News & Insight

10 October 2012

The recent Fabian/YouGov polling, of people who do not vote, paints a bleak picture of this disengaged society. The findings have implications that go far beyond the political sphere, though. Not voting is a symptom of fragmentation of culture: it...

9 October 2012

In 1974 Tony Crosland, the leading post-war Labour party intellectual, wrote his last major work, Socialism Now. Three years later he was dead. The title can be meant in two ways. The first is an analysis of socialism (or social...

9 October 2012

Yesterday, at the kind request of Conservative Home, I tried to put partisanship to one side and think clearly about how best to tackle some of the big questions facing politics come 2015. Now, this being Conservative Party Conference, my...

8 October 2012

A year ago, the Liberal Democrats reaffirmed their commitment to community politics. This is more than a campaigning methodology; indeed, to quote from the book that started it all (Bernard Greaves and Gordon Lishman’s The Theory and Practice of Community...

8 October 2012

Despite their differences in views, it seems all the party conferences see the issue of apprenticeships as a popular fringe topic. It came up again at a Fabian Society roundtable, which I attended while at the Labour conference in Manchester. Why...

4 October 2012

'One nation' Labour. What a blinder. I am brimming over in admiration for Ed Miliband and his team for this most audacious of rhetorical land grabs. Not because it was a cheeky, clever conference week headline but because it provides...