There are few words in the English language which better encompass everything conservatism is meant to be about than “home”. Home is not just the roof over your head. Home is where you are from, where you feel you belong, where you feel safe. We humans are not abstract beings; we exist in particular spaces […]
In her speech at Conservative Party Conference last week, the Prime Minister announced “an end to austerity”. In policy terms, this message has been the main focus of the post-conference talk for the commentariat. With polls suggesting that the public are increasingly weary of constraints on public spending, that rhetoric may make a great deal […]
Anyone who works with big sets of numbers knows how easy it is to make them tell the story you want them to tell. Most readers don’t have time to check every source or trawl through the necessary excel spreadsheets, so it can sometimes be very tempting to be selective in your use of data. […]
Reading the Sunday papers can’t have been fun for Philip Hammond. After weeks of pressure from the health secretary and Number 10, it seems the chancellor has been forced to allow a big new spending pledge on the NHS to go ahead without any agreement yet on how it is to be funded. The chancellor […]
In a famous sketch from the 1987 Spitting Image Election Special, Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley stand up in a car in a town centre, brandish a red megaphone, and proceed to shout “nurses!” repeatedly to the assembled crowd. In recent weeks, the public debate over NHS funding has resembled that scene. The line between […]
