Inside: Bill Gates, David Kynaston on private school, vaping, Thatcher, the future of Ukraine, Camelot, WG Sebald, Florida and Scunthorpe.

Good morning. Welcome to the Saturday Read, the New Statesman’s guide to politics, culture, books, and ideas. This is Finn with Nicholas and George.

---

---

The Saturday Read has been globetrotting this week. Sort of. Lily Lynch visited Florida to investigate Mar-a-Lago, the true locus of American power. And Megan Kenyon went to Scunthorpe to witness what Britain’s net zero ambitions are doing to its industrial towns.

These places do not have much in common, obviously. But both relate a cautionary tale. The American elite, Lynch contends, “have always looked down on Florida”, using the state of 23 million as “a receptacle for socially sanctioned classism”. Now Florida has fought back, transforming itself into the seat of the new American right. Meanwhile in Scunthorpe – a place forgotten amid the aspirations of Britain’s establishment – Reform is prowling. The party could do what it does best here: exploit the upset of those who feel left behind.

Meanwhile David Kynaston and Francis Green write our cover story about the Great Private School Debate (are they bastions of old British unfairness, or important facets of the national legacy?). And while the Saturday Read does not condone smoking, we ask below whether the vape can ever usurp the cigarette (or is it just too uncool?). As ever, thanks for reading and have a great weekend.

---

---

1—“Migrated south”

Florida, once a national laughing stock, is now the “nerve centre of global power”. Lily Lynch investigates how Trump has remade America in Mar-a-Lago’s gaudy, shameless, unignorable image. GM

Florida is America’s soft underbelly and its dead end, where all the country’s darkness is illuminated by the omnipresent sun. “Florida from its beginnings has served as a catch basin for the world’s detritus,” the American writer Russell Banks wrote in 2022. “It’s where you go when your prospects elsewhere have ended.” But this reduction of Florida to national punchline is at least partly a product of blue-state cultural elitism, transforming a state with a population of more than 23 million into a receptacle for socially sanctioned classism. The Trump insurgency, organised from Florida and fuelled by the aspirations of immigrants, the interests of the very rich and the resentments of the working class, is the state’s dignity fighting back.

2—“The heavens reflect our labours”

The steelworks in Scunthorpe pre-date the existence of the town. But now the industry is in precipitous decline, threatening thousands of jobs and Scunthorpe’s very identity. Megan Kenyon reports from an unhappy place. FMcR

British Steel and Jingye are reportedly seeking £500m in subsidies to keep the blast furnaces running and to upgrade to cleaner technology. If Keir Starmer’s government cannot find a more sustainable solution, others will capitalise on the problem.

Reform is already moving in this space; its deputy leader, Richard Tice, said in 2024 that the party would renationalise the steel industry (a move no one I spoke to in Scunthorpe held up as a silver bullet). Andrea Jenkyns, the former Conservative cabinet minister who is now running as the Reform candidate for Lincolnshire mayor, believes “red tape is making the industry locally insecure”. Jenkyns told me that in government her party would deregulate to speed up the steel-making process (although it is unclear how this aligns with Tice’s plans for nationalisation).

3—“Monetising the revolution”

Some billionaires were born rich. Some got there by being born with nothing to lose. Will Dunn compares one man from each camp: Bill Gates and Ren Zhengfei, Huawei’s founder. The one thing all billionaires have in common? A huge appetite for risk. GM

The military showed Ren the protection institutions can offer. At the factory, he could read broadly and be creative without incurring political risk. This lesson would be invaluable in later life. In 1989, when Huawei was still a fledgling manufacturer of telephone switches, China’s answer to IBM was the Stone Group founded by Wan Runnan. In that year’s rebellion against the Chinese authorities – and its brutal conclusion in Tiananmen Square – Wan chose the wrong side; he barely escaped China, never to return.

4—“They love her, they fear her, they hate her”

The TV portrayals of Margaret Thatcher began with her as a harpy-like puppet on Spitting Image: they could only get more sympathetic. But Rachel Cooke wonders whether any actress will ever truly inhabit the woman, who by force of character changed our country forever. NH

In one of his columns for the “Sunday Times”, when Walden is in the first throes of his enthusiasm for her… he writes that great novels will one day be written about her. But this hasn’t happened. At best, she gets a cameo, as she does in Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Line of Beauty”. Taking in the real thing in after two hours of Walter, you grasp both why she is so hard to capture on the page, and why TV and film-makers keep trying to do so on screen. Graham and Walter between them have done their best to crack her open, just as Walden once did. But she remains resistant, as smooth as a formica worktop in the old galley kitchen of No 10.

5—“This hedonistic race to the bottom”

Inveterate doomscrollers may be well-advised to don oven gloves before opening this one. Instagram is ruining food culture and it’s pissing Finn off. She excoriates the “Faustian pact between vendor and influencer” and, sparing no side plates, calls for the return of good taste. GM

The result is one of the world’s great food cities flogging culinary tat, treating the consumer like a calorie-starved, indiscriminately carnivorous pervert. We should blame the internet entirely, the increasingly porous boundary between material reality and online culture. The food of viral fame is a product of the mindless content cycle, and the Yorkshire burrito becomes no different to the doomscroll: slop for the brain, slop for the tastebuds.

To enjoy our latest analysis of politics, news and events, in addition to world-class literary and cultural reviews, click here to subscribe to the New Statesman. You’ll enjoy all of the New Statesman’s online content, ad-free podcasts and invitations to NS events.

Subscribe

What vibe shift? AOC might have ditched the she/her from her Twitter bio, but in St-Martin-in-the-Fields in central London on Tuesday night you could be upbraided for getting a river’s pronouns wrong. Please, asked nature writer Robert Macfarlane, say rivers who not rivers which. They’re alive!

But if the talk here and there breached the comic, Macfarlane’s pedantry was also illuminating. “Capitalocene” rather than “anthropocene” he insists, to remind us it’s a system we chose that is wreaking havoc on the climate. “Living world” rather than “environment”, to stop us pretending that we can live without it.

To an audience loudly dismayed by Trump, Macfarlane offered this succour: turn to the last page of Middlemarch, if you can do so without crying, and remember the power of small deeds. Dorothea’s effect on those around her was “incalculably diffusive”, and yours can be too.

For a growing number of investors, private markets are becoming a more attractive option as they seek out new ways to maximize returns. In the search for diversification and optimised returns, many are putting their money into funds that invest in private companies. To understand more about this complex and challenging market, click here to see the analysis from State Street who help institutional investors.

6—“Anti-glamorous glamour”

“There’ll be great presidents again… but there will never be another Camelot.” So Jackie Kennedy told Life magazine in the days after the assassination of her husband. But, worse than no Camelot, Trump’s government is Camelot turned inside out, writes Lee Siegel. NH

What America has always been, it now nakedly is. Maga – Masks All Gone Away. What does it matter that Trump is again in over his head, as he threatens tariffs against Russia, which the US barely trades with, or tries to abolish birthright citizenship, which, thankfully, has little chance of becoming law? What empowers so many is the new transvaluation of values, in which virtues are replaced by sins. Money is the brute, non-elite reality behind the bright, shining lies of liberal ideals, the Trumpists say. And the emotionally warped, morally apathetic billionaire is the hero of our time.

7—“Clunky, gauche, unsightly”

Directors are trying to bring vaping to the big screen, as the world continues to fall out of love with cigarettes. The problem? It translates as irredeemably, pathologically uncool. Kyle McNeil asks if the vape can ever look good on camera. FMcR

The alluring risk factor is diminished: elemental fire replaced with synthetic sweeteners, coquettish gestures for unwieldy grips, fashionable savoir faire for awkwardness. And while they are part of the modern world and probably use some quite clever technology, there’s something strangely anachronistic about them. Sci-fi never predicted them because they don’t really seem that revolutionary. Cigarettes, meanwhile, are, if not futuristic, entirely timeless: Harrison Ford smoked Marlboros in “Blade Runner”, not a replicant version of Juul. Smoking cigarettes can make you feel ashamed, but the dysphoria caused by vaping is far more powerful: it makes you feel embarrassed.

8—“Abandoned to its fate”

At the outset of the Russia-Ukraine war, European leaders argued that Ukraine’s security was inextricable from the security of the entire continent, our new Europe columnist Hans Kundnani writes. But today – under the new reality of a second Trump administration – they may come to regret such absolutist rhetoric. FMcR

The problem, of course, is that America’s commitment to protecting its allies is exactly what is in question with the re-election of Trump. It is far from clear whether the US would respond at all if any of these European troops were killed – and Europeans are in no position to threaten much of a response themselves without the US. Whichever coalition of European states deployed troops to Ukraine could soon find itself at war with Russia, and without the support of the US. What’s more, if Russia were to attack troops from Nato countries and the US failed to respond under the alliance’s Article 5 agreement – whereby an attack on one member is an attack on all – it would also mean the end of Nato itself. In an attempt to defend Ukraine, European states would be endangering their own security.

9—“This larger canvas”

Aesthetic failures were tantamount to ethical ones, and WG Sebald would not let them off lightly. Sounds harsh, but he had to do high artistic justice to his subject: Chris Power explains that Sebald’s writing career was a lifelong struggle with German war guilt and the fate of European Jews. GM

The irony embedded within the new form Sebald created is that it should be constructed from so many elements of what came before, his borrowings weaving between homage and plagiarism. We encounter some of these in “Silent Catastrophes”. His admiration for Bernhard is expected, given his free and obvious borrowing of elements of Bernhard’s style, but it is more surprising to discover his summary of a scene from Stifter’s “My Great-Grandfather’s Portfolio”, describing a fall into a ravine and the subsequent shooting of a crazed dog, which he presented in Vertigo as an episode from his childhood. A less direct transposition is found in the closing essay’s consideration of Handke’s novel “Repetition”, in which a young man called Filip searches for his missing brother. Recounting the story, “It is almost as if [Filip] himself… is the lost brother on whose trail the younger Filip Kobal sets out.” In “Austerlitz” this is reversed: Jacques Austerlitz is searching for his own forgotten or suppressed identity as a Jewish child who escaped Prague via the Kindertransport, but when he studies a picture of himself from this lost childhood it is as if the adult and the child are two separate people.

10—“Fundamental unfairness”

In 2014 David Kynaston wrote a widely noticed cover story for the New Statesman, “Education’s Berlin Wall”. He asked why the left was so silent on the inequalities perpetuated by private education? Ten years later, the Labour Party listened, imposing VAT on private-school fees. Writing alongside Francis Green, this week Kynaston returns to the NS and urges them to go much, much further. NH

Can Labour now… move decisively over the issue? Can No 10 use the VAT policy as the first stage of a larger narrative about equality of opportunity, about everyone getting a fair shake of the dice? It is a truism that this new government urgently needs a more positive, inspiriting, non-technocratic story to tell, a story that goes beyond economic growth and national security, crucial though those are. We live in a society infinitely less deferential than the Britain of half a century ago, infinitely more critical, in the social media age, of how accidents of birth determine the distribution of life’s glittering prizes – and the private-school issue is not only substantively important in any serious pursuit of greater equality of opportunity, but also hugely symbolic.

George’s Best of the Rest

1. Brock Colyar: The cultural ascendancy of the new young right
2. Matthew Karp: Trump redux
3. Tom Stevenson: Versions of Hamas
4. Patrick Maguire: To take on the right, will Labour go blue?
5. Paul Krugman: How Germany became a cautionary tale
6. Juliet Samuel: DeepSeek shows China is winning the race
7. Alexander Stern: The story of advice. One to ignore.
8. Man claims responsibility for googly-eye epidemic in Oregon
9. The hitchhiker’s guide to the hummingbird
10. Don’t worry, scientists say, this asteroid won’t hit us until 2032

And with that…

Do I crave dictatorship? It was reported this week that a majority (52 per cent) of my Gen-Z peers believe the UK would be a better place if it were governed by a strong leader “who does not have to bother with parliament and elections”. A third of us want the army “in charge”.

Some personal and generational reflection here: I do not think that my contemporaries are a militaristic cohort. I suspect this is just a reflection of something far more prosaic: my age group’s exasperation at political inefficiency.

This week, Rachel Reeves threw her weight behind a third Heathrow runway. She was reiterating an announcement first made by transport secretary Geoff Hoon in January 2009, re-recommended by David Cameron’s independent Airports Commission in 2015, and rubber-stamped by Theresa May’s government in 2018. In other words, we may finally be getting some movement on a decision first taken by the British government 16 years ago.

Democracy isn’t incompatible with ambitious change – look at Mitterrand’s grand projets, look at the motorways Britain built in the Sixties and Seventies, look at how new railways have changed living in (parts of) London. It is the sluggishness of contemporary politicians – who defer nervously to judicial reviews, national inquiries and extra-parliamentary reports when faced with key infrastructure decisions – that young people resent.

Last year Ed Davey went viral for celebrating the opening of a second staircase at Surbiton train station “after 10 years” of waiting. Gen Z’s real problem with politics is the complacent, low expectations of their leadership.

---

Subscribe to the New Statesman

The New Statesman is home to the finest writing on politics, culture and ideas. To stay up to date, subscribe using the link above.

— Finn, Nicholas and George.

Recommend The Saturday Read to your readers

Your guide to the best writing on politics, culture, books, and ideas each weekend – from the New Statesman