‘Stop knocking comprehensives. They work’. Bloody hell. That was my first thought on discovering the author of this spirited post on comprehensives on the Guardian website. I don’t agree with everything in it but it’s such a rare genre, the pro comprehensive piece, that I have to reproduce it, even if it does come from… Continue Reading
Author Archives: Melissa Benn
Meet the Wife
Read Melissa Benn’s latest review, of Laura Bush’s autobiography Spoken from the Heart, published in yesterday’s Guardian Review. Continue Reading
Building Schools for the Favoured
Tomorrow, July 19th, at noon, I will be part of a contingent of Queens Park Community School (QPCS) parents and students joining a lobby organised by teachers’ unions against the government’s cuts to the Building Schools for the Future budget, QPCS itself has lost 17 million pounds but a lot of Brent schools are far… Continue Reading
The Misogynist – well, nearly but not quite…
Read Melissa Benn’s latest review: of Piers Paul Read’s The Misogynist in today’s Independent. Continue Reading
Thinking the unthinkable
Frank Field’s feckless fathers, by Melissa Benn Posted in: PF blog 11:09 am, 30 June 2010 | Melissa Benn For as long as I can remember, Frank Field has been thinking the unthinkable. Now part of David Cameron’s cost-cutting team, some old ideas are being re-cycled in a new supposedly culturally and politically sensitive form.… Continue Reading
Labour contenders give it a twirl…..
Read Melissa Benn’s latest piece on the Labour leadership contest, here, in this week’s Public Finance. Continue Reading
Five ways Labour might change
Read my latest Comment is Free post on the Guardian website about ways Labour might change following its electon defeat. The idea for the piece first came to me after I went to a local Labour Party meeting, following the election; like many people, the election itself and Labour’s relatively narrow defeat reminded me of… Continue Reading
Not new but next….
My latest post from Public Finance. – with a little bit added! It’s official: New Labour is no more. We have it on the word of one of the previous government’s sharpest political brains, former Foreign Secretary David Miliband, the first to throw his hat into the ring for the party leadership. With his trademark… Continue Reading
Where are the women?
Great piece by Katharine Viner in The Guardian today about the dearth of women or indeed any diversity in the new Con/dem coalition and how this reflects the general absence of women from mainstream political life over the last few weeks. Read it and weep. And then get organised…… Continue Reading
Strange days indeed
In this strange post election time everyone is trying to make sense of what has happened and what should happen next. (This blog for instance got a lot of hits yesterday which I can only presume was people keen to find others with whom to share the surreal political moment; sorry but I was glued… Continue Reading
Latest writing
THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY
The crisis of the meritocracy: Britain’s transition to mass education since the Second World War PETER MANDLER, 2020 Oxford: Oxford University Press 361pp, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780198840145 Cambridge historian Peter Mandler has a fundamentally optimistic story to tell about the growth of universal education in Britain over the last seventy years and one can sense… Continue reading…
Latest news & events
A Cold War Tragedy
Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’ Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival. More information here. Continue reading…
