The local elections showed voters tiring of party politics but not personalities There were two big winners on 3 May. Not Ed Miliband and Boris Johnson but ‘disenchantment with party politics’ and ‘politics with a personality’. The results were clearly great for Labour, far surpassing expectations. There is no doubt that it is now conceivable …

I’ve not made much secret of the fact that I greatly admire the work Stephen Twigg has done during our time in opposition. I’ve had plenty of arguments with those who think he endorses Tory policy (he doesn’t), that he will open up the schools system to a market free-for-all (he won’t) or that he …

Two years after David Cameron entered Downing Street, Progress presents our take on the government’s record so far A Aircraft Carrier The government’s defence review in 2010 axed 7,000 soldiers, 5,000 personnel from the RAF and 4,000 from the navy. But most media attention was focused on the decision to leave Britain without an effective …

Have you heard the one about two Christians, two Jews and two Muslims in a hotel in Iraqi Kurdistan? None of us on the recent parliamentary delegation there devised a witty answer but we did establish that all are welcome in this beautiful region. The sixth fact-finding report in five years of the all-party parliamentary …

Labour’s top team believed Ken Livingstone was destined to lose the London mayoral election well before polling day. A not entirely subtle distancing operation followed that conclusion. The message was an each-way bet. If Livingstone lost, it was his fault alone. If he won, it was the Labour leadership that dragged him over the line …

Nuggets of interest abound for Labour in Policy Exchange’s latest publication, Northern Lights, which declares itself nothing less than an ‘attempt to update our maps’, doing away with ‘long-defunct ideas’ about why people vote. Despite the title, it examines not just the north of England but the Midlands, the south outside London, and the capital, …

Labour probably experienced a southern discomfort well before 1992, but it was after that year’s general election that the Fabians published the first of a series of pamphlets authored by the then Labour MP, Giles (now Lord) Radice. Twenty years on and while the fortunes of the party in the south have ebbed and flowed, …

Labour’s impressive local election results on 3 May provided the ideal platform for Labour activists to gather at the 13th Progress annual conference to debate the new centre-ground of British politics and how to form a majority Labour government in 2015.  For as Andrew Adonis, Progress Chair, emphasised in opening the conference, there is no …

Bank of England governor Mervyn King recently declared in the 2012 BBC Today Programme lecture that ‘our banking and financial system overextended itself’. This included allowing financial institutions to leverage their balance sheets by over 50 times, and making use of esoteric, complex derivative instruments which few understand even today. This created a profound and …

The state as we’ve known it since the second world war has delivered some remarkable achievements. We are, as a society, healthier, wealthier, and better educated than ever before. But there have been unintended consequences too that are not so positive. For too many of the most excluded and the poorest in our society, the …