Tom Harris steps down as shadow minister

Gordon Brown unveils 6 point plan for Scotland (and Britain)

Many people had been wondering why Gordon Brown hasn’t been more involved in the debate around the Scottish Independence referendum. Today he’s getting involved in a big way – by outlining a 6 point plan to change the constitutional settlement of the UK and give more powers to Scotland. The six points are: A new UK constitutional law – backed by an historic document equivalent to a bill of rights – to set out the purpose of the UK as […]

Why we’re introducing a Compulsory Jobs Guarantee

By Stephen Timms

For generations in Britain, when the economy grew, most people got better off with it. But that isn’t true anymore. Especially for young people. The number of young people left on unemployment benefits for over a year has doubled since 2010 under David Cameron’s government. The latest figures show over 50,000 young people have been on the dole for over 12 months. Its increasingly clear that the government has failed miserably to give young people opportunities to learn, train and […]

The Week in Bits: “Welcome to Britain, 2014. The end can’t come soon enough”

By Conor Pope

Impending Armageddon comes as blessed relief for prospective homeowners The prediction that the average price for a small flat in central London will rise to £36million by 2050 was not met with any particular surprise, given the unstoppable force that is the UK’s absurd housing market. Predictability does not, however, negate any feelings of glum impotence towards the hope of one day owning a place to live, and the depressing forecast was only lightened by the increasing likelihood of the […]

Whose recovery is it?

By Ian Lavery

We live in strange times. It is a world where nothing is quite as it seems. For tuning in to the news, picking up the daily papers or checking out the internet it would appear everything is rosy. There’s a recovery, the dark days are over, the Chancellor’s economic plan has worked. But where is this so called recovery? It isn’t manifesting itself in financial rewards for the households in my constituency or indeed most households up and down the […]

We must build more homes – but how?

When Ed Miliband announced Labour’s aim of building 200,000 homes a year by 2020 in England last September, the Financial Times reported that housebuilders had called it a ‘wild’ plan and that the party ‘fails to understand how real markets work’. So the task for everyone who wants to see the supply of new homes radically increased is to prove it can be done and set out practical steps to achieve that target within the lifetime of the next government. […]