Fragile Times

DAVID CONNOLLY reflects on the fallout from December’s general election and the unnerving sense of a fast changing and precarious world. The core statistics of last month’s general election make grim reading…...

The Strange Death of Labour England

The scale of Labour’s election defeat is hard to take in, says JONATHAN TIMBERS. But it has been a long time coming and will take a long time to put right. This election defeat is not only a “disaster”, as John McDonnell correctly said, it is a body blow that might lead to the...

The Causes and Cures of Brexit

“The Brexit vote was the biggest single democratic revolution the UK has experienced in decades,” according to Neal Lawson of Compass, whose new report brings together more than 20 short essays…...

The Origins of Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn’s rise is only the latest in a long line of left-wing ‘corrections’ to a rightward drift in the Labour Party, which date from before it was even founded, argues GRAHAM TAYLOR....

A Manifesto for Democracy

It is the contention of this brief paper that British democracy is not working, either philosophically or practically. Philosophically speaking, there is no effective representation; practically speaking, no political party is proposing radical reform to break the sclerosis currently evident in the system....

Labour and the Corbyn Effect

DAVID CONNOLLY reviews a recent collection of essays that examine Labour under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and seek to map out a possible future for the Party. I recently overheard a conversation in a café in Chester-le-Street that illustrated an on-going problem – namely that despite the many and varied travails of the May government, Labour...

Is Our Democracy Broken?

The state of British democracy and how we can fix it will come under scrutiny at the Dronfield Labour party Discussion Meeting in north-east Derbyshire this Sunday when Vicky Seddon, coordinator of Sheffield for Democracy, will be the main speaker....