In November 2015 Labour’s Leeds North East MP Fabian Hamilton launched the Building Homes for Britain report. Here, its researcher and editor SIMON JOSE outlines the report’s core ideas and explains why a complete rethink of housing policy is needed. For decades the housing market has trundled towards the chaotic state it is in today....
The government’s housing policies are aimed directly at people with the fewest resources and the lowest resistance, says ELLEN ROBOTTOM – which means community campaigns such as hers are more vital than ever. In his discussion of the Housing and Planning Bill, Dr Quintin Bradley explored an increasingly familiar characteristic of ‘welfare’ policy: namely, that...
The government does not intend to solve our housing crisis, says QUINTIN BRADLEY. Instead it is using it as a weapon of policy against the beliefs and attitudes that sustain the welfare state....
HARRY BARNES picks apart the Labour Party’s policy process and finds a raft of positive proposals. He just wishes they were being delivered in a less piecemeal way....
The GMB union has welcomed the Labour Party’s election pledges to put working people and trade unionists at the centre of the 2015 general election....
BARRY WINTER reviews Common Weal, the new book from the Jimmy Reid Foundation, which sets out a vision for Scotland run by its people, for its people. “Scotland’s people are in a unique position – we have been invited to imagine our nation afresh.” So argues Robin McAlpine in the opening sentence of his interesting...
BARRY WINTER reflects on Tony Benn’s personality and politics, interweaving his own memories of the period as he considers the left’s failures in the 1970s and ’80s and the lessons for those seeking progressive change today. Few people in contemporary politics have attracted such public affection as Tony Benn. In spite of years of vilification...
Labour leader Ed Miliband and the party’s policy review chief Jon Cruddas made separate but complementary speeches recently that merit thoughtful consideration, says BARRY WINTER....
GARY KENT reflects on the 100th anniversary of partition on 3 May and the distorted thinking that for decades dominated left-wing approaches to the province, the Troubles and the sectarian divide. ...
While recent rate increases are welcome, the Living Wage Foundation’s voluntary approach to employers is not working, says ERNIE JACQUES....
The Centre for Labour and Social Studies has published a new election guide on the issues of work, pay and unions as part of a series of pamphlets highlighting what’s at stake in the parties’ policies for working people....
Words are weapons and can also save lives. It’s possible the wise words of a young Danish sociologist could have saved hundreds of lives in Northern Ireland if they had been heeded. Gary Kent explains why This slim but weighty pamphlet was published by the Independent Labour Party in 1972 and in that year’s...