The Scottish referendum campaign has finally caught fire. After months of bland nothingness, the coordinated interventions of George Osborne, Ed Balls, Danny Alexander, and (most extraordinarily) Treasury…
Where would we be without Godwin’s Law? This law, formulated for the internet, dictates that as a discussion progresses, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1. And, as…
People who win large amounts of money on lotteries tend to switch their political allegiances towards the right of the political spectrum and become less egalitarian, joint UK-Australian research has found…
Who lives at Number Ten Downing Street? The answer is of course… George Osborne. While his official residence may be next door at Number Eleven, it is he and not David Cameron who lives in the flat above…
This could be the riskiest move of Ed Miliband’s career. After months of posturing about the changes in the relationship between the Labour Party and the unions, Miliband has clearly set out his plans…
The Liberal Democrats are in trouble. The party appears to be engaged in a very public form of hari-kiri, accelerating its own political meltdown. The heady days of 23% polling and Cleggmania in 2010 seem…
The Labour Party has started bringing forward policies for 2015, and not a moment too soon. The time for policy reviews, which really were more like a synopsis of contemporary social theory than reviews…
A few years ago I conducted a feminist analysis of the Liberal Democrats as my PhD thesis. During the research, people (both inside and outside of the party) would often say my project was “a bit niche…
Ed Miliband’s heavily-trailed speech on banking reform was no political game-changer; however, it broadened and deepened his One Nation theme and set out specific policy proposals to help restore Labour’s…
As Britain starts four years of commemorating the centenary of the First World War, Blackadder Goes Forth, first broadcast on BBC1 in 1989, has, bizarrely, taken centre stage. To rather less fanfare than…
Just two days after the latest polls showed the “Yes” vote for Scottish independence gaining on the pro-unionists, the Scottish government’s White Paper, Scotland’s Future: Your Guide to an Independent…
Philip Murphy, School of Advanced Study, University of London
It is difficult to do justice to the mood of despair that has been haunting the corridors of the Commonwealth Secretariat’s headquarters in Marlborough House in recent months. The decision to hold the…
March 2015 could see a Washington-style impasse in the UK parliament over the government’s final budget proposals. The advent of coalition government, fixed terms in office, and a general resurgence of…
For more than 15 years, policy “tsars” have been a growing, unrecognised and largely hidden source of influence on UK government ministers’ decisions. Our research revealed for the first time that more…
George Osborne’s Help to Work scheme, announced in his keynote speech at the Conservative Party Conference, gives three options to the long-term unemployed – work placements, daily job centre visits, or…
As Conservatives head to Manchester for their annual party conference this weekend, it seems a very long time since David Cameron, then newly-elected party leader, urged the electorate to “Vote Blue, Go…
In his Labour Party conference speech, Ed Miliband planted himself firmly on the left. His big themes of confiscating land from greedy developers, controlling energy prices and imposing a higher minimum…
Ed Miliband suffers from a split personality. When discussed in the abstract – in polls, on the street or in newspapers - the image conjured up is of a policy wonk who, like many politicians, is far from…
This weekend’s UKIP party conference – its 20th – was phenomenal and fantastic. Obviously, I’m using those words in their original senses of “it happened” and “it resembled something from a child’s story…
Three years after the Clegg-Cameron wedding in the rose garden at Number 10, the Lib Dem Conference this week in Glasgow has showed signs of the strain. Much as Clegg attempted to rally the troops by claiming…