Author Archives: David Thorpe

A line I heard in a public house recently summed up for me the problem with the present incarnation of the Labour Party. A long-standing Labour supporter from Leigh in the north of England said to me “the problem is Labour is now more Hampstead than Hull”.

Data revealed as part of a recent opinion poll conducted for the Evening Standard, bears out my ersthwhile friend’s pithy analysis.

It showed that in London, the party pof Corbyn has more support among the higher earners of the ABC1 demographic than it does among the C2DE group of working class voters.

The …

In the Autumn Statement, Philip Hammond spoke at length about the productivity crisis in the UK, and how he intends to address it.

And doubtless, the creation of higher skilled jobs, of better broadband, of better trains, will all make it easier for UK workers to do more, benefitting the workers and the economy alike.

But what if the productivity statistics are wrong?

Although they hardly belong to the same generation as me, I have three friends or acquaintances who have yet to reach retirement age, but have pension provisions sufficiently large that they are not seeking employment, nor do they claim unemployment benefit.

The government has such folk as a zero in the productivity number, they don’t appear in the unemployment data, nor in the wage data.

Ever lost a lover and then spent hours replaying the whole of the time you had together back in your mind?

If you engage in such reflection it’s often possible to see with hindsight where the cracks started to appear, and the happiness shunted to a road leading to subsequent despair.

Liberals have been shell shocked by a 2016 that has produced a slew of political upsets, and created a stew of uncertainties about the prospects for a progressive future.

The elevation of Donald Trump to the White House is merely the latest in a long line of upsets that have confounded the pundits.

Ed Miliband’s recent declaration that a future Labour government would seek economic growth through a VAT cut is a disappointing deviation from the recent raft of progressive policies announced by Labour.

Miliband has charted a carefully centrist course for his party- embracing economically liberal ideas, such as the mansion tax, and agreeing with the Liberal Democrats on Heathrow expansion, and ID cards.

In these and other areas Miliband has shown himself to be closer to the Orange Book than the Red Flag, that’s why his proposal to cut VAT is a deeply disappointing return to the “conservative” (Tony …

In my wild youth, which was as long as it was fecund, I enjoyed a brief and mutually unsatisfactory fling with Marxism. One of the most fearsome methods used by Marxists to direct debate is to retreat into the world of “ism”’s, where, rather than engage in discussion of the relevant point, opponents are branded with the prevailing pejorative ‘ism’ of the day.

While its probably too late for Marxists to change, it’s rather disturbing when more mainstream political figures fall into the same habits. A recent example of this came when Labour MP Peter Hain, speaking on The …