Why we all need to demand an end to the secret Tory NHS ‘capped expenditure process’ hit-list By Jonathan Ashworth, Shadow Health Secretary A weak Prime Minister and unstable government have this week been forced to allocate extra cash to Northern Ireland in return for votes in the House of ...
By Professor Emeritus Mary Mellor, from University of Northumbria That's right there are two magic money trees. Both the state and the banks can create money out of thin air. States do this by having budgets. Despite the myths that have been told time and time again, states are NOT households ...
Corbyn Mania continues to grip Glastonbury after incredible scenes on the main stage There were a few grumbles from some music quarters when this year’s Glastonbury lineup was announced. However it wasn't music that was required when Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn stole the show on Saturday afternoon, appearing on the main ...
Settle back and relax with a nice warm beverage as I'm going to tell you a story. Back in the mid-1980s when I was an eager young man with a passion for politics, the Liberal Party of Canada sent me to an intensive training conference for campaign management. The keynote ...
Today Britain celebrates its first Brexiversary. A year on from the vote to leave the European Union we are already a poorer, weaker and less happy nation than we once were and we haven't even properly started the process yet. With our only political moves being ones to sure-up existing EU ...
The Daily Mail has waged a war on the "fascist left" in what may go down as one of the most ironic pieces of journalism in media history. After it was crushed by so-called "alt left" publications in the 2017 General Election right-wing editor Paul Dacre launched a full scale attack in ...
Protesters marched in peace today just hours after the media unleashed a day of rage. Anti-austerity activists marched from Shepherds Bush to Downing Street following the tragic Grenfell Tower incident and “brutal austerity, cuts and anti-immigrant attacks”. According to the 2017 Social Progress Index released this week Britain is flat-lining on ...
A total of 79 people are either ‘dead or presumed dead’ after the blaze tore through the tower on Wednesday, in Grenfell Tower, West London The 2,500 word account of the horrific fire and rescue mission, shared by fellow firefighter Pete Drummond, will distress and upset many upon reading. It ...
Arriving at Latimer Road tube station in Kensington at first glance you feel you have arrived amidst the Notting Hill Carnival which is held in the area every August bank holiday. The streets are busy and full of people that reflect London diversity. Every street corner is dotted with police minibuses ...
By Daniel Khalili-Tari One of the US’s greatest exports is arms. Cuba’s is doctors. In the US citizens can die if they can’t afford healthcare. But in Cuba, universal healthcare is free. The US’s adult literacy rate is not known. Cuba’s however, is 100 per cent. Why is the Trump ...
For all the negative press football and football supporters get, one couldn't help but feel a little choked up on Tuesday night when the French and English national teams and their fans came together to sing Manchester's anthem Don't Look Back in Anger in an effort to remind the global community of football's ...
Some things make you question the meaning of sport, they just seem so inevitable. Ronaldo and Messi breaking goal scoring records, Usain Bolt running a 100 metre final, Lance Armstrong and Hansie Cronje. Some people just make it look so inevitable and so simple that it appears almost futile; they’re ...
The most popular story ever on this website was Labour's increasing share of the popular vote in the June 8th general election. Genuine surprise and from many real euphoria. But what is behind this and what does it tell us? The most embraced and it would seem obvious solution is ...
It is quite an admission from the long-term Councillor for Putney and newly-elected Deputy Mayor of Wandsworth Ian Lewer that a career in politics might be a stretch for him, but given the lack of talent that currently resides within Westminster it seems to be a problem facing many young people. ...
13 years ago, I was part of the team at Stonewall that helped achieve workplace equality, same-sex marriage and the Equality Act, protecting lesbian, gay and bi people in terms of goods and services. Today, the Democratic Unionist Party, now in coalition with the Conservative Party, opposes many of these hard-won rights. ...
When Jeremy Corbyn was first elected as Labour leader in 2015 those old enough were quick to ring the alarm bells. "This is Michael Foot all over again" they prophesied, warning how his left-leaning leadership and strongly socialist tone was about to throw the party into political wilderness. Less than two years ...
There once was a time when rich newspaper moguls ruled Britain's political scene and pandering to their needs was a sure-fire way of securing a tasty majority in parliament. But on Thursday evening, as the exit polls came in showing that Labour would win 261 seats in the General Election, Rupert ...
Of all the pictures to emerge from last night's election coverage perhaps the most poignant was one of Theresa May stood next to a black knight as she awaited her constituency results in Maidenhead. For fans of Monty Python she had become the embodiment of the knight who stands legless ...
Like most things in life, the simplest restaurant dishes are generally the endearingly memorable. So it's hardly surprising that the ingenuous bone marrow salad at St John in Clerkenwell has been on the menu, unchanged, for the past 23 years. In turn, when presenting paying customers with something so simple, ...
It was a question we posed in November last year that was to set the tone for the unravelling of the Conservative's election campaign. How, after two terms of crippling austerity cuts, dismantling of the welfare state and a referendum that was used as bait to secure a second term did ...
We’re a resilient lot here in the UK. Attacks in Westminster, Manchester and then London Bridge took place, but we collected ourselves, came together as a people and moved on with our lives- a slap in the face of those who meant us harm and no doubt infuriating for those ...
Jeremy Corbyn – like him or loathe him - has made politics feel, not only bearable, but exciting to young people.
Cathy Come Home wasn’t made to inform, it was made to confront. When it premiered as part of the BBC’s Wednesday Play series back in November ‘66, 12 million people – a quarter of the British population at that time – tuned in to see Ken Loach’s seminal social-realist masterwork. ...
First we had ‘Brexit means Brexit’ then we had ‘Strong and stable’ (or was it ‘Stable and Strong’?), then the ‘Coalition of Chaos’, and now we have ‘The Labour Money Tree’. There seems no end to Theresa May’s PR soundbites (or indeed mud slinging), but the Money Tree one really ...
Theresa May has declared that "enough is enough" following the terrorist attacks in London on Saturday night which killed seven people and injured 48. The attack has propelled security to the top on the agenda in the final days of the election campaign, and May will no doubt take the ...
By John Lerwill While I know there are some very decent persons in the Tory ranks, there is an underlying misapprehension by the Tory movement: ignorance of the fact that a true civilisation is measured by how well we look after our weakest and most vulnerable members. Gandhi pointed that out, ...
By Chris Renwick I've noticed a few recurring arguments against voting for Jeremy Corbyn. Theres one in particular that stands out to me. It comes in different flavours but it is essentially the same argument… “what planet are labour supporters on?” “don't believe the spin, he's a liar like the ...
Here's a Pro Tip drawn from the world of sportswriting: If you are ever called upon to write a match report – and in football that means you file within ten minutes of the final whistle unless you want to discover just how loudly an editor can scream into a ...
British MPs are sitting on a property empire worth over £100 million while £500,000-worth of pay outs have been recorded from the BBC and Rupert Murdoch and nearly a quarter were revealed to employ their partner as secretaries. In an exclusive investigation by freelance journalist Chris White, 650 Members of ...
You wouldn't know it day-to-day, but May was a pro slacker month. It's mid-tempo easiness right through this month, folks, with the exception of the Cyndi Lauper sugar of Paramore's new one, that is. Resist 'Fake Happy'. You can't. Elsewhere, we had the triumphant return of shoegaze pioneers Slowdive, who have ...
By Paul de Hoest, Green Party Candidate for South West Hertfordshire Inequality has widened, young people are priced out of the housing market and Government debt keeps going up. The only answer the Tories have is that we need more of the austerity medicine which means: less welfare, less spending ...
Given that they hold so much influence over our hearts and minds, it’s a bit of a problem for our democracy that the majority of the UK press is owned by a handful of foreign-based billionaires, who predominantly back the Tories.. The proprietors of our favourite newspapers have significant financial interests ...
It’s campaigning season — and that means party political broadcasts. Here’s what the parties have been saying … and what we might read between the lines of their scripted addresses to the nation. A party political broadcast by Theresa May It’s been remarked that Prime Minister Theresa May is running ...
Other than sharing the same queen, having social care crossovers, a progressive political outlook and thriving economies, one thing that binds London and Toronto more than anything else is diversity. When Sadiq Khan was first elected mayor he declared the city to be the most diverse in the world, with over 50 ...
Theresa May has faced new allegations of media cronyism after her interactions at a press conference in Wales. It was in this Wrexham speech, to which only select insiders and media personnel were invited, that May announced adjustments to the social care reforms that had lured such ardent criticism earlier ...
Manchester mayor Andy Burnham has praised the spirit of Manchester following a suicide bomb that killed 22 people and injured 59. The newly elected mayor paid thanks to the people of Manchester, who "even in the minutes after the attack... opened their doors to strangers and drove them away from ...
It may seem like a distant memory now, but there was a time before the UK voted itself out of Europe and the US voted in a celebrity halfwit that things had started to look up for the progressive, liberal left. Bernie Sanders had roused public appetite by advertising a new brand of ...
The Conservatives have hijacked Google to cover up their dementia tax blunder which has sparked outrage amongst the electorate. Labour has gained 11 points on the Tories in just three weeks after Theresa May unveiled controversial social care plans in her manifesto. Under her plans there will be a significant ...
A grandmother suffered a heart attack during a job centre employment meeting and was too scared to get up and leave, for fear of losing her benefits echoing the film I, Daniel Blake. In the Ken Loach film, the lead suffers a similar situation, but this woman had an attack ...
I can recall that when I was about five years of age I would be taken door to door by my Grandmother, clasping her petition clip board, fired up with the latest outrage that had got her off the sofa and on to the streets. She had found brief distraction ...
Today will be declared as a historic victory for whistleblowers as Julian Assange paved the path to his freedom two days after Chelsea Manning was released from prison. The Wikileaks founder has had charges dropped against him in Sweden which means he could soon walk free without fear of been extradited ...
They haven’t been too accurate in recent times, but if the latest polls are to be believed, Jeremy Corbyn’s ratings are on the up. Growing significantly day by day. For a politician that is routinely ridiculed in the mainstream press, it seemed almost unconceivable three weeks ago that the UK would ...
Earlier this year Starbucks made a pledge to hire 10,000 refugees globally over the next five years in a publicity-fuelled stunt that hit all the right notes following Donald Trump's inauguration and amidst all the dark clouds hanging over the toxic geopolitical environment. The warm gesture provided a much-needed PR boost for the often beleaguered coffee house chain, ...
The rise of post-referendum "Re-leavers" has given the government a huge mandate to push for a hard Brexit, new research has revealed. Re-leavers, defined as those who voted to Remain in the EU but think that the government has a duty to leave, have blurred the lines between “Leave” and “Remain” meaning the ...
By Samantha Ferrell-Schweppenstedde, Equality Now On BBC One tonight is the first episode of ‘ThreeGirls’, a hard hitting three-part drama that tells the true story of three girls who were among almost 50 adolescents groomed for sex by a gang of men in Rochdale between 2008 and 2012. Aged 13 ...
