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Today I’m launching Making Ends Meet, a campaign to change our economy and not just to treat the symptoms by providing foodbanks but to end the need for them to exist at all. Something is going very wrong with the UK economy. Employment is…
When the European elections happen this May, we don’t know whether we will be electing MEPs for five months or five years. That question will, in the end, have to be settled by Westminster. But these unexpected elections are a chance for…
Unemployment, said Harold Wilson, more than anything else, made me politically conscious. I am thinking about having his words tattooed on my forearm, so often do I think of them. Wilson was talking about the 1930s, but it is the collective…
As hardline Brexiteers stepped aboard a boat on the Thames to throw haddock into the river in protest, I watched in total disbelief at the infantile extremes we have reached in politics. But actually, this week’s Brexit soap opera has…
Brexit has always been essentially an exercise in contradiction. And when I say always, I mean always. In fact I spent my final speech in the House of Commons before the referendum patiently explaining to Tory Brexiteers that globalisation…
Naturally I couldn’t help but enjoy watching the Tories running scared at their conference last week. They looked devoid of ideas, lacking all energy, and terrified of Labour. But they are also terrified of their own right-wing, and it is…
This is the full text of the speech that Alison McGovern, Progress chair, delivered to their annual conference today. Thanks to Conor, Progress team etc. First I want to talk about Richard Angell. I don’t always know how to describe exactly…
In this Brexit row, the dead-end rhetoric of futile nationalism is ruining our country. It is up to us to resist it. What is the point of Labour in this fight? It’s time for us to be clear. We are a patriotic bunch of people. We think that…
The new chancellor opened his first Budget speech yesterday with a line that probably contained more truth than he knew. “As we prepare for our future outside the EU, we cannot rest on our past achievements.” It was the only admission in…
There have been times over the last five years when I have sat in the House of Commons and felt as though we had the power to affect real change. Yesterday at Foreign Office questions was not one of them, at least regarding one issue that…
Laura Kuennsberg of the BBC asked Theresa May the correct question yesterday. Either, she said, the prime minister has changed her mind about our current trading arrangements with Europe having greater merit than the Brexit alternative, as…
One of the reasons I find it hard to celebrate the new anti-establishment zeitgeist in Western politics is that so many of the embattled institutions are actually based on fundamentally progressive values. Whether it is the European Union…
