus across the two main parties on everything from the need to control immigration more effectively, to slashing regulation in order to build more houses and boost economic growth, to reining in welfare spending and promoting more public and private investment. Yet... See more

When I got to my hotel, I logged on and saw I had E-mail from Bill. It had been written about two hours after I left his office. There was no reference to our having just met. He was responding to mail I had sent him several days earlier, asking what he thought of Henry Ford:

Ford is not that admirable—he did great things but he was very very narrow

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I think most Nativists, as you call them, think of immigration as one might view a family home. In our family we are stuck with a bolshy brother but there's nothing we can do about him. He's family. Then there are guests who come to stay who are so nice that they become like family. We even prefer them to our bolshy brother. On the other hand there... See more

This collective mis-reading of the recent past has left Labour psychologically ill-equipped to tackle so many of our current problems, most of which are the unintended consequence, or overshoots, of centre-left priorities established in the New Labour era: unsustainable welfare/disability spending, erosion of work ethic, over-regulation of business... See more

The reason it feels nearly impossible to quit Twitter is because of the almost complete and total absence of intellectual life in the offline world.

There is nowhere for a Thinking Man to "land" anymore. Even the cities are largely voids of anything resembling satisfying discourse -- largely because in those cities, rents are so high people now have... See more

At Microsoft’s main office, in Redmond, a suburb of Seattle, I saw a demo of an early version of the company’s operating software for the information-highway machine, in which the user points at the TV screen with a remote control, clicks onto icons, and selects from menus. I heard a lot about “intelligent agents,” which will at first be animated... See more

In public debate, the country is often cast in contradictory terms. On one hand, it is as a menacing juggernaut—a ruthless, calculating power whose state, so capable that it threatens to overwhelm the West. On the other hand, it is dismissed as a “paper dragon”, crippled by incompetence and corruption. These two narratives coexist comfortably... See more