Originally written for the New Statesman The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Volume IV: The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro, Bodley Head, 736pp, £35 What ultimately matters in politics is what you leave behind. Lyndon Johnson left behind the second most substantial legacy of any US president of the 20th century, after Franklin [...]
From The Guardian The reintroduction of the CSE is about the worst reform imaginable. It will divide all secondary students into sheep and goats, and write some off to a second-class education, second-class qualifications and second-class prospects. This was precisely the world I grew up in. Performance at GCSE is too low. Last year [...]
Written for The Times, 26th June 2012 Yesterday’s announcement that Liverpool College is to become an academy is perhaps the single biggest breach in the Berlin Wall between the private and state sectors of education in recent decades. It opens the way for many more private schools to join the state-funded system – giving [...]
Originally posted in The Spectator’s Coffee House blog Last year Mossbourne Academy in Hackney celebrated one of the most remarkable achievements ever recorded by a state comprehensive school with a largely low-income intake. It got eight students into Cambridge and another 70 into Russell Group universities. If every comprehensive was in this league, social [...]
Originally written for the Financial Times Going South: Why Britain will have a Third World Economy by 2014, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, Palgrave Macmillan, £14.99 Declinism is back, and this is one of its most brutal and eloquent expressions to date. We aren’t just going through a Great Recession, argue Larry [...]
First published at the Labour Lords blog In the last two months, Peers have spent 25 hours debating House of Lords reform. Today they will spend two and half hours debating youth unemployment, and only one backbench Conservative is taking part. That doesn’t say much about the Government’s priorities, particularly in tackling what Nick [...]
From the BBC website: The HS2 rail scheme might not be ready before 2030 because of “dither and delay” by ministers, former Transport Secretary Lord Adonis has said. The Labour peer said he feared the legislation needed for the project may not be passed within this parliament. Phase one of the £33bn high-speed rail link, [...]
London needs to start planning now for a new Crossrail line – Crossrail 2 – linking south-west, central, and north-east London, if the capital is to keep moving in and beyond the 2030s. A plan for Crossrail 2 is set out today in the report of a working group which I chaired for London First, [...]
This is taken from my opening speech to the Progress annual conference on 12th May Approaching mid-term, a significant political shift is taking place in Labour’s direction. Partly this is mid-term coalition blues. But something more fundamental is happening. The Tories promised their economic plan would deliver growth and jobs. Two years on it [...]
The advance of elected mayors continues apace, despite the negative votes in city referendums last week. The London mayoral contest dominated May’s local elections. London’s transport, and much else besides, has been transformed for the better by twelve years of the mayoralty. Polls show more Londoners now favour independence for the capital than the abolition [...]