One of the (few) positives of the leadership election and the Liverpool conference is that they forced Jeremy Corbyn to make speeches about policy. Up to then Corbyn had behaved like an Old Testament prophet who rails against austerity, inequality and social injustice. This appeal never loses its emotional power, but what is extraordinary about …

‘A vote to Leave is a vote to Leave’. This is true, but spare a thought for what happens then. The Leave campaign is adamant that ‘leaving’ is all very simple. It has announced a programme of six bills that after a Leave vote would separate Britain from the EU: repealing the 1972 European Communities …

This Thursday David Cameron arrives in Brussels for one of the defining meetings of his premiership. The European council is set for a full discussion of his demands for a renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with the European Union. His reputation in history almost certainly depends on the outcome. Will he be remembered as the prime …

‘We are not short of ideas – what is missing is the political will’. These words, by European Commission vice-president Joaquín Almunia, captured perfectly the mood at yesterday’s Policy Network conference on the aftermath of the European elections. More than by just populist stress, the European Union is afflicted by a crisis of leadership. Matteo …

Roger Liddle sees himself as an evangelist for Europe. This book’s target reader, he says at the beginning, is ‘the genuine sceptic, in the true meaning of the Oxford Dictionary of English – “a person inclined to question or doubt accepted opinions”’. But, however much Liddle tries to cast himself as an outsider, this is …

For much of the last three decades, leftwing populism has seemed something of a contradiction in terms. Even after Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan departed the political stage, the right retained a powerful hold over much of the traditional discourse of populism: inverting and perverting its narrative of the ‘people versus the powerful’ to target …

When Tyrell Burgess, academic and innovative educational thinker, was asked to write a Labour party pamphlet on education he found himself ‘depressed about the lack of real planning … I could only bring myself to say no more than we would “make a start”’. That was his own admission from an essay published in 1968 …