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
Category Archives: Writings
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
Dreamers of a new day?
This really doesn’t seem an apposite title for a blog post as we head, in a matter of hours, into May 6th and a possible hung parliament or worse, a Tory victory. But it IS the title of my latest published article; for anyone interested in our rich radical past, please read my New Statesman… Continue Reading
On Burma and Bigotgate……..
Read Melissa Benn’s latest pieces on the web. Further comment on ‘bigotgate’ in Public Finance, and a piece on one of Burma’s most celebrated activists, the poet and comedian Zarganar, recently sentenced to thirty five years for criticising the government’s handling of cyclone Nargis in 2008, on the Guardian’s Liberty Central section of Comment is… Continue Reading
Election matters, and why this election matters so much
Two excellent pieces today on separate aspects of the election campaign. Francis Gilbert has written a cogent piece on Comment is Free on why Tory policies for schools will spell disaster for our education system. In the main paper Natasha Walter analyses the deeper reasons for the absence of women from the front line of… Continue Reading
Recommended
Very good piece by Seumas Milne in The Guardian today on what Tory plans, particularly on education, might really mean. Continue Reading
The single mother’s manifesto by JK Rowling
‘David Cameron says the ‘nasty party’ that castigated people like me has changed. I’m not buying it’ says JK Rowling in The Times this week. Continue Reading
Regressive, Stagnant and Contradictory: Fawcett’s damning verdict on parties’ Manifesto
For the duration of the election campaign I am posting items in the news I find of interest/relevance to our understanding of what this election really means. Below, a press release from the Fawcett Society on what the main party manifestos promise – or fail to promise – in relation to women. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:… 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…
