Confronting high-velocity culture
Rapidly advancing information technologies were once widely expected to liberate humanity from routine tasks and spur fresh creative and stimulating activity. Yet their recent impact, powerfully influenced by giant corporations, has posed formidable problems in a period already marked by social and economic crises. “Immediacy”, a new book by University of Illinois professor Anna Kornbluh, exposes an…
The Road to Municipal Socialism – the Present and Future of the Preston Model
In Preston, the Labour-led council has earned plaudits for its pioneering approach to community wealth building. Here, council leader Matthew Brown speaks to Martin O’Neill about the progress of community wealth building, in Preston and around the world.
Austerity is inevitable, but we can still choose what type
Andrew O’Brien agrees that the country’s credit card has been maxed out. But austerity should take a very different form this time around; if done correctly, it could herald national renewal
Marquand remembered: an open mind
Neal Lawson David Marquand, who aged 89 died earlier this week, was one of the founding Editorial Advisory Board members of this journal and, intellectually, one of its leading lights. David was one of a small band of intellectual giants of social democracy in the latter decades of the 20th century, and into the early decades…
The politics of embedding a new economic consensus
In her Mais Lecture, Rachel Reeves set out her ambition to shape and embed a new economic policy consensus. Tony Payne considers the prerequisites to success.
The pitfalls of pluralism: a reply to John Denham
John Denham lays down the challenge that the soft left must overcome its aversion to organisation, or remain marginalised. For a faction enjoying neither strong links to business nor the trade unions, the central obstacle is money. In its absence, Labour’s soft left should look to more decentralised, more pluralist organisation, forming alliances around individual…
Pragmatic Environmentalism
A roundtable discussion on the climate transition and the left. What might a ‘pragmatic environmentalism’ look like, asks Emma Montlake, Raphael Kaplinsky and Victor Anderson.
Wealth, inequality, and the return of “luxury capitalism”
Can Labour turn the tide and start to build a new order, a more accountable model of capitalism and a fairer society for all? To do so, it must revisit earlier Labour thinking to combat wealth inequality, argues Stewart Lansley.
Securonomics, the Mais Lecture and Critical Minerals in Cornwall
In her Mais Lecture, Rachel Reeves spelled out a comprehensive break with the political and economic assumptions of previous decades. One area where securonomics can be put into practice is Cornwall, with increasing demand for domestically-sourced critical minerals, argues Frederick Harry Pitts.
The growing inequality of shared spaces
Controversy over male-only private members clubs is a distraction from the real inequalities in access to shared spaces, argues Caitlin Prowle.
Women, they have minds
The real disappointment is not that there are no women advising Keir Starmer and Labour’s senior figures – that is simply untrue. What is disappointing is that they are consistently not named and they are not acknowledged. When the books are written about the 2024 election and the ensuing government, who will emerge as the…
Growth is a conservative idea. Progressives need their own account of how production expands and prosperity happens
Growth is a good thing, but not everything. The notion that it is a necessary prerequisite of progressive policies lends legitimacy to a narrower, regressive and duplicitous understanding of growth
Austerity Forever?
Troels Skadhauge reviews Clara Mattei’s ‘The Capital Order’, on the history of austerity.
Labour’s alliance with the City presents new challenges
Labour is turning to powerful corporate interests to plug the UK’s crippling investment gap. This may come at a cost, politically and economically.
The Left Wing of the Possible: The Case for Radical Pragmatism
Two fears haunt the Left; that Labour might still lose the next election, or that it might win but be unfit to govern and so put the country on a bullet train to the populist Right. Only a Radical Pragmatic Left can offer a transformative middle way between a dry focus on winning and Corbynite…
What the launch of ‘Popular Conservatism’ tells us about the Tories’ future
Liz Truss and her allies are launching a new organisation: ‘PopCon’. The proliferation of these kinds of groups is a sign of something going badly wrong in a political party, suggests Morgan Jones.
Unleashing community power
Faced with a cynical public and deep regional inequalities, Labour needs to follow warm words with concrete plans to give power to communities, argues Josh Westerling.
‘We can do it and do it better’: lessons from LBJ’s War on Poverty at 60
Rory Weal argues that Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, 60 years on, offers a model for how individual and community agency can be channelled into concerted action to address structural causes of poverty
Understanding governance failures: a review of How Did Britain Come to This? by Gwyn Bevan
James Silverwood reviews Gwyn Bevan’s new book on Britain’s systemic governance failures
Britain’s Beleaguered Muslims: a review of Nadya Ali’s The Violence of Britishness
John Chowcat reviews Nadya Ali’s The Violence of Britishness – an excellent contribution to our understanding of the politics around who counts as sufficiently ‘British’
Women in the Miners’ Strike: Usable and Unusable Pasts
In recent years, more attention has been paid to the role of women in the 1984-5 miners’ strike. What lessons might recollections of that doomed, 40 year old struggle hold for building a richer democratic culture in the present?
Acts of God and Acts of Humanity: a response to Colin Hay
Colin Hay’s account of the impact of climate crisis on welfare provision rests on an understanding of ‘uninsurable’ risks which is contestable. There remains scope for political choice
Misreading Brexit nationalism
John Chowcat explores the nature of British national sentiment to assess Labour’s current tactics and prospects, given the long shadow Brexit still casts over the country’s future
The Long Shadow of Collaboration
NUPES, the French left’s historic electoral alliance, is breaking apart in acrimony. The long shadow of wartime collaboration hangs over re-emerging intra-left tensions, explains David Klemperer.
Environmental catastrophes and future fiscal politics: Colin Hay’s warning reminds us that re-embedding the welfare state is long overdue
Colin Hay is correct to argue that ecological crisis places the welfare state as we know it in great peril. But a bold reimagining of welfare capitalism can help to chart a new course
Wrenched from the sacred
Traditionalism might be the world’s ‘least known major philosophy’, but its influence stretches from the far right to King Charles. Morgan Jones reviews a recent study.
The real reason Rishi Sunak cancelled HS2: the political economy of high speed rail
Rishi Sunak’s HS2 decision shows that he lives in a world of his own. But we all live in a different world to the one in which we embarked on HS2
Starmer and Reeves are narrating a new economy – now all they have to do is deliver it
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are offering a coherent narrative for how Labour will manage the economy. But it could be undone if the silence around redistribution persists
A speech of political consistency – and a little more confidence
Keir Starmer’s conference speech brought together Labour’s pre-existing messaging and policy offers, but with an increasingly optimistic tone
No need for catastrophising, it’s bad enough: a response to Colin Hay on the future of the welfare state when ‘environmental catastrophism’ strikes
Colin Hay is right about the welfare state’s deteriorating habitats, but that does not mean we need catastrophise by concluding that conventional social insurance will become obsolete
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