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Regeneration without participation
William Bradley is disappointed by a council's failure to listen to locals on urban regeneration.
When Jules Pipe, the mayor of Hackney, accused those opposing the regeneration of Dalston as wanting to ‘keep Hackney crap’, eponymous badges popped up everywhere, with local residents displaying their support for exactly that. But it seems that Hackney Council are still intent on cleaning up the borough, as confirmed by recent news that Hackney Council have granted permission for the demolition of the Foundry (despite being in a designated conservation area), to be replaced by a ...
Using the old politics to bring in the new
Dan Leighton calls for the public to have a direct say in electoral reform.
Thirteen years after New Labour came to power and three months before an election, the carrot of electoral reform is once again being dangled before us. Yet what an emaciated carrot it is. By restricting reform to a referendum on the Alternative Vote, the Prime Minister has deceptively conflated the question of whether we should change the electoral system with what type of system we should have. In attempting to pre-determine the nature of electoral reform from above, Gordon Br...
Good consumers
Peter Bradwell on why the iPad is not a mark of social progress.
Much of January was taken up by being told Apple were about to launch a ‘tablet’, and hearing that the device would probably look like a massive iPhone. A short time later Apple launched a tablet that looked like a massive iPhone. The funniest thing I read about this was that Apple are really good at keeping secrets. Actually, like all good suspense writers, Apple recognise that knowing what is coming next is much more exciting and scary than not knowing. And like with the thirt...
License to skill
Max Wind-Cowie warns the Children, Schools and Families Bill doesn't do enough to drive up teaching standards.
This week the excitingly named Children, Schools and Families Bill is before Parliament. The title of the Bill hints at its extraordinary breadth – it covers everything from Family Law to Ofsted – but it’s the impact of this Bill on schools and teachers that I find most interesting. In this regard the Bill sums up what has been wrong about the Government’s approach to schools and teachers; not because it is moving in the wrong direction but because it&rsqu...
Andy Burnham's free swimming
Prevention is the key to healthcare argued Andy Burnham MP in his speech to Demos.
Andy Burnham MP, Secretary of State for Health, made a passionate case for early intervention and prevention in healthcare as he addressed a full room of officials and press this afternoon at Demos. 'I can genuinely imagine a smoke-free future,' he said, defending the Government’s smoking ban against the inevitable charges of illiberalism from Demos’ Director, Richard Reeves. Despite warm-hearted scepticism from those such as Danny Finkelstein of The Times, pre...
Against parenting
Ollie Haydon-Mulligan says that family warmth and family wealth aren't competitors.
The problem with David Cameron’s speech at Demos earlier this month wasn’t the speech itself but the way it took shape in the media, as a claim that parenting matters more for children’s development than a family’s material wellbeing. It isn’t that this particular claim is untrue. It’s that the claim threatened to frame the child poverty debate as a row over the relative importance of ‘warmth’ against ‘wealth’. Framed like this, the ...
The 'Major miracle'
Richard Reeves finds a curious trajectory of inequality in the UK.
If the principal weapons against inequality were reports, commissions and panels, we'd have reached an egalitarian nirvana decades ago. This week's report from the National Equality Panel - dubbed an 'inequality bible' by Harriet Harman - comes after dozens of think-tank reports, the publication of official poverty figures. But this report is important. Hills, when it comes to this kind of research, is the real deal - the Godfather of the Gini coefficient. The report he a...
More to gain from training
Pippa Read defends Train to Gain against recent criticisms.
Train to Gain, the government's flagship £2bn workforce training programme, has just received another bashing. Hot on the heels of the criticisms of the National Audit Office last summer, the Public Accounts Committee has now judged the overall financial management of the project to be poor. There is room for improvement. A product of the 2006 Leitch Review, which recognised Britain's woeful skills shortage, the programme has not driven up the demand for training among employ...
The way we think now
Richard Reeves looks at what the Social Attitudes Survey means for party politics.
At last, amid the political positioning and rhetoric about ‘broken Britain’ and Etonian playing fields, a clear-eyed view the state of the nation from the annual Social Attitudes Survey published today. Britain, in short, is becoming much more tolerant of diverse lifestyles; more sceptical about the role of the state as an antidote to economic inequality; and less certain about the value of parliamentary democracy. Only a third of the population thinks gay relat...
Prohibition never works
Marcus Fergusson takes issue with the bias around digital rights.
The Digital Economy Bill is struggling: an extraordinary 300 amendments are being discussed in the Lords, mostly centred on proposals to prevent illegal file sharing by making internet service providers (ISPs) tell pirates they are breaking the law, and especially on Lord Mandelson’s 'three strikes' idea under which repeat offenders would be disconnected. The Bill is flawed in three ways. First, evidence for the scale of the problem is biased. Rights holders like BMI say illega...
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