At the Passover Seder each year, Jewish people ask why this night is different from all other nights. The question continues to find meaning; the circumstances we celebrate this year fill us with doubt and despondency. But there is an answer – for thousands of years we have been the people of the book. Texts and commentaries have informed our people’s direction.…


Social Policy gives us a range of means in which to assess deprivation. Some measures focus on social capital; others on economic capital. In Canada, Pierre Bourdieu inspired its public measure to combine both. The trouble for researchers now lies in deciding what indicators are most telling, from the sea of data available. There are tens of thousands of public datasets that…

Late on the night of the 26th of March 2015. Jeremy Paxman looked at Ed Miliband with steely eyes: ‘They see you as a North London Geek’. It was a defining moment of the election. It followed years of criticism in which Ed Miliband was othered and represented as alien to mainstream British society. We saw it just as well on British…

(If you’re viewing this post on a mobile browser, you will have to click through on the static images to use the interactive features.) Chris Hanretty produced a breakdown of the EU Elections by constituency. It is worth stressing that these results do not on their own tell us anything about a future general election result. EU election votes, for various reason,…

Milton Keynes, built as an overspill town, has many achievements to claim – the roundabout, concrete cows, pretending to be New York in that scene from Superman 4. However, it also faces many urban design challenges, including an abundance of cars and a lack of access to public transport. Milton Keynes is a monument to Harold Wilson’s public planning of the Open…