Category: Blog

Blog
Cllr Anntoinette Bramble

How can we help? Reforming financial assistance in local government

I was born and raised in Hackney. I have been a teaching assistant, nursery nurse, an assistant headteacher, a councillor, and now Deputy Mayor of our borough. I have seen how Hackney and our communities were empowered under a Labour Government, and I have seen how they have been systematically

Read More »
Blog
Gerard Rinse Oosterwijk

Shock Wilders win leaves Dutch progressives in despair

In the run-up to the 22 November election for the Dutch Parliament, the Tweede Kamer, pollsters predicted a tight result. Several parties were competing to become the biggest and potentially deliver the new prime minister after 13 years of Mark Rutte’s hegemony. Very few predicted the landslide win by the

Read More »
Blog
Louise Ellman

Why is Hamas’s sexual violence of October 7th being ignored?

The UN’s International Day for Elimination of Violence Against Women and Girls on 25 November is a time to face reality: the atrocities of Hamas gunmen in on October 7 included the widespread rape of women and girls. With most of the rape victims subsequently murdered, a full account may

Read More »
Blog
Mark Galeotti

What can Labour do with Russia?

Next year’s general election is likely to centre on domestic issues rather than Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, not least as it is hard so far to see any substantive policy differences with the Conservatives on this issue, beyond a possibly performative demand that the government do more of

Read More »
Blog
Roger Liddle

Review: Richard Toye’s Age of Hope

Richard Toye’s Age of Hope is the first major study of the post war Attlee government to be published since 1997. It stands alongside the two much earlier classic overviews of this period, Kenneth Morgan’s Labour in Power (1984)and Peter Hennessy’s Never Again (1992), but benefits from a longer and equally

Read More »
Blog
Tom McNeil

AI Ethics in Law Enforcement: Navigating Innovation and Oversight

The shiny facade of the recent ‘global AI safety summit’ doesn’t offset the government’s serious lack of ambition on ‘safety and ethics’ in the UK. This broad ambition to lead the diplomatic effort on AI, is honourable in its own right. Dystopian depictions of our future, envision AI attacking our

Read More »
Blog
Gary Kent

The Middle East: a high-stakes moment in history

It is hard to look at world events today and feel hopeful. Russia’s war against Ukraine and the Hamas orgy of violence on October 7th (again) bring to mind Irish poet WB Yeats’ words from 1919’s The Second Coming: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed

Read More »