News & Insight

5 January 2016

Victory in the Lords and George Osborne’s autumn u-turn over tax credit cuts provided welcome relief after a torrid summer for the left. But don’t go mad with your celebrations. Not only was this a delay rather than a true...

4 January 2016

Experienced canvassers will know the drill: L is Labour, T is Tory, Z is non-voter and so on. But if you have only campaigned in London, you might not have seen a ‘B’, because B is for UKIP. In other...

28 December 2015

When Aneurin Bevan died in 1960, a Conservative MP wrote in the Evening Standard that his passing reflected the Labour party’s failure to respond to a changing social reality: “In the coalfields from which he came, Marx and Engels have...

22 December 2015

Next year ministers will seek views on devolving the main disability benefit for pensioners to English councils. This is a big deal for the architecture of the welfare state, even though the news came in a low-key half paragraph, published...

21 December 2015

In the 1950s, as Labour struggled to recover from the defeat of Clement Attlee’s post-war government, Richard Crossman observed that the party had lost its way not only because it lacked a map, “but because it thinks maps unnecessary for experienced travellers.” As Labour seeks...

16 December 2015

As a member of a political party which puts equality at the forefront of its mission, I found the latest Fabian Society report on women’s diversity in the Labour Party depressing, if not entirely shocking. The Fabian’s discussion paper - one...