The Uber flotation and the power of imagined futures Entrepreneurial TV shows like The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den are littered with awful clichés. These apparent statements of common sense float about, ready to be called into action to rebuke those who don’t show quite enough acumen. One of those clichés, “revenues are vanity, profit is sanity”, came to mind with the news…
Part II: Arguing from values: what Labour’s centre-left can learn from the new social media landscape The first part of our interview with New Statesman political editor Stephen Bush on how social media has changed the political landscape covered the effects it had on the last two Labour leadership elections and the last general election. In part two, we discuss what the…
So you’ve abolished private schools. Now what? Although firmly to the left of the national conversation today, there have been repeated calls to close down, or nationalise, private schools. Notable figures across the political spectrum have attempted to bring this debate into the mainstream; American billionaire Warren Buffett has called for the US government to “make private schools illegal”, while British playwright…
In recent years, the framework for dealing with disability on both sides of politics has been narrow, with an overwhelming focus on disabled people as recipients of welfare and state support, with success largely measured by how many disabled people are moved off benefits and into work. While it is reasonable to expect that any Labour approach will be superior to that…
There are two tragedies to the Windrush scandal. The first one is, of course, the act itself, the monstrous act of a government deporting elderly people who have lived in Britain their whole lives to a country they do not recognize. The second, quieter and maybe more poignant tragedy, is how quickly people became used to it. There was a small time…
How exactly do we conceive of housing? This is a fundamental question, and one that never quite seems to be satisfactorily answered. So often, getting housing is treated as kind of status symbol, a way of indicating success under capitalism. This issue goes to the heart of the ways in which politicians are trying to deal with the housing crisis, and the…
One of the most depressing constants in industrial life in the UK is the life cycle of the average British business. They are frequently born from the minds of one of the country’s exceptionally well-educated workforce in the high-value manufacturing or software sector, before being built up through the efforts of skilled employees. Sadly, their contribution to the economy is often then hijacked by large, usually overseas, investment firms and conglomerates buying the business. At best, the decisions that affect hundreds of workers and the economies of whole towns are now taken in boardrooms in New York or Shanghai. At worst, the company is asset-stripped for its patents, techniques and talent before being wound up. In between this runs the spectrum of profit relocation (or tax evasion as normal people call it), layoffs, the imposition of hostile working practices and decline of quality. Even the largest and most successful of British businesses aren’t immune to this. When Cadbury’s was taken over by Kraft, the entire board resigned and their replacements subsequently shuttered dozens of factories across the world in a cost-cutting exercise. ARM Holdings, who make the microprocessors found in almost every mobile phone, were taken over by Japan’s SoftBank and then saw their Chinese arm sold to fuel Xi Jinping’s government’s strategy of acquiring foreign technology firms to jump-start China’s indigenous high-tech industry.
Year after year, the admissions figures for Oxford and Cambridge universities tell a grim story about the persistence of inequality in Britain. The privately-educated—seven percent of the population—make up roughly forty percent of admissions. The most privileged demographic groups make up eighty percent. These elite graduates go on to dominate the upper echelons of society, being disproportionately represented at Westminster, in the…
