The Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has this evening announced that the Government will meet 80% of wage costs for workers to ensure that they keep their jobs during the coronavirus crisis. The package has already attracted criticism, because it does nothing for the self-employed and freelances. That point is well-made, but there is a deeper problem […]
Category Archives: UK politics
With the Labour Party leadership election continuing to drag on – longer than Götterdämmerung but likely to bring much the same outcome for that benighted party – little attention has been given to the other British political leadership that will take place later this year – that for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats. It’s […]
I spent yesterday evening listening to a speech by the philosopher A C Grayling at a meeting in Bath, organised by Bath for Europe, on the subject of rejoining the EU (unfortunately I had to leave before the Q and A in order to stand a fighting chance of getting a train back to Cardiff). […]
Yesterday’s announcement from Whitehall that HS2 would proceed – at an estimated cost now of £100bn, a figure that seems likely to rise substantially – has opened a wide fault-line about the future of Wales and Welsh devolution. As Plaid Cymru MP Jonathan Edwards argues persuasively in a piece in Nation Cymru, the issues for […]
For those of us who walked away from the Labour Party, unable to stomach the party’s failure to oppose Brexit and to deal with the institutional antisemitism that shows no sign of abating, that party’s period of reflection and long-running leadership election has provided little comfort. I have looked in vain for any sign that […]
Leaving the Labour Party is not easy; nearly a year after the event, you still follow the debates, discuss things with your former comrades, still feel a certain emotional pull. The Labour Party is far too much like a family – admittedly one, to misquote Orwell, with the wrong members in control – for its […]
Among the twenty-four inscriptions that line the walls of the Scottish Parliament, one – attributed to Alasdair Gray but, as he freely admitted, borrowed from the Canadian poet Dennis Lee, seems hugely apposite to the position of we in Wales who still have faith in progressive politics: “Work as if you live in the early […]
