While I was sat in the auditorium at the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference listening to Danny Alexander’s speech on the economy – which, by the way, was not too shabby an example of the genre – Twitter reported the unveiling of the Labour party’s five election pledges. Here […]
In today’s Observer Sir Hugh Orde argues that the cuts to police funding being proposed by the Conservatives for after the election, layered on top of the cuts that have already happened, put the ability of the police to fulfil their basic functions at risk. He argues that […]
A couple of days ago I was asked, at short notice, to write a brief introduction to Social Policy, suitable for young people interested in finding out more about the discipline. Even though I only had a few minutes to write it somewhat inevitably I wrote more than […]
I’ve only just found the headspace to catch up with Tim Montgomerie and Stephan Shakespeare’s The Good Right, an agenda for the modernisation of conservatism. I was reminded of it yesterday while reading Stephen Tall’s final – and excellent as ever – post for ConservativeHome. The overarching aim […]
[This post is the original version of a text that first appeared in issue 370 of Liberator magazine (February 2015), under the title “Sustained by useful idiots”] As we approach the last few weeks of this Parliament it is almost inevitable that our thoughts turn to evaluating the […]
The long election campaign is now well and truly under way. It is hard not be underwhelmed by the story so far. Politics is a complicated, multidimensional business. Indeed, one of the things I don’t envy politicians is that they are expected to have intelligent views on all […]
Last week researchers associated with the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics published a substantial suite of papers reviewing the Coalition government’s policies across a broad range of social policy areas. They summarize the key strands of policy and try to provide an […]
Over at Liberal Bureaucracy a few days ago Mark offered an overview of activity in the Liberal Democrat blogging community. He argues that the trend is not healthy – fewer bloggers, less activity: So, there are less of us, and we’re quieter than we once were, which feels […]
The signs of housing stress accumulate. On top of established problems of affordability among young people living independently we are seeing increasing numbers of households sharing and a rise in multigenerational households as children find it more and more difficult to leave the parental home. A sense of […]
Nick Clegg has a rather extraordinary post at the Telegraph today. The second half of the post is pretty standard: the Libdems are less spendthrift than Labour and less ideologically anti-state than the Conservatives. Split the difference and aim for the sensible centre. But in order to grab […]
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