It took longer than it should have done for the penny to drop. I spend a lot of time talking to parents in focus groups about all sorts of educational issues, but it still took me ages to get to the bottom of why school attendance has fallen off a cliff. I had absentmindedly assumed […]
I’m no Tory, but I find Michael Gove endlessly interesting. His time as education secretary, whatever you think of the results, was enormously consequential. Likewise, it is tragic that his brief stint as a potentially great liberal prison reformer at the Ministry of Justice was cut too short by the Brexit bunfight. This week, Gove […]
Sometimes something is so obvious it’s easy to miss. Like the impact of rampant inflation and the ugly reality of mortgage repayments jumping to previously unthinkable levels is going to have on how people vote in next year’s general election. This particular moment of clarity happened on Tuesday evening in a focus group I was […]
‘What we need is a revolution. We can’t go on like this with rent rises, and prices rising. Everyone is struggling – you, me, everyone. Everyone except those people in Westminster with their expenses accounts. God, I’d love an expenses account. I’d get a duck pond.’ This sounds like a quote from a focus group, […]
Received wisdom tells us that schools will not be a core electoral issue when Rishi Sunak goes to the country, probably next year. Most education policy wonks and pollsters (I am both) are at pains to explain that we shouldn’t expect a repeat of Tony Blair’s ‘education, education, education’ sloganeering. Schools are not only better […]
Immigration is a deeply emotive subject, one that drives extraordinary political activity, not least Brexit. It came as little surprise, therefore, that last week’s net migration figures prompted a flurry of claims and counter-claims about just why the numbers have got so high. In particular, attention focused on the vast numbers of visas being issued […]
A speech to a centre-left conference without a TV camera in sight doesn’t scream ‘history in the making’, but the one Keir Starmer delivered on Saturday morning may just have been that. Sir Keir Starmer’s address to the Progressive Britain Conference might have been billed a ‘landmark’ event, but it may well have marked the […]
Skills is the great Cinderella topic of British politics. The standard refrain is that while vocational education is terribly important, you just can’t get the public excited by it. Tony Blair even said that if he had wanted to secretly declare nuclear war, he would have done so in the middle of a speech about […]
We’ve had Waitrose Woman and Workington Man, now policy wonks have come up with another electoral archetype who will shape the next general election – Stevenage Woman. According to the thinktank Labour Together, Stevenage Woman is ‘in her early 40s, she’s a mother, in full-time work, struggling with stagnant wages and rising costs’. I must […]
It is one of the more extraordinary and long-term changes to the way we think about politics in this country in the last few years, but in less than a generation the benefits of devolution to England’s regions have become almost a settled political truth. Everyone from the rightest of right-wing think tanks to the […]
The Government’s commitment to – and strategy for – ‘levelling up’ the north of England and the West Midlands got a shellacking in the media last week. First came the slightly strange news, courtesy of The Times, that the Government was set to abandon the phrase altogether and replace it with something like ‘gauging up’. […]
