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Are we, to quote New Labour in the Nineties, “all middle-class now”? Do we all want to be? Not according to recent polling; far from middle-class norms pervading, British people disproportionately see themselves as working-class.
To understand why, it’s worth …
While the rest of the country shivers, takes an anxious glance at their online bank account and gloomily turns the thermostat even further down, one man has good reason to celebrate as we stagger towards the end of the year. …
For Lauren Townsend, becoming an MP was an obvious choice. Born in Milton Keynes to a working-class family, she has lived in the city all her life, working in a variety of jobs, including as a waitress for TGI Friday …
Only the most optimistic Conservative could believe the party will win the next election. It has been a year since the Tories slipped underwater in the polls and showed any signs of resurfacing. Truss drove the party to electoral wipe-out, …
“Stop the boats!” With that three-word slogan, Tony Abbott, the Leader of the Australian Liberal Party systematically attacked the Labor governments of my boss Julia Gillard and her predecessor and successor Kevin Rudd. The arrival of boats from Indonesia carrying …
In the days following her resignation, the British media appeared to be united in its verdict on Liz Truss: the 44-day premiership was the shortest and most catastrophic in British history. Support for the Conservative Party has plummeted to its …
Shortly before the Government’s ill-fated budget, I had coffee with a Conservative MP who was keen to stress that the Tory party was heading towards disaster. It isn’t going to work, the MP told me, likening Truss’s breakneck dash for …
There’s a moment in politics when you have no moves left. No matter how clever you are, or how right your case is, the walls are closing in and they won’t stop until you are crushed. There is no experience …
The most awkward part of being a vicar is the hanging around. We used to call it a ministry of presence: hovering near the school gate at drop-off time, or wandering aimlessly at the village fête. You do sometimes feel …
A common form of classroom cruelty when I was at school involved a game we called “Contagion”. The instigator would touch the person next to them, having chosen a low-status scapegoat — usually “Holly”, who wore thick glasses and was …
Are feminists welcome in the Labour Party? I mean the old-fashioned kind of feminist, who knows the difference between men and women. The answer appears to be that we’re not. Delegates to this year’s party conference in Liverpool will be …
As Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour gathers for its annual conference in Liverpool, one might be forgiven for seeing the city as a symbol of his party’s greatest strengths. After all, Liverpool’s five seats remained solidly Labour in 2019 while the …
At the heart of Downing Street is “The Grid” — the confidential calendar of media announcements that drives the daily drumbeat of government stories. Departments always compete to have one of their policies slotted in as “Story Of The Day”; …
Tony Blair used to say that the worst thing about being in opposition was that you would wake up every morning thinking about what you wanted to say, while government ministers were waking up thinking about what they were going …
“It’s just not something I talk about to people. It’s almost a heresy not to read The Guardian here.” Diane lives in Didsbury, one of Manchester’s most affluent suburbs. But even here, among the neatly pruned hedges, she feels isolated …