Opinion

So, MPs have left the Labour Party to form an Independent Group. Is this the beginning of the end? Can Labour escape from this and its Brexit dilemmas, or is there no way out? 63% of Labour’s vote in 2017 came from remain supporters, and 37% from leave supporters, and if it is to win the next election, Labour has to keep these voters and attract others from both camps. The polls – and the MPs who have just walked...

There is a British baby in Syria. His name is Jarah. He’s only a few days old. His two older siblings are dead. He might never see his father. And his mother? She’s an object of hate. Plastered across British newspapers, Shamima Begum is the ‘Jihadi bride’ who’s been told in no uncertain terms that the UK is not her home any more. Maybe you can’t blame people for feeling no sympathy for a woman who left home to join...

Was Winston Churchill a bad person? It’s amazing how such a simple question has set off a storm of acrimony and accusations. John McDonnell must have known what would happen when he attacked one of the sacred cows of British nationalist myth. McDonnell has problems of his own to contend with, but on this issue he’s a struck a chord. Churchill was perhaps a villain, certainly an imperialist and frequently a British chauvinist. He was also the man the UK...

Buying more lottery tickets is a sure-fire way of losing more money, and philosophically speaking, it doesn’t even increase your chances of winning. Think of it this way. If you have two tickets in your hand, which one is more likely to win? Neither, right? They both stand the same chance. And just because you have two tickets in your hand it doesn’t increase the likelihood that one of them will win, it just means you paid out (or lost)...

"The Labour Party has always been about people", the party's website proudly states on its legacy page. It was formed to give ordinary people a voice and has "sought power in order to improve their lives", with achievements from the NHS to the welfare state that have made a lasting difference to the lives of people across our country. After more than a century of helping to make worker's lives better the Labour Party is now renowned as one of the most...

“Mass deportation flights to Jamaica have been shown time and time again to be unjust and brutal tools of Theresa May’s government"

There are two things we have to recognise if we hope to understand Brexit. The first is something everyone should have known from the start. The second is a fact becoming clearer by the day. Both are bad for the United Kingdom. First, the UK was always going to be worse off outside the European Union. It is impossible for the EU to give Britain a better deal than the status quo. That would cause the collapse of the organisation...

An hour before Theresa May told the House of Commons to vote for the government to reopen negotiations, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker had been in contact to convey that it would be fruitless for her to come to Brussels on the basis of an attempt to reopen the Withdrawal Agreement. Indeed, before the Brady Amendment had even been voted on, all 27 countries of the European Union had already rejected it. An official note seen by everyone outside parliament, it seems,...

Two and half years on from the referendum and those sunlit uplands we were promised are starting to look more like a raging forest fire on the horizon. What was supposed to be the “easiest deal in history” has boiled down to a Prime Minister in absurd denial about a cobbled together compromise that’s deader than dial-up. Apart from some political turd polishing to try to sweeten the dish, the best we can hope for now is the prospect of...