In January 1993 Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair announced a key pillar of the opposition’s future election policy in a New Statesman op-ed. He wrote that a Labour government would be ‘tough on crime and tough on the underlying causes of crime’ – a phrase that would be often repeated after he ascended to
Among the first things I did when moving to the UK from Australia was sign up to three British institutions: Arsenal football club, the NHS and the Labour party. Sure, Jeremy Corbyn’s party is further to the left than the Australian iteration. But following Labour’s surge in the 2017 general election there was something alluring
The timing of the Liberal Democrats’ leadership hustings on Friday could not have been better for Jo Swinson and Ed Davey. The two leadership hopefuls took to the lectern on an historic day when YouGov recorded the once floundering party as leading in its latest polling. This, along with the party’s recent success in the
Australian Labor leader Bill Shorten will forever have the ignominious label of the man who lost the unlosable election – Australia’s answer to Neil Kinnock. After six years of the conservative Liberal-National coalition government, and three different prime ministers, Labor were considered the clear favourite to win Saturday’s general election. The government had been wracked
In 2007, then-Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd labelled climate change ‘the great moral challenge of our generation’. Rudd is right: if no action is taken on rising CO2 emissions then the world is in trouble. That’s why it is so disappointing that my country, Australia, has failed to tackle the problem and remains one of the
To understand the decay of the Labour Party since 2015, look no further than its London youth wing. London Young Labour (LYL) is the Momentum-controlled home of the capital’s under-27 Labour members. It is also a sparkling example of the worst kinds of regressive identity politics popping up on campuses across Britain. As a 26-year-old
