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“Finland is a country of readers,” declared the country’s UK ambassador Päivi Luostarinen recently, and it’s hard to argue with her. In 2016 the UN named Finland the world’s most literate nation, and Finns are among the world’s most enthusiastic users of public libraries – the country’s 5.5m million people borrow close to 68m books a year.

the UK spends just £14.40 per head on libraries. By contrast, Finland spends £50.50 per inhabitant. While more than 478 libraries have closed in cities and towns across England, Wales and Scotland since 2010, Helsinki is spending €98m creating an enormous new one

84% of the country’s population is urban, and given the often harsh climate, libraries are not simply places to study, read or borrow books – they are vital places for socialising

The Conservatives, who have been in power nationally since 2010, braced for losses amid anger over unsteady Brexit negotiations, an explosive immigration scandal and years of public spending cuts that have seen local officials close libraries and slash services.

The elections will determine who controls the councils, which collect garbage, fix potholes and run schools, and many voters will choose firmly on local issues. In London, many residents fret about the lack of affordable housing. Campaigning in the northern English city of Sheffield has been dominated by a controversial decision to cut down thousands of trees as part of road-improvement plans.

Both the Conservatives and Labour say they will deliver on the decision to leave, but Labour wants to seek softer terms and retain closer ties with the bloc. The party hopes anti-Brexit feeling will help it win in pro-EU Tory areas such as the affluent London boroughs of Wandsworth and Westminster.

The Labour Party has accused Theresa May of breaking her promises and continuing “business as usual” with Russia after the Conservative Party accepted another £100,000 donation from the wife of a former minister in Vladimir Putin’s government

Next year will not be a midterm election, after all. It will be a referendum on Trump — as it has to be, and as Trump will insist it be

the central task of the Democratic candidate will be not just to explain how dangerous Trump’s rhetoric and behavior is, but how un-American it is, and how a second term could leave behind an unutterably altered America. One term and the stain, however dark, might fade in time. Two terms and it marks us forever.

Biden made this moral case. And he did it with feeling, and a wounded sense of patriotism. He invoked previous presidents, including Republicans, who knew how insidiously evil white supremacy is and wouldn’t give any quarter to it. He reminded us that in politics, words are acts, and they have consequences when uttered by a national leader: “The words of a president … can move markets. They can send our brave men and women to war. They can bring peace. They can calm a nation in turmoil. They can console and confront and comfort in times of tragedy … They can appeal to the better angels of our nature. But they can also unleash the deepest, darkest forces in this nation.” And this, Biden argues, is what Trump has done: tap that dark psychic force, in an act of malignant and nihilist narcissism.

The number of new renewable energy projects applying for planning permission reached a four-year high in the UK last year as energy companies raced to meet the rising demand for clean electricity.

The jump in applications last year was the biggest annual increase in recent years and 75% higher than the number of annual planning submissions made three years ago. There were just 154 submissions in 2016, rising to 185 in 2017.

Planning submissions for clean energy projects are expected to rise in the years ahead due to the government’s decision earlier this month to lift a block against subsidising onshore wind projects that was put in place almost five years ago.

The model the government was using was to do nothing and just wait until everyone introduced sensible panic measures of their own. Then once the public had done its job for it it, the government would then be nudged into turning it into official policy. Ideal for the Boris with No Clothes, who couldn’t face the responsibility of decision making.

The UK is now surpassing the apocalyptic tolls we fixated on just two weeks ago. The same tragedies are unfolding across our country

But the sense of distress with which the Italian scenario was reported and received in the UK is strangely absent. Missing too is the urgent need to understand why this is happening.

Not only did the UK have the experience of Italy play out before the virus hit its own shores, illustrating clearly the measures that needed to be taken, it had explicit warnings from Italians spelling out the pitfalls to be avoided.

LONDON — Like a stumbling figure from “The Walking Dead,” Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, has yet to realize that she is a political zombie. For all her poise as she spoke on Downing Street on Friday, the day after Britain’s general election, when she declared her intention to continue in office, she is roaming the land of the undead. Sooner or later, reality is going to bite — hard.

As an admirer of Mrs. May, I wish she had chosen to leave with honor intact, instead of subjecting herself, and the country, to the ordeal ahead. The party is well and truly over. Will someone have the grace to tell her?

I’m just pointing out that there are some very significant structural problems that we need to fix, whether or not we leave the European Union.” The current economic malaise, he adds emphatically, “is not a blip. This is the moment we have to stop pussyfooting around in terms of solutions.”

Peston advocates a “wealth tax” – an annual levy of 1% on all net assets greater than £500,000. “Workers have become too powerless,” he goes on, and argues for “new forms of online collectivism” – digital trade union platforms – and the creation of a new ombudsman to regulate the labour market along the lines of the financial services’ Financial Conduct Authority.

. His book is full of depressing statistics about the vanishingly small prospect of disadvantaged Britons today climbing the economic or social ladder, but when I ask if he himself shares the worry that his own children will not enjoy a better life than his, he erupts.

Boys who look at me like this belong to a class that everyone refers to as “the lads”, and they seem exempt from generally accepted codes of behaviour. The lads intrigue me from the moment I arrive at school. They are fascinating because they seem to defy all social conventions

I have been told my entire life that it is important to get on with people in order to succeed, but these peers of mine often seem supremely uninterested in that.

My school never creates the lads – they arrive there with the core of their egos fully formed – but it frequently seems to end up rewarding them with some of the most senior positions in the student body. The lads have long ago worked out, or been told, that what matters is not being good-natured but achieving high office. In a system where boys are raised to be deferential to those in authority, they know that if they merely gain prestige, then personal popularity will follow.

The EU insisted it could allow Britain to retain its tariff- and quota-free access to its market only if the British government promised not to undercut its social, environmental, labour and state-aid rules.

The political declaration that was attached to the withdrawal treaty which Boris Johnson signed earlier this year duly declared that “the future relationship must ensure open and fair competition, encompassing robust commitments to ensure a level playing field.”

Theresa May, had sought to respond to these concerns by proposing in July 2018 that Britain and the EU should follow a “common rulebook”,

Today, Johnson has renegotiated Brexit, the Tories have their largest majority since 1987, and Labour has sustained its worst defeat since 1935.

How did he do this? In four ways, each of which has parallels with Trump.

First, Johnson was fortunate in his political foes. He ran against the most avowedly leftist frontbench the Labour Party has put forward since the early 1980s. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn proudly calls himself a “socialist.” He rails against a “rigged system” that supposedly exists for the benefit of a handful of billionaires. His campaign promised free college, dramatic increases in health spending, a hike in the minimum wage, massive infrastructure spending, new taxes on the rich, and a “new green deal.”

What probably hurt Labour were the extreme stances taken on immigration (open borders), British nationality (Britain should apologize and pay reparations for its colonial past), and the Green New Deal by the younger leftists who had come into the party over the last four years and joined Momentum, Labour’s main activist group. They spoke of eliminating any bars on who was a citizen and who could vote in national elections; they warned of imminent planetary disaster and proposed steps that were widely seen as threatening the country’s standard of living. Say what you want about these proposals, but they reflected — to invert Labour’s slogan — the passions of the few, not the many and were bound to marginalize the party.

Johnson is a far abler politician than Donald Trump, and he also knows something of his country’s political history and has been consciously mimicking Benjamin Disraeli’s “One Nation” conservatism that sought to unite the working class and aristocracy against the uppity bourgeoisie. But to transform the Tories and keep Labour at bay, Johnson will have to accomplish a trade deal with the European Union (which is no mean task) and prevent a downturn in the British economy as its trade with the EU inevitably shrinks either absolutely or proportionately. And he will have to convince his upper class and business constituencies to abandon their dreams of a deregulated Singapore on the Thames

It’s a war of one part of the elite against another part of the elite, she says. Brexit was an elite project. “The game was to get everyone to go along with it”. Were all the southern Tories who voted for it a part of the oppressed masses? “And who do you think funded the campaign?”

Their leaders weren’t from small towns full of abandoned shops and drug-ridden streets. They were metropolitans, with degrees from Oxford in the case of Johnson and Dominic Cummings. The men and women Applebaum knew were not loyal drones but filled with a dark restlessness. They may pose as the tribunes of the common people now but they were members of the intellectual and educated elite willing to launch a war on the rest of the intellectual and educated elite.

One of Applebaum’s closest Polish friends, the godmother of one of her children, and a guest at the 1999 party, provided her with the most striking example.

hat happened to following the science?

Critics complain that the politicians are chancing it rather than being led by the evidence.

as the German sociologist Max Weber argued a century ago, politics can never really follow the science. Pretending that it can is where the trouble starts.

the News Guild of New York — the union that represents 1200 New York Times employees — recently set out its goals for the newspaper, especially with respect to its employees of color. Money quote: “Our workforce should reflect our home. The Times should set a goal to have its workforce demographics reflect the make-up of the city — 24 percent Black, and over 50 percent people of color — by 2025.”

what I want to focus on is the core test the Guild uses to judge whether the Times is itself a racist institution. This is what I’ll call the Kendi test: does the staff reflect the demographics of New York City as a whole?

systemic racism, according to Kendi, exists in any institution if there is simply any outcome that isn’t directly reflective of the relevant racial demographics of the surrounding area.

eaders in Europe marked the 75th anniversary of the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany in recent days. Wreaths were laid, somber speeches intoned, and promises made to “never forget.”

The coronavirus pandemic has reminded us of how much World War II is hard-wired in the West’s political imagination.

In Europe, the trauma of the war now forever lurks beneath the continent’s appeals for unity and solidarity.

Governments have three choices in how they respond. The first and most difficult path is to contain the virus through a programme of mass testing, contact tracing and isolating. This requires a huge effort: building a large infrastructure to monitor cases of the virus and identify hotspots, ensuring this system runs efficiently, providing adequate PPE to everyone who needs it, and deploying border controls to vet who is entering the country.

The second path is far simpler. It involves slowing the spread of the virus by using timed cycles of lockdown and release, with the government issuing guidance on how much social distancing is required. But the side effects of this path are very costly: it risks wrecking the economy, straining health and social care systems, and creating social unrest

The third and easiest path available to governments is simply to do nothing. The virus sweeps across the population, the economy remains open and whoever makes it through is lucky to still be alive.