Today’s newspapers show several pictures of angry protests, with vandalised statues and zero social distancing. They tell a story: of demonstrators who seemed to be alienating potential supporters and risking re-igniting the virus that is destroying the very lives they rightly claim matter. But that’s not a fair picture of what happened at the weekend.
I’ve been a lefty for long enough to be pretty familiar with the sensation of losing elections. I remember weeping in 1992 when John Major’s Tories beat Neil Kinnock’s Labour – but this time hurts like no other. When campaigning for Kinnock in 1992 and Blair in 1997, I had grave misgivings about some their
Until recently, the Tories seemed pretty confident about next week’s election. Despite spending three and a half years blundering over Brexit, they were still comfortably ahead of Labour in the polls. In Jeremy Corbyn, they had an opposition leader denounced as a terrorist sympathiser, an unreconstructed communist, a rabid anti-Semite and — in general —
Every one of the last five years has involved a major electoral event. As a Councillor in my home borough of Wandsworth in London, I’d forgive myself for feeling jaded at the thought of knocking on even more doors as the days get shorter and colder. But when the starting pistol was fired for the
When Patrice Evra and the French national football team lined up at Wembley last night, it was a moment of poignant defiance which earned an instant place in sporting iconography. I shed a tear, but I didn’t sing La Marseillaise. When horrendous things like the attacks on Paris happen, our first instincts are to offer
As a council house tenant who despises the idea of right-to-buy, I have to admit that George Osborne has put me in a quandary. Like all Tories, the Chancellor likes home ownership — after all, people who own rather than rent are more likely to vote Tory. It’s hard for him to repeat Margaret Thatcher’s
When the first riots hit Brixton, I was 12 years old. My mates and I came from south London council estates and, while we were no angels, we certainly couldn’t be described as bad kids. I can’t pretend that I had any real grasp on why people were rioting but I knew it was against
