The Labour party must look to education as a way of winning arguments and changing lives. It shows our commitment to communities; education is where the future is built. It is also vital to our fiscal credibility that we find the middle ground between overspending and starving our schools of funds. The party should make …

Imagine it. Noon on a Wednesday, question number one Mr Speaker, order, order. All the pomp of prime minister’s questions centred on one man – arise prime minister Boris Johnson. It’s a little fanciful to indulge in such political nonsense. And we’re at least four months away from silly season. That didn’t stop the Evening …

I don’t know if you have seen the Labour party action plan for family budgets. Or our insistence that the NHS will be the defining issue at the next general election. Well, I’m sorry to tell you, it won’t be. In the vein of Hopi Sen’s great piece on the Challenge for the Labour Right, …

Perhaps the most pertinent message I took away from Progress political weekend (apart, naturally, from the fact that Lord Mandelson’s politically astute presence can command a room like no other) came from the Times columnist and Tony Blair’s former speechwriter, Phil Collins. His time as an adviser to Tony Blair, in one of the finest …

Talk to a Labour activist who was involved in the 2010 general eection and the feeling, from my experience, is generally the same: Labour in that election won the ‘ground war’. We managed to stop a Conservative majority, we tell ourselves, by traipsing more streets and knocking on more doors, getting out the vote more …

Reading The Independent at my desk yesterday all was going well, I’m still on a high from Sunday’s 5-2 thrashing of Spurs and two pages of coverage on the Leveson Inquiry is always enjoyable. I happily flick to page 6 where I see Labour is up two to 40 per cent, a three-point lead over …

The SNP are good at spin. In 2007, the Labour party suffered greatly in a swing to Alex Salmond’s party. In 2011, we were demolished. Both elections were, in nationalist-speak, clear calls for independence. It is decidedly easy to project, from here in Westminster, that a swing to Salmond – twice – is a swing …

Yesterday NUS launched its #payinterns campaign with the TUC and Interns Aware. The debates on internships are not new, but with youth unemployment at a record high it is timely and welcome. But while many sympathise, few feel able to act. No one wants to be accused of hypocrisy – but while we avoid the …

There’s a new phenomenon sweeping the Twittersphere, which of course means it’s not really a phenomenon. Rather it is grandiose, self-important posturing of a number of self-declared Blairites, looking to  appropriate the term ‘Blairite’ to justify defecting to the Conservative party, one even creating a brand new branch of political philosophy called ‘Blue Blairism’. Apparently …

We all remember the current spending review. Osborne told us Britain was bankrupt, Gordon Brown had got it all wrong, and the only way to cut the deficit was to cut and cut fast. Capital investment was in the firing line and project after project was halted. We in Nottingham managed to squeak lines two …