News & Insight

Going spare: How to deal with under-occupancy

13 February 2014

The UK is in the grip of a housing crisis. This is nothing new; over the course of the second world war the UK lost almost half a million homes to a combination of the Blitz and doodlebug attacks. Add...

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The Hugo Young lecture: Why teachers and doctors know better

12 February 2014

You need to judge any contribution to debate about the future of public services by a ‘three Ps’ test. The first P is power, and in his Hugo Young lecture Ed Miliband passed with flying colours. A Labour government would stand...

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Movement politics and shared sacrifice: Understanding Miliband's Hugo Young lecture

11 February 2014

In the wake of Ed Miliband's foray into the ever-stormy waters of public service reform the analysis ranges from the inevitable Thatcher and Blair comparisons to meditations on how the speech represented either a "buried Fabianism" or that "dice are loaded...

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Making work pay: The story so far

11 February 2014

The economy is growing, but where are the celebrations? The recent preliminary GDP figures showed 0.7 per cent growth in the last quarter of 2013, but the response has been muted. Business secretary Vince Cable pre-empted the figures by declaring...

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Responsible capitalism in a globalised world

11 February 2014

In the Fabian Society’s new foreign policy pamphlet ‘One nation in the world’ I wrote about the need for a more joined-up government infrastructure to achieve our foreign policy objectives. This included a rallying call for greater consistency between our...

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Putting the public into public services

10 February 2014

Peter Kellner has written of late on how policies themselves do not necessarily have to be popular. They have to be believed. They have to be credible. The example given by Kellner was that the 50p tax announcement by Ed...

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