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There can be no overstating the political and economic importance of last Thursday’s announcement from Moody’s ratings agency, that it is downgrading the UK’s credit rating to AA1. And the fact that financial markets were expecting it by no…
The most chilling thing about Michael Dugher MP's timely piece on "mainstream" anti-Semitism is that it needed to be written. Anti-Semitism in Britain, as I wrote in the New Statesman last February, is sadly a phenomenon no longer confined…
Yes, Tony Blair was wrong. The bolstering of faith schools and the consequent upsetting of the delicate existing balance between them and society at large, I wrote in 2011, was always a rather suspect idea: not because religious people have…
The audacity of hope: it worked for Obama in 2008, and it is an important quality for an opposition to bring to the table, as Ed Miliband did in his New Year’s message last Friday. It is fairly clear that at this point the Coalition is…
After the indescribable horror of the fourth mass shooting this year in the US, the world’s media and commentators have been pretty much united in their sympathy for victims and urging of the American government to push for change. United…
If you’ve been living on the moon for the last twenty-four hours, you may just not know about the royal baby. The news has predictably sand-blasted UK news schedules and obscured the traditional staples of murders, celebs and, quite…
In recent days, bombs have been dropping on Gaza while rockets have continued to rain on southern Israel, as they have been for months. As usual, there is a premium on accurate information and a discount on propaganda. As usual, people…
As David Cameron ponders the deeper strategic meaning of Romney's defeat for his fractious party, in the back of his mind I suspect there is something a little more prosaic distracting him disproportionately from this and the everyday great…
Yesterday Mark Ferguson suggested that it might be the time to bring Alastair Campbell back to Labour. He’s right that we need someone with Campbell’s skills, but perhaps not to guide Labour’s social media strategy, as Mark suggests…
Between Miliband's speech last week and Cameron's imminent one, there have been many pieces on Labour’s audacious, and slightly unexpected, pitch for the centre ground. It still has drawbacks: it does not deal with the state of the party…
As Peter Watt pointed out at the time of the TUC conference, its influence is declining for a number of reasons: the concentration of power in the hands of the leaders of three super-unions, declining membership in general and a political…
Like many, I read Ed Miliband’s New Statesman interview with interest. Some parts of it pleased me greatly, like the seeming acceptance of not having money to spend. And the corollary to that, which is that we could not redistribute wealth…
