During every crisis, the X-Ray: that flash of a moment that lights everything up, and exposes the internal structure of what you’re really looking at. So it is now with Britain’s beleaguered universities, heading into a very uncertain teaching year with very little capital of any sort in the bank. So much heat has been […]
After every disaster, the aftermath – first the disbelief, then the mourning, then the inquest, then the rebuilding. The Labour Party has now moved from Stage Two of that process to Stage Three: it has begun to recover from numbness and regret: it is now moving on, to ask itself where everything fell apart. That’s […]
Sir Keir Starmer has spent the last 48 hours putting his own stamp on the Labour Party. Out goes the clique around the old leader, in comes a new breed of less easily pigeonholed talents. Most voters will not even have heard of more than one – or at the most two – of these […]
Some crises overwhelm everything: they make each controversy that went before them seem very small indeed, and they draw a line in the calendar between ‘Before’ and ‘After’. We could well be living through one of these fundamental historical breakpoints right now. So much in the future will be at least coloured by this spring […]
The UK Labour Party is still reeling from its worst defeat since 1935. Although its overall share of the vote has recently been worse (in 2010 and 2015), it has now lost scores of seats that have been Labour for generations. It seems in shock, unable to react, for one very good reason – it […]
Labour should not have lost this election. Only once before has any modern British government going for a fourth term won the approval of the voters. Real wages have been stagnating for years (though they are rising now). Prime Minister Boris Johnson is deeply unpopular. Public services, especially the National Health Service, are in a […]
There’s a lot for voters to like in Labour’s new manifesto, and it will probably further boost their image after the party’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, fought the Prime Minister to a draw in their televised debate. Public services are creaking after nearly a decade of austerity. This manifesto commits to returning much of the funding […]
On the surface, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s election gamble makes a lot of sense. He leads Labour by ten percentage points, or even a little more, in the polls. Jeremy Corbyn is on some measures the most unpopular party leader the UK has ever known. The main anti-Brexit pressure group, the People’s Vote campaign, is […]
