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This morning Keir Starmer chose to frame his offer to the voters under the banners of Security, Prosperity and Respect. He called this a contract with the voters, a framing for which I have little time, and which led to...

The decision to merge the FCO with DfID, and civil service chief Sir Mark Sedwill’s resignation are supposedly part of a wider shake up No.10 has in store for the civil service and the way it works. Over the years,...

Yesterday the Government announced a £750m package to support charities stay afloat during the coronavirus crisis – a move which has been welcomed as a positive step by many in the third sector. But there is a wider question around charity sustainability...

By Daniel Alphonsus “Ripping apart the social fabric” and “destroying how society works”. These apocalyptic portrayals of social media were once the dirge of neo-luddites. Today they are the words of Chamath Palihapitiya, a Silicon Valley titan and one of...

A decade ago, there was one phrase we heard time and again, whether in a focus group, online or on question time – “the politicians are out of touch”. There was an overriding sense that politics was irrelevant, it was...

What do school lunches, social care plans, students’ fees, winter fuel payments, pension pots, energy prices, grammar schools and british foxes all have in common? These are all subjects of the recent string of government U-turns which have been piling...

In the natural world, earthquakes function to dissipate the pressure building up between opposing tectonic plates. In the political world, however, it seems that every earthquake only serves to increase political pressure and entrench divides. Rather than settling the debate,...

While the social, political, economic and geopolitical consequences of a vote to leave the EU continue to spin their way out, the vote itself provides a window into just how divided British society is. Since the early hours of Friday...

Imagine, for a moment, the scene had the markets – and even the 10pm polls – been correct, and the United Kingdom this morning has woken with a 52-48 vote to remain in the European Union. The faces on the...