David Brindle will be joining us at Progressive Britain Conference 2024, at our panel ‘Fair Care: Can Labour deliver high quality and accessible care for all?’. Get your tickets to hear more from him there!   How much does Labour need to say about its plans for social care and a National Care Service before the general election? More than it is saying at the moment, certainly, but it has to stop short of giving the Tories anything with which they could fabricate a “death tax” attack line. It’s going to be a difficult balance to strike. The social care sector is crying out for help after m ..read more

Last month, the CPS published the final findings of its research on how to improve its responses to cases of rape. This came as part of Operation Soteria, a national Home Office-funded research programme to transform the way police investigate rape and serious sexual violence. Operation Soteria included the development of a national operating model for rape and serious sexual offences (RASSO), which in 2023 was rolled out across all 43 police forces in England and Wales. These recent findings come from independent research from the University of Warwick, commissioned by the CPS, assessing the ..read more

Rachel Reeves’s recent Mais Lecture set out a powerful framing for Labour’s planned decade of national renewal, adding further detail to what is already being called ‘securonomics’. As Tom Collinge has written for Progressive Britain already, it is rare for front-line politicians to offer such a coherent argument and analysis linking the past with the present with the future. Security has become a totemic issue for progressives in rethinking the role of a modern state an increasingly insecure world, and the Mais Lecture summed up what will be the purpose of government for Labour. It described ..read more

There is a famous story about Margaret Thatcher, that during some internal debate on economic policy she produced a copy of Hayek’s ‘Constitution of Liberty’ from her handbag, slammed it down on the table and declared, “This is what we believe.”. It may have happened, it may have not (the source of the story seems to be a Sotheby’s catalogue) but it has passed into legend because it exemplifies something people already believe, that she was a leader who stood for something and who changed the country in her image. This is a powerful idea, one that sits at the heart of the weird afterlife she e ..read more

The Government has recently introduced new rules banning social care workers brining visa dependents into the UK. Home Office social media ads proudly declared that the Government has “BANNED overseas care workers from brining dependants.” Adding that “120,000 people who arrived last year would no longer be eligible under our new rules.” However, these new rules won’t solve the social care crisis. Instead of looking at the fundamental issue of undervaluing people who work in health and social care, Government decided to focus on some headline. It is high time we reclassify social care as a pro ..read more

A senior diplomat once told me in fluent Yes Minister mandarin that countries encouraging the Irish Republic to join the Commonwealth should do so alphabetically. In short, there was little chance of the UK as the old imperial power being heeded. The impetus in the 1990s for Ireland rejoining the Commonwealth was to assuage unionist fears about a united Ireland and the Irish President backed it. It may grow if unification becomes viable but that seems improbable any time soon. But membership of another international body, Nato, may be different. Traditionally neutral countries, Finland and Swe ..read more

At the Women’s Budget Group, the UK’s leading feminist economics think tank, we took a moment on International Women’s Day to celebrate and take pride in our work as a team of diverse and brilliant women committed to achieving equality for all women. Having spent the week preparing for and assessing the Chancellor’s final pre-election budget through a gendered lens, we are under no illusion of the mountain yet to climb to achieve economic and therefore social and political equality.  While the Chancellor continues to claim that the UK economy has “turned a corner”, the reality for million ..read more

It is hard to decide which will prove to be the greater crime, in these circles. To acknowledge the singular influence of a justly popular (NB not ‘populist’) Tory, or (and I suspect it is this) to acknowledge the singular influence of a mid-table Premier League club that co-habits a city with the current champions. Coe and United. They are Britain’s twin masters of outsized reputation. Neither, it seems, must do very much at all (and, indeed, can continue to do so for quite some time) but when the moment arrives for a headline, nothing sells more ink than Coe & co. So, as it happens, the ..read more

In a world marked by both diversity and polarisation, the United Kingdom stands as a testament to multiculturalism, bringing together people from various backgrounds, ethnicities, and religions. But despite this rich tapestry – or perhaps because of it – there are those who are hell bent on driving division within and between our communities, raising fear and suspicion of our neighbours, and using slurs and untruths about the differences in our races and faiths to push us further apart. Recent atrocities in Gaza and Israel have undoubtedly fanned these flames, providing those negative voices w ..read more

Public trust in the police is crumbling. The YouGov monthly tracker shows that people believing the ‘police are doing a good job’ has declined from 77% in December 2019 to 50% in January 2024. Those who think the ‘police are doing a bad job’ have increased from 17% to 40% over the same period. Talk to retailers facing an epidemic of looting, or anyone waking up this morning to find their homes ransacked, or women reporting sexual assault, and they will tell you the same thing: often the police don’t show up, and if they do, nothing much happens. Or you can ask Andy Cooke, His Majesty’s Chief I ..read more