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Friday 10 February 2012

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Saturday, 4th February 2012

Opening up Westminster's closed shop

7:03pm

I was immensely proud to co-host an event at the House of Commons with Robert Halfon, the Conservative MP for Harlow, to promote apprenticeships in parliament. The workaholic Mr Halfon came up with the idea of launching a Parliamentary Academy last year after taking on an apprentice in his own office. To me it seems the ideal way to get MPs to put their money where their collective mouth is, which is why my charity New Deal of the Mind has  started a pilot scheme with four apprentices in and around Westminster in...

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Friday, 27th January 2012

The brave men of Camp E715

4:10pm

Last year I travelled with the Holocaust Educational Trust to Auschwitz and the experience had a profound effect. I had been warned it would, but having been a voracious reader of Holocaust memoirs and literature, I thought I was prepared for what I would see. Others have written more eloquently on this subject. Mark Ferguson, who was on the same trip as me wrote an excellent piece on Labour List to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. As he says, there is no ‘normal’ way to respond to what you see at Auschwitz.

...

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Saturday, 21st January 2012

Matthew Norman, David Brenteron and the end of the compassionate Conservative

3:34pm

Until now I haven’t seen Matthew Norman as a radical figure in British journalism. But his column in the Independent this week was a genuine anti-establishment rant in the best tradition. The headline was a corker: ‘Cameron is the David Brent of welfare reform’ – clear, to-the-point and expressive of the fury of the piece to come (he later describes the man he dubs ‘David Brenteron’ as a ‘galaxy-class hypocrite’ for his government’s betrayal of the disabled in its welfare reforms). It is difficult to choose a single passage from the article as...

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Saturday, 14th January 2012

Labour is the third party, get used to it

10:43am

This has been a terrible week for the Labour leader – truly, bone-crunchingly awful. Inevitable comparisons have been made with the IDS era of the Tory wilderness years, but this is different because it is Labour. Conservative leaders are trophies, symbols of the best or worst the party can aspire to at any given time. But Labour leaders are expected to embody hopes and dreams: they are pragmatic Utopianism made flesh. If all political careers end in failure, then Labour leaders always fail better. Could Ed Miliband fail best of all?

Patrick...

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Saturday, 7th January 2012

It’s not about you, Ed

10:23am

One thing you learn in life is that most people have no idea how they are perceived by others. This is particularly true in Britain, where we don’t generally feel it is polite to tell people what we think of them. Politicians and public figures therefore find themselves in the unusual position of having opinions about them shoved right in their faces. Maurice Glasman’s description of Ed Miliband as having ‘no strategy, no narrative and little energy’ must have been deeply hurtful to the man who elevated a previously little-known academic to...

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Tuesday, 13th December 2011

Nazis, Aidan Burley and memories of the bad old days

4:48pm

News of the antics of Aiden Burley and his friends at a Nazi-themed stag party in France made me think about the strange ways some Tories like to have fun.

When I was at university in the mid-1980s the Tories were in their pomp. My time at Cambridge was sandwiched between the two Thatcher-era landslides of 1983 and 1987 and those of us on the left felt pretty embattled. Through a mixture of ignorance and accident I ended up at a particularly ‘traditional’ college, Magdalene, which was then all-male and...

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