Articles:
- Children with special needs deserve better than a rush to reform - The government's frantic approach to special education threatens vital provision for thousands of children like mine - 21st May 2012
- Local elections 2012: Thatcherism with a posh accent is a toxic proposition - The Tories aren't in existential crisis, but discontent among voters is focused on the leadership cabal and the issue of class - 5th May 2012
- The metropolitan milieu's disdain poisons our politics - A roped-off ruling elite sneers at large swaths of the country, but the case for a local government revival is unanswerable - 23rd April 2012
- The metropolitan milieu's disdain poisons our politics - A roped-off ruling elite sneers at large swaths of the country, but the case for a local government revival is unanswerable - 23rd April
- This bold donations cap is a glimmer of hope for Labour - Some will try to frame Miliband's proposals on union contributions as a betrayal, but diluting power is all to the good - 16th April 2012
- Elected city mayors: the delusions and dangers of power freak politics - A comfy consensus has been reached on the merits of elected mayors, despite an absence of any real debate on the issue - 10th April 2012
- The Tories are no closer to shaking the taint of privilege issue - The Cruddas fiasco, the budget, and even alcohol pricing show how very hollow are their claims of shared sacrifice - 26th March 2012
- Road privatisation is the latest step in the stripping of Britain's assets - If you wonder where David Cameron's plan to sell off our roads will end up, look at how wealth is torn out of the heart of America - 19th March 2012
- Pub giants fall into debt, but publicans feel the pain - Pub leaseholders slaving away at £1 an hour are being squeezed by pubcos that are billions of pounds in the red - 19th March 2012
- How police privatisation was recast as common sense - The insidious, incremental growth of a huge, private shadow state has taken Britain by surprise - 5th March 2012
- Emma Harrison of A4e's big mistake? Not keeping her head down - Flamboyant opulence and welfare-to-work are not the easiest of fits, and the tension between public services and profit is building - 27th February 2012
- Emma Harrison: nice work if you can get it - A4e boss Emma Harrison paid herself £8.6m last year. Nothing unusual for a top banker perhaps. But her company is funded by the government to find jobs for unemployed people. And it's being investigated for fraud - 22nd February 2012
- Opposing free labour doesn't make us 'job snobs', Iain Duncan Smith - I'm all for 'real jobs that worthwhile people do', be they in a supermarket or anywhere else. So let's see those jobs - 22nd February 2012
- McCartney and Dylan? That's the sound of ageing - Rock may be uncool, but it's not dead – as long as it accepts its new status as the music of the ageing - 20th February 2012
- Work for free and 'be of benefit' to a multinational like Tesco - A Tesco job advert offering 'JSA plus expenses' reveals the sinister reality of government work experience schemes - 17th February 2012
- Occupy London: what went wrong? - It gave a voice to the usually ignored, but Occupy's consensual model has seen it too often take the path of least resistance - 14th February 2012
- If you don't like the way big banks are run, move your money - The bankers' pay issue is not just about Stephen Hester's bonus at RBS. A boycott is a way of tackling the systemic problems - 30th January 2012
- Self-employed business opportunity? No thanks - David Cameron's support for entrepreneurs can't hide the reality of self-employment, nor mask the erosion of proper jobs - 23rd January
- The scale of the challenge is shocking us into action - Through protest, we are finding a new left politics that can propel glaring iniquities to the centre of public debate - 24th December 2011
- Here's to Mick Hucknall's amazing voice - Season of goodwill: Admitting I liked Simply Red didn't fit with the NME's Maoist indie conspiracy, but Hucknall's repertoire is studded with triumphs - 21st December 2011
- Europhobia's no swivel-eyed Tory monopoly - Support for the anti-EU lobby in Britain has risen from 19% to half the population in 10 years. Labour ministers feel trapped - 13th December 2011
- The euro no longer rocks Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers - Once Jay-Z liked to handle wads of euros. But now top US acts find Europe increasingly uncool - 8th December 2011
- Britain's economy needs a big push but the Tories can only nudge - Osborne's grand plan to boost growth is a dogma-ridden hybrid that will squeeze the low-paid and rebound on the economy - 29th November 2011
- Youth unemployment: aspirational talk? All the young hear is a sick joke - If coalition rhetoric is to be believed, the UK is full of optimism. The reality: people are working unpaid in Poundland - 19th November 2011
- The mainstream of politics risks letting loose the ghouls - Lib Dems no longer occupy the centre left, Labour is mired in the past. And so appears evil genius Nigel Farage - 5th November 2011
- Breezy optimism in the political bubble. Fear and loathing on Britain's streets - Outside the party conference halls the disconnect between politicians and the public has never been greater - 6th October 2011
- Now we have to rely on the right to fight the feral rich - Let's hear it for Charles Moore, the Spectator and FT. Their attacks on the feral elite contrast with a virtually silent Labour - 10th September 2011
- Being volunteered to work for nothing: a new recipe for the likes of them - Cameron and Blair talk of a rump at the bottom of society – rhetoric that suits businesses getting unpaid labour out of it - 24th August 2011
- Who are the real looters – rioters or MPs? - You help yourself to hundreds of pounds worth of fancy chairs, rugs, lamps – are you not in the same moral ballpark as looters? - 18th August 2011
- For a progressive, David Cameron is sounding very Thatcherite - The prime minister's fightback speech failed to display the consistency or understanding needed after last week's riots - 16th August 2011
- A contract to terrify 1.5m people on incapacity benefit - A French company is being paid millions to harass incapacity benefit claimants with the threat of being made destitute - 26th July 2011
- Morecambe has too much history to be one of austerity's casualties - The failed regeneration of Morecambe is a depressing example of how the private sector cannot thrive if the state's hacked back - 22nd July 2011
- You can't just catch a bus to a job that doesn't exist - In south Wales it's clear that simply assuming those on benefits could find work is Tory fantasy - 7th July 2011
- Which artist will dare break this deathly cultural silence? - In the 80s, even Wham! supported the miners. But tomorrow's strike has yet to find any expression in the wider culture - 29th June 2011
- Could this be the church to calm our secularist outrage? - Anywhere but Westminster: Evangelical worship gets many on the left hostile or awkward. So how do we respond to believers that save the destitute? - 14th June 2011
- The world needs a new Marx, but it keeps creating Malcolm Gladwells - The outlook is bleak for many British people. If Labour is to have any relevance, it needs some fresh thinking - 8th June 2011
- Google: a tiger we musn't feed - As Google's claws bite ever deeper, its dominance of the web should be challenged - 3rd June 2011
- Why Dover's cliffs are now a no-fly zone for speculators - At Cadbury and Manchester United they'd understand the political significance of the people's takeover of Dover port - 18th May 2011
- Why hackers and spooks want our heads in the cloud - Our unthinking embrace of these giant data centres is throttling the giddy anti-authoritarian computing dream - 26th April 2011
- From John Lewis to workers' co-ops: these Tories love wrongfooting the left - The vision Maude and co have for the public sector challenges Labour: what's your alternative – the 1945 way, now and for ever? - 19th April 2011
- Gillian Duffy v Nick Clegg doesn't come close to 'bigotgate' - Labour patronisingly uses Gillian Duffy for political stunts, yet it's done little to address what lay behind her original face-off - 14th April 2011
- Why Clarkson and co are puerile and proud of it - The rise of child-men like David Cameron and Jeremy Clarkson suggests an alarming shift in modern masculinity - 1st April 2011
- Budget 2011: Guardian columnists' verdict - 24th March 2011
- How the home of Mini Rolls and Smash was gobbled up - Food factory workers facing the the sack will march on Saturday for an economy that values more than just money - 23rd March 2011
- Labour-til-I-die is dead in the water - The party must reach out and participate in a wider centre-left politics if it is to have any kind of meaningful future - 18th March 2011
- The coalition has sneaked a coup on a sleeping public - Its project to drastically remodel British society is speeding ahead without any regard for what it told voters last year - 28th February 2011
- The alcohol and the ecstasy: prejudice drowns out sense - The government's rank relationship with the drinks industry contributes to a twisted logic that contorts policy on intoxicants - 21st February 2011
- A rotten sort of recovery - The coalition's 'flexible' economic model relies on cripplingly low pay and rising job insecurity - 17th February 2011
- Rightwing politics is inherently pluralistic – the left needs to be too - It makes no sense that Peter Mandelson is allowed to join Compass while someone like Caroline Lucas is excluded - 4th February 2011
- At the sharp end of austerity unions are still our best hope - This is a year for unions to find the clout and relevance millions are relying on – not feed the caricatures of Tory papers - 20th January 2011
- Librarians: 'We do so much more than shelve books and say shhh' - The Tories clearly don't know how much libraries do. Cuts will threaten the very social bonds they claim to want to promote - 12th January 2011
- I am a Beatles obsessive. But let's cut the Fabs-worship - As John Lennon said, it's just a rock group that split up. But 40 years on the Beatles use so much cultural air no one else can breathe - 4th January 2011
- In this Dickensian season, a Victorian clique still rules - Austerity, deference and a little charity to the poor: the nation is being recast according to the ancient mores of the upper class - 22nd December 2010
- We can't keep treating party leaders like football managers - Miliband faces a wall of cant, ideological hostility and sheer media silliness. Labour shouldn't be fazed by this kind of hounding - 8th December 2010
- Alan Johnson: enforcer – or mutineer? - While Ed Miliband has been on paternity leave, the Blairite old guard has been treacherous - 19th November 2010
- Help us map the world outside Westminster - Building on my series of films, I'm looking for your views on the impact of political decisions on communities across Britain - 18th November 2010
- Cocaine, the perfect drug for a brittle and anxious Britain - How did the high-rollers' drug of choice become so widely used that the country now tops the European league tables? - 18th November 2010
- Liar Liar, protest music on fire? - After I lamented the lack of pop-cultural voices angered by coalition policies, people were quick to come forward - 11th November 2010
- Someone out there, please pick up a guitar and howl - Public services are being laid to waste and benefits shorn, but popular culture's voice of dissent remains strangely silent - 5th November 2010
- Ed Miliband's leadership will be lonely, but his politics are sound - Of the 49 people who ran for the shadow cabinet, only nine backed this Miliband. He must not let this dilute his radicalism - 8th October 2010
- Labour's right will roar back - Don't be fooled by all the leadership election posturing. Saturday will reveal where power lies - 23rd September 2010
- Blair the zealot: a mindset closer to a pathology than politics - New Labour dogma pervades Tony Blair's biography. Bringing it into the leadership race is a depressing mistake - 2nd September 2010
- A Lib Dem civil war? Surely we're forgetting something - The party may have been hijacked by a free-market clique – but, as New Labour discovered, there's no glue like power - 25th August 2010
- How the internet is altering your mind - A new book claims the amount of time we spend on the internet is changing the very structure of our brains – damaging our ability to think and to learn - 21st August 2010
- From political wizard to a byword for excess. The journey's over for Tony - Blair is beset by public opprobrium and his own apparent guilt. Now his gift only highlights New Labour's toxic legacy - 18th August 2010
- Why the north-south divide will soon become a chasm - We are not all in this together, whatever the metropolitan elite may say. The cuts will be felt most far beyond the M25 - 9th August 2010
- What can Labour do, with the Blairites still in power? - From health to education to the BBC, the coalition is putting the former PM's plans into action. The opposition is struggling - 31st July 2010
- Festival violence: gentleness and decency will survive these vile attacks - To see the violence that marred T in the Park and Latitude as some awful fall from innocence does the festivals a disservice - 21st July 2010
- Liberal Democrats should prepare for a bumpy ride - Reading the Lib Dem soul is a tricky business, but dissent in the ranks - 18th June 2010
- Beyond the politics of temporary remedies - John Gray provides an incisive diagnosis of the modern political malaise – if only our politicians were listening - 5th June 2010
- Labour's new motto: immigration, immigration, immigration - Some Labour people have settled on a daft strategy: outflank the Lib-Cons from the right, and so satisfy the proles - 22nd May 2010
- Who could pull off the herculean task of leading a Lib-Lab coalition? - A Lib-Lab coalition may be in the country's interests, but it would be mauled by terrifying media and corporate forces - 11th May 2010 (Cif at the polls)
- Election 2010: Time to revisit Operation Beardy Lefty - With a Lib-Lab deal looking like Labour's only hope, why is the party pursuing a scorched-earth policy? - 3rd May 2010
- Bigot' jibe exposes disconnect between politicians and voters - Labour's political elite has failed to explain social change to ordinary people - 28th April 2010
- David Cameron is a nobody in the north - For all Cameron's sink-estate photocalls, mention his name in Liverpool or Glasgow and you begin to wonder if he even exists - 13th April 2010
- An absurd fear of the old left is killing Labour's best ideas - In Blairite pathology, even modest manifesto proposals can lead some in the party to see reds under beds - 27th March 2010
- These horror stories offer the left home truths - Cases like that of Khyra Ishaq need more than an anonymous 999 call. We have to commune, converse and organise - 16th March 2010
- After Labour's fall, who will be left to engineer its rise? - James Purnell has shown that the underground left is vibrant with ideas. Yet the mass exodus of MPs is leaving politics broken - 20th February 2010
- One in five could actually be a winning endorsement - A miserable absence of meaning in our politics leaves the public so cold that a party with 20% of the vote could take office - 11th February 2010
- The trouble with the A word - 'Aspiration' is worse than just a vapid bit of rhetoric – it betrays an insidious cross-party con trick - 25th January 2010
- A simpler protest than Billy Bragg's wheeze: switch banks - You don't have to do a Billy Bragg to register your outrage at bonuses. Just join the Co-op - 20th January 2010
- Rebels without a cause - The latest Labour move against Gordon Brown has little to say about policy or political direction – or even why he should go - 7th January 2010
- Plunging Labour now recalls it needs two wings to fly - When Brown inevitably goes over the electoral cliff, assumptions about how the party leadership works may fall with him - 5th January 2010
- A very British tribute to the troops - With events like the Sun's Millies, this year we celebrated our soldiers more than ever, but without 'boasting and flag-wagging' - 23rd December 2009
- A Lib-Lab pact: deep down they know it makes sense - It may not be exactly a love-in on the left, but a coalition government is the way to stop Cameron taking us back to 1979 - 16th December 2009
- Blond's day in the sun - The utopian ideals of Red Toryism are appealing, but will not survive a clash with political reality - 27th November 2009
- The nervous, noncommittal noughties can't end soon enough - In a decade defined by fatalism and impotence, film-makers and writers have been quick to tap into our sense of impending doom - 17th November 2009
- The soul of Kirstie Allsopp may still cost the Tories dear - Cameron's victory hinges on his tribe, yet little can rile voters like cut-glass vowels and a strident sense of class entitlement - 27th October 2009
- Get off of my tuffet, Muffet - I can't lament the demise of nursery rhymes when my three-year-old sings rock'n'roll classics instead - 16th October 2009
- Labour conference: Sunday - Harris's fringe: Labour activists at the conference have been reduced to a hard-bitten rump who refuse to give up - 28th September 2009
- I'm a Beatles fanatic. But this is just overkill - A month of rolling news coverage of the new Beatles computer game and a box-set reissue and I'm sick of the Fab Four - 12th September 2009
- A weird, neurotic leader does not explain Labour's malaise - At the core of the party something is unravelling. But it's the Blair project rather than Gordon Brown's psychology - 10th September 2009
- The pirates thrive on a scrap with the analogue crowd - The utopia envisaged by some online envangelists would be impoverished creatively, breeding many buskers and no Beatles - 27th August 2009
- These men-in-white tarnish easily - I'd love to support Martin Bell and Terry Waite's independent guerrillas, but their wafflesome agenda makes it impossible - 21st August 2009
- This anti-politics merely opens the door to millionaires and careerists - The Tories are pushing election primaries as a cure-all for a rotten democracy, but they will lead to a takeover by cash - 17th August 2009
- Life and death? Afraid so. It will be Labour's most seismic year since 1981 - Election defeat will bring the party's most pivotal moment for a generation. Many may jump ship and join forces with new allies - 10th August 2009
- We're outsourcing the future, to be built by Thatcher and Philip K Dick - Don't be fooled. The drive to privatise goes on. How long till schools, prisons and hospitals all sport flashing corporate logos? - 29th July 2009
- Coulson keeps his cool - Andy Coulson gave a fine performance as the editor who knew nothing about NoW phone-hacking. So is he in the clear? - 22nd July 2009
- Labour's final betrayal? - We're now in the miserable situation where government ministers look like the most enthusiastic defenders of the City - 27th June 2009
- When love leaves town - Like their New Labour fans and counterparts, U2 should take the hint of a dwindling support - 2nd June 2009
- The dark side of Vince Cable - The rapturous reception Cable earned at Hay today was expected; the Lib Dem's attack on Alistair Darling was not - 1st June 2009
- Hair shirts to the fore - Many of my friends now see no point in voting Labour, and want to give the Greens more clout - 28th May 2009
- End rule-by-clique - A new politics: The first-past-the-post model is as broken as the allowances system. It is time for electoral reform - 20th May 2009
- New Labour's marriage is back on the rocks - The McBride affair has divided Labour. But what the party needs now is neither Brownism nor Blairism, but democratic socialism - 18th April 2009
- Memo to Labour: please think about how it looks - It's not just the email smear debacle. Talk of a stitch-up in candidate selection adds to a sense the party is out of touch - 15th April 2009
- An all too familiar plot - We were told this crisis would end the country's north south-divide. In fact it's worse than ever - 9th April 2009
- Lending a hand - A last-minute reprieve for the Wirral's libraries shows what can be achieved when local people get together - 6th April 2009
- Our libraries are at risk - just when we need them most - Lean times are already bringing cuts in services, with little heed to the vital role they play and how they shape futures - 2nd April 2009
- Ditch this dreary sell-off: let creativity deliver Royal Mail - Second-class thinking advocates privatisation. But with free market vanities failing daily, it's time to abandon dogma - 25th February 2009
- The demise of Smalls of Spilsby holds a lesson for every high street - With local independents bearing the brunt of this recession, our once bustling town centres are turning into dead-zones - 18th February 2009
- Wedlock isn't the key - Marriage is on the decline, but let's face it: weddings crystallised all the worst aspects of the boom years anyway - 14th February 2009
- Battle scars are back in vogue with the Big Beasts' revival - The greenhorns ready to inherit the political earth will be fretting. Kenneth Clarke's return reflects an appetite for experience - 21st January 2009
- The sullying of our songs - Pop music lovers should fear for the future as a desperate industry turns into glorified advertising - 16th December 2008
- Sipson can define an era - The hugely symbolic Heathrow runway ruling has been delayed, and there is a tiny ray of hope - 5th December 2008
- A way out of the ID folly - In recession, the identity cards' cost may be a more compelling obstacle than civil liberties arguments - 28th November 2008
- If we want more representative MPs, we need to start talking about class - Unless Labour grasps this core issue all the tough talk on Westminster's narrowing social base will be lost in tokenism - 17th November 2008
- Our idiotic, coarse Auntie - Ross and Brand's oafish style defiles the airwaves, and to say so is no sop to the authoritarian right - 28th November 2008
- Hard sell - How can it Westfield - and the growing number of giant malls around the country - survive? - 24th October 2008
- We're all going to be keeping down with the Joneses now - Britons are being nudged closer together by debt, job insecurity, and the realisation that the welfare state has its uses - 22nd October 2008
- And now for the good news - The West End's struggling, the art market's faltering ... but might the slump be a boon for culture? - 21st October 2008
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