Three days before the 1983 election, I attended a rally in Oxford Town Hall. It was in the days when it was still possible to come in off the street to a Labour leader’s rally, and the speaker was Michael Foot. The atmosphere was revivalist, a packed hall cheering on their much-loved leader. How could […]
Tag Archives: neoliberalism
The Brighton and Hove Green Party is fond of labelling Labour as a party of austerity, and claiming to be the party that really stands up for social justice and against poverty. Today’s meeting of the Green-chaired Policy and Resources Committee of the City Council demonstrated why the Greens’ claims to support the vulnerable in […]
As the election gets closer, the question of whether there is such a thing as Milibandism – and if so what it might be – is beginning to be asked. I think there is such a thing – and in the past few months, since the Labour Party conference in particular, it is becoming increasingly […]
Britain is facing a cost-of-living crisis, one that is driven by falling real pay. There is growing concern, not just about the level of unemployment, but about under-employment; people who are in theory in work but in practice cannot earn enough to make a decent sufficiency. The biggest cohort receiving benefits is people in work; […]
There has recently been a small media storm over a question in the Eton scholarship exam, in which 13-year-old boys were asked to imagine they were prime minister and to write a speech justifying the shooting of protesters. The best response I’ve seen to this was by Chris Dillow on his Stumbling and Mumbling blog, in […]
Much cyber-ink has been spilled following last week’s strong UKIP showing in the English County Council elections – it might seem superfluous to add to it. I think the strength of UKIP’s “surge” is overrated – these were partial elections in which the major centres of population did not vote (along with Scotland and most […]
I have a lot of respect for Angela Eagle, Shadow Leader of the House of Commons (and, as it happens, my university contemporary). So I was surprised to see her quoted as supporting a range of measures to encourage more voting, including incentives like prize draws and making election day a bank holiday. There is […]
The past week was inevitable. It was always going to be the case that when Margaret Thatcher died, there would be a torrent of Thatcherabilia in the media; much of it adulatory, some of it reopening the old wounds from the 1980s. The State Funeral question had been well-trailed; it was always clear that the […]
Where does Labour stand on the bedroom tax? The stance of many – probably most – Labour activists is clear; at a personal level they completely oppose this penalty on those whose social housing has a “spare” bedroom, and for very good reasons. The implication of the penalty for “under-occupancy” is that social housing is […]
The people behind the Think Left blog yesterday circulated a piece from the Independent about the way in which New Zealand has reacted to the imposition of an austerity agenda. It’s an old piece, but the landscape is strikingly familiar – food banks, homelessness, benefit cuts, soaring crime. The piece points out how New Zealand’s […]
Notes from a Broken Society 