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Yesterday, British universities were in a spin. The result of six years of stress and anxiety, management pressure and absurdly bureaucratic language is out. We know the REF scores. We know, in other words, the numbers that every university…
I am writing this column sitting in a traffic jam in Dhaka, the car-crammed capital city of Bangladesh. There’s an energy and an excitement here. The economy is growing at a rate European societies can only dream of, business expands beyond…
Jawarharlal Nehru, first Prime Minister of independent India was giving a speech in a bus factory. Nehru’s topic was ‘the place of the big machine’. It was 1955, the era of big industrial projects and the centralised state. Perhaps, his…
There was a moment when we could have won Rochester and Strood. Talking on doorsteps there a month back, the mood seemed to be a plague on all your houses. People weren't sure of UKIP, lots of people saying they were divisive and…
I'd love to see a head-to head debate between Ed Miliband and Nigel Farage. Forget the Tories, with their incoherent and opportunist brand of soundbite politics. Forget the LibDems, riven by their possibly terminal identity crisis. The…
Crisis? Of course there’s a bloody crisis. Most people in Britain feel squeezed and hassled, working harder for less, while the wealthy and powerful seem to get away with it still. And most people think politics has no answer. We, those…
It's happened many times before. The union flag is pulled down surrounded by anxious British soldiers. They hope the 'natives' they've handed power to will hold on to a British-friendly kind of order, but are desperate most of all to get…
British politics is peculiarly dominated by the relationship between this country and the rest of the world. Margaret Thatcher's politics were led by the effort to restore Britain's global prestige. Since then the EU and foreign wars have…
The country is sluggishly lifting out of depression. Austerity slowed the pace of recovery, but unemployment is back below the level when Lehman Brothers collapsed. Things are still tough for many, but there’s less despair than there was. I…
What kind of Prime Minister does Ed Miliband want to be? Amidst the long speeches and quickly changing slogans there’s one thing about Ed Miliband’s politics which stands out. He wants to be an institutional reformer. Ed Miliband is…
The fictional town of Dunchester is the scene for a right-wing science-fiction novel by nineteenth century author H. Rider Haggard. It is also the site for a fantasy game used to recruit and train British civil servants. The Tory novel is…
'English home rule at heart of Tory campaign', The Daily Telegraph's headline screams the morning of Ed Miliband's last pre-election conference speech. The rise of UKIP, the demise of trust in English politics and Conservative efforts to…
