Category Labour
Is gender the next party dividing line?
A few days before the recent UK General Election, I read Colin Crouch’s essay ‘Post-Democracy and Populism’. Crouch ends the piece by considering whether the political centre and left have any social identities that can support their movements in the way that populists of the right have appealed to national identity. The one he suggests […]
An ideological split in the Labour Party?
This post expands on some of the ideas explored in this discussion with Jolyon Maugham regarding this post by Colin Talbot – read those and you’re up to date Colin Talbot’s recent post on the future of the Labour party suggests that it is on course “for an all out civil war between its social […]
On Jeremy Corbyn and the ‘Oxbridge purge’
Owen Jones wrote a slightly odd article last week responding to the claim that Jeremy Corbyn has ‘purged’ the senior ranks of the Labour party of Oxford and Cambridge graduates, since most of his team come from less prestigious universities.* Unfortunately Jones spends the article rather labouring what seem to me to be a couple […]
In defence of the ‘Westminster bubble’
Andy Burnham, in standing for the Labour leadership, has placed great emphasis on his desire to “take Labour out of the ‘Westminster bubble’”. Yet his opponents, particularly in the media, have taken great pleasure in pointing out that Burnham himself has been a professional politician for most of his life, and so is as much […]
Why Labour are not anti-business
Politics is complicated. And inevitably, to deal with the complexity, voters and journalists fall back on simplifications – they rely on caricatures of what the different parties stand for. But sometimes these tropes are misleading and cause us to miss out on interesting and important nuances in the argument. A major example of this is […]
The difficulties of a ‘coalition of the rational’ on immigration
One of the intriguing ideas to emerge from the Labour party conference earlier this month is shadow immigration minister Chris Bryant’s proposal of a non-partisan ‘coalition of the rational’ in favour of immigration. The idea is attractive and interesting because it raises the ideological complexity of the issue. However, it is this very complexity that […]
Social Problems Are Like Maths 