News & Insight

9 May 2013

On the day after the 2 May 2013 council elections the BBC posted a lead story on their news website about the previous day’s vote, containing the line: “UKIP is the big story of the night, gaining 139 councillors and...

8 May 2013

The successes of Nigel Farage and UKIP in the recent local elections have already provoked much analysis. In particular, the three main parties are now engaging in an intensive period of soul searching as they think hard about how best...

7 May 2013

“When all this is gone, what's left is what matters most: the people you love - your family, your friends.” The Guardian's Mike White tells me these were Jim Callaghan’s words, quoted by a member of his family at the...

30 April 2013

Yesterday on LabourList Adam Lent argued that the Labour party has been overrun by ‘vulgar Fabianism’. In saying this Lent considerably overstates the intellectual weight of Fabianism in contemporary Labour debates (perhaps I should be claiming otherwise) and underplays the...

24 April 2013

The late Ronald Dworkin (1931-2013) was an intellectual light to the American liberal left, whose ability to communicate complex ideas to the public led the great Harvard political philosopher John Rawls to liken him to a modern day John Stuart...

23 April 2013

Andy Burnham’s plan to integrate health and social care is the boldest idea to emerge from Labour’s policy review so far. If he can convince his shadow cabinet colleagues to back it, can he convince the country in 2015? “The...