Outside In

A few months ago I began writing about ‘social conservatism’ and the Labour tradition, and the ruckus currently taking place with those social liberals who like to call themselves ‘progressive’, and those who aren’t quite signed up to the whole project and are therefore labelled, by the ‘progressives’, as ‘social…

A post here from Tom Harris today who argues that ‘progressives’ are ill-at-ease in the Tory Party, and naturally belong in the Labour movement, whose raison d’etre is at one with the ‘progressive’ agenda. You’ll have to read the post yourself to witness the crudeness of the caricatures, but needless…

Here’s an article of mine that has just been put up on the new ResPublica blog (“the Disraeli Room”) – read it here. Or, if link-clicking isn’t your thing… There can be little doubt that the most fashionable idea in contemporary political debate is that of ‘localism’. It is an…

Quite often one comes across a totemic issue that not only seems ill-suited to the tradition in which it has nested, but also seems to go against everything it is that particular tradition proclaims itself to stand for. And it seems to me that, for the left, the ‘Living Wage’…

It is finally becoming evident that the free-marketeers want anything but free markets. Indeed, if recent events are anything to go by, it rather seems that free-marketeers are in fact committed to nothing less than the absolute liberty of the biggest and strongest to go about distorting and perverting the…

A wonderfully written piece here by A. N. Wilson who, whilst not my usual cup of tea, captures the pernicious consequences of dehumanised capitalism, cherished of neo-liberal economists and ‘free-marketeers’ alike, brilliantly well.  As I’m sure you’ll agree, he makes a better fist of articulating the wider problem than Douglas…

One of the phrases one often hears is that the rapid leap in media and communications technology, amongst other things, has brought the world closer together, has helped create a ‘global village’, and enabled people to overcome those old boundaries that once proved obstacles to unity. Which is all very…

One thing I have noticed more and more just recently is the tendency of so many to conflate between ‘conservative’ thought and libertarianism. It is on the blogosphere where the lines are most noticeably blurred, where a close-knit community of conservative and libertarian bloggers tend to find common voice on…

Reading Next Left’s blog today, I was struck by a passage regarding the problems inherent to any meritocratic structuring of society, and thought I might as well offer a few speculative (and no doubt rather more naive) thoughts of my own. Now I must confess that, until a few years…

They’re at it again. The Russell Group of leading universities can once again be found prophesying doom if they fail to receive the generous subsidies to which their industry has become accustomed over the past few years. Apparently, if funding drops, we’re likely to see a ‘devastating effect not only…