Born at the start of the 1980s, I am, supposedly, one of Thatcher’s children. Isn’t that an incredible statement? Twenty-three years after Margaret Thatcher was booted out of power, her name defines a generation of people now in their early twenties and thirties. Had I been born a year or so earlier, I wouldn’t have …

The post-budget discussion has rightly focused on the deficit, borrowing and growth. Talk of more cuts just around the corner has largely been lost, even though those cuts (or tax rises) are potentially enormous. No area of public service has been – and will be – hit as hard as local government. By 2014, councils …

The IDS-Cait Reilly spat has been both amusing and illuminating, but it poses big questions for Labour, as well as the government. The government has to answer why its flagship policy – the work programme – is going so badly. Before the programme started, the Treasury estimated that around 5 percent of ‘clients’ would get …

It’s a commonplace that the Lib Dems are Lib Dead. The polls taken so far this year have them hovering around 10 per cent – less than half of the 23 per cent they gained in 2010. Commentators assume that their 57 seats will drop below 20, all of which is fine by me. Yet, …

The past few weeks have seen boosts to the Labour approach to business from two unlikely sources. First, the Economist praised Labour councils for leading the way in innovating and designing new ways to help their residents and businesses. Then the Heseltine report took as its starting point the premise that growth will not return …

I have always liked Tip O’Neill’s judgement that all politics is local. It rings true, and it comforts the weary councillor after another round of emails chasing a missed bin collection. It is why our local representatives hold more power over Labour’s national prospects than most councillors may even realise. Because, just as every sports …

It is often said that Labour has an immigration problem and that – for some – the solution is to talk tough. I’m not sure either is true. We don’t have one problem – we have many. There is no magic form of words that will make the issue go away, whether we are speaking …

Over the summer, there has been a lot of interest in Ed Miliband’s new ‘guru’, the Australian academic Tim Soutphommasane. Although he didn’t quite knock Jess, Mo and Bradley off the news bulletins, Soutphommasane’s ideas deserve a wide hearing. He pushes the value of positive, progressive, patriotism (an issue close to my heart) and the …

Oppositions rarely get a hearing for their policies, unless they are particularly mad or bad. People remember Michael Foot’s pledges on unilateral nuclear disarmament and nationalising swaths of the economy, but the Labour policies of 1994-7 are largely forgotten. What lingers is Clause IV – not for the policy itself, more for what it said …

Sometimes public policy debates can feel like a choice between two poisoned chalices: the unfettered market on the right and paternalism on the left. Yet, despite their obvious differences, these competing worldviews have a lot in common. Neither is particularly appealing or popular at the moment, and neither offers a convincing solution to our current …