Category: Uncategorized

  • Hearts, minds, votes: Voting demographics, social attitudes and values in the UK

    I created this document as a personal project because I wanted to collect relevant data and to better understand how approaches to understanding social attitudes and moral values might influence framing and messaging. I hope you find it useful and welcome any feedback. Contents: Demographic overviewDemographic data on recent voting and other trends Economic and social attitudesOpinion…

  • Three things we learned about how people see the economy

    Are we talking about the economy in completely the wrong way? Framing the Economy is the largest ever study of how the British public understand the economy and how progressive organisations might communicate more effectively. The two-year project, run by NEF, the New Economy Organisers’ Network, the Frameworks Institute and the Public Interest Research Centre, included…

  • Power to the people (of Preston)

    What unifies the disparate measures that fall under the community wealth building banner is their potential to disperse power, wealth, and ownership away from centralized elites and into local communities. And while some of the steps can individually appear small and piecemeal – which is partly a strength as it means they can be put…

  • Campaigning beyond our comfort zones

    Cross-posted to Open Labour, 5/2/16 A recent report by Labour’s centre-right RedShift group on “reinvigorating Labour’s brand” calls for Labour to be more “surprising” and “counterintuitive”. An unnamed advisor is quoted as saying: “We have to marry [resilient] Labour voters with a wider group by saying something surprising. Labour has not said anything surprising for…

  • Should we be less “radical” and more “sensible”?

    First published in Compass, 7/7/15 Did Labour lose the election because it was too left wing? That’s become a standard explanation in right-wing newspapers and among some Labour commentators. But Hopi Sen – who sits on the right of the party and would be the first to complain about this sort of thing – has a different take: “Labour…

  • We need a new set of economic responses if we are not to be utterly defeated

    First published in New Left Project, 11/5/15 Are you ‘Old Labour’ or ‘New Labour’? For ‘wealth creators’ or against them? A supporter of ‘aspiration’ or not? The whole debate around Labour’s future direction is being framed in terms that are obsolete or meaningless, or both. The post-war social democratic model dependent on redistribution through taxation…

  • We must find ways to devolve economic power

    First published in openDemocracy, 22/4/14 The left’s love-in with devolution deepened with last month’s Compass-organised letter to the Guardian, signed by everyone from Progress on Labour’s right to Class on Labour’s left, alongside Greens and others. They may have been pushing at an open door in their call for Labour to devolve power. Both Ed Miliband…

  • Some things I wrote earlier…

    Book review: Reclaiming Public Ownership, by Andrew CumbersWe Own It, 5/2/14 Book review: In Place of Austerity, by Dexter WhitfieldOpenDemocracy, 5/1/12 Taking back the centre: how the left in Britain can regain its voiceOpenDemocracy, 30/9/11 Social media has transformed protest – and the Daily MailGuardian, 8/1/11 The Tories’ campaign is stuck in a time warpEvening…