After weeks of solid campaigning, one thing I keep hearing from activists up and down the country is that we’re all speaking to voters who say they’re still undecided. They’ve read the manifestos, watched the interviews, met the candidates, but they still say they’re not sure whose name to check at the ballot box. But if there’s one thing we know for…
There are few things about which I am ardent and zealous and universalist, entirely assured of the cold clear correctness and blanket applicability of my own position. It’s just not the soft left way; that kind of certainty is for tankies and Baptists. There is one cause, however, to which I offer the kind of blind and unquestioning devotion usually reserved for…
Recently I found myself considering the possibility of a World Parliament – something like a cross between the European Parliament and the United Nations – whose members would be elected proportionally to the population of each country. What would the political makeup of such an assembly be? As far as I’m aware no-one has yet bothered to try and work it out,…
When you were at school, did you ever see a teacher cry? If you did, I am certain you remember it well. Teachers can appear monolithic, distant figures in our memory – we blithely talk about this good teacher, this bad teacher, this teacher who hated me, but those moments when the cracks show can be deeply affecting. We all know teachers,…
Every now and again I think back to the halcyon days of June and July – the sun was shining, Love Island graced our screens every night, and millions tuned into the World Cup to check in on the England men’s best performance since 1990. It felt like a golden time for the collective national mood, though certainly not for the collective…
After Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in 2015, Frank Field – who had nominated Corbyn – explained why his candidate had won the contest, and why UNISON leader Dave Prentiss had been wrong to suggest that Labour members had witnessed a “great debate” during the leadership campaign. “We had no such debate,” Field told Sky’s Dermot Murnaghan. “I…
