The United Kingdom has one critical flaw: there are too many English people. There are in fact five times as many English as the other three nations combined. This has always led to the perception of English dominance, and the practical risk that the English can outvote their partner nations. Over the years this problem […]
Let England assume its shape, wrote Orwell in 1941. In a fundamental shift in power the native genius of the people had to be freed; and the inefficiency, class privilege and the rule of the old dispelled. His point was democratic but more so of destiny. Only by the people taking charge could transformative freedom […]
It usually takes a terrorist attack for Britain to discuss seriously the role of religion in civil society. And when the conversation happens, it tends to flow into two channels. One is about what motivates Islamist violence: the role of mosques, the responsibility of the Muslim community, the sources of radicalisation, the effectiveness of security […]
There was a time when everything that mattered in political economy was happening in Manchester. All at once. In the early years of the 1840s, the Anti-Corn Law League, led out of the Free Trade Hall, Manchester by Richard Cobden and John Bright, was pressing the Prime Minister, Robert Peel of Bury, to lift tariffs […]
May 4th saw a quiet revolution in local government when voters in six metropolitan areas — Greater Manchester, Liverpool, Peterborough and Cambridge, Tees Valley, the West of England and the West Midlands — elected metro-mayors. A seventh metropolitan area — the Sheffield city region — will elect a mayor in 2018, and others may well […]
It is possible to avoid doing almost anything. But it is not possible to avoid being somewhere. When immersed in the most absorbing augmented or virtual reality simulator or simply with the benefit of a vivid imagination, you may project yourself elsewhere in space and time. But the truth is that you have to be […]
The country’s future national prosperity is imperilled because a toxic cocktail of threats – including Brexit, automation and a shrinking skills base – risks squeezing the supply of native workers trained to do tomorrow’s jobs – a report from Localis has today warned. In a paper published today entitled ‘In place of work – influencing […]
When Localis published The Making of an Industrial Strategy in March, some in local government saw our call for Strategic Authorities as weighing in on one side of the reorganisation debate. This was as predictable as it was wrong. Let me replay our argument. Places like Greater Manchester, the West Midlands or Cornwall enjoy enhanced […]
The ‘local’ is in vogue. Liberalism isn’t. In the UK, at least. These two points are related. A misrepresentation of liberalism has been cultivated in political discourse – that it’s the playthings of North Londoners obsessed with dinner parties, sexual freedom and Class A drugs. Apparently, the economic and social liberalism that has dominated politics […]
There are many reasons why the campaign to keep Britain in the European Union failed, many of them flowing from a condition that long predated the referendum: at a cultural level, the UK had never joined the European project in the first place. There was institutional membership, signatures on treaties and technical integration. But the […]