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
One of the politicians I worked for said that a distinct advantage of being in the Cabinet was never again having to appear live on Newsnight. A junior minister could be dispatched to Broadcasting House for ritual disembowelment by Paxman or Wark, and the Cabinet Minister could be safely home
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
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
The Chancellor struck an optimistic tone on Wednesday as he stood up to address the Commons with his Autumn Statement, proudly stating the country ‘has turned a corner’ and that his plan for the British economy is ‘working’. Sadly, as we heard at our immediate reaction event that evening with
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
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
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
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
Barnet, where I am a councillor, is one of the most diverse boroughs in the country, including being home to the largest number of Jewish people of any local authority in the country . On 7th October when the horrific terrorist incursion into Israel by Hamas occurred, we were braced
