Photo Credit This article was originally published in Renewal. The government response to the coronavirus crisis involves an unprecedented level of intervention in the peacetime British economy. But the rhetorical and ideological underpinnings of these new policies reveal that little has really changed in Conservative thinking. On 17 March, Rishi Sunak told Parliament that the ‘national effort’ against Covid-19 would be ‘underpinned…
Photo Credit Keir Starmer’s election reflected the age we live in; a low key acceptance speech a day before Boris Johnson was admitted to intensive care. This was not an atmosphere conducive to dramatic gestures by his internal opponents. Starmerscepticism has been born nonetheless, on Twitter, on Facebook and on the pages of mostly online outlets previously notable for their loyal support…
Credit: Chris McAndrew / UK Parliament (Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)) In any normal world, Robert Jenrick would have resigned by now. If you aren’t aware of the Housing Secretary’s misdemeanor, Jenrick is accused of facilitating a ‘cash for favours’ deal in which he approved a housing development on the Westferry Printworks site in Tower Hamlets, a site owned by Conservative Donor…
(Image of Dominic Cummings by Radical Larry (CC BY-SA 4.0)) Due to whatever virtue (loyalty) or character flaw (obsequiousness), I was never radicalised; my politics are those of my mother, only less so – a big state social democrat with a passion for human rights. My household was intrinsically political; we ate our vegetables because not doing so was an offense to…
(Picture: Nigel Sutton) Labour continues to be at once a party of progress – whether of a Marxist or liberal variety – and a party that cannot escape viewing the world through the prism of its own past. We are constantly drawn towards a circular view of history. For the Old Right, this is a story of electoral defeat, a leftward lurch,…
Flickr/White House Photo. Boris Johnson is a cheat and a liar; we all know this, it is priced in. Even those who like him know it – they just see it as roguish and charming that he can slide away from the consequences most of us would face if we had his behaviour. To trust him at his word is unwise. In…
The current debate in the Labour Party about trigger ballots and open selections gives all members the opportunity to discuss not only how we select our candidates, but what kind of MPs we want. The Blairite revolution in the Labour Party promoted the idea that being an MP was a technocratic specialism for professionals with a privileged background. The gulf between the…
I am part of a small group of people that you can only get into based on an accident of birth. Am I a member of the Royal Family? No. Instead, I am one of a small number of people whose parent also happens to be an MP. (Though I’m not a member of the Benn family, pictured above.) How many of…
