Neal Lawson
Neal Lawson is a British political commentator, fellow of the Global Policy Institute and chairman of the pressure group Compass. Neal also publishes regularly in the Guardian and the New Statesman. His most recent book is 'All Consuming' published by Penguin Press.
Europe at the Crossroads: It’s Now or Never!
The European Union is one of the grandest projects in human history – the creation of a new economic, and eventually social, super-state out of the ashes of post-war despair. The founders had a cunning plan: They would create an economic imperative around the production of essentials such as coal and steel, convinced that a [...]
An Idea Whose Time Has Come
In 2002 I published an article on a maximum wage in the centre-left theory journal Renewal. The idea of putting a ceiling on what people could earn was left-field, to say the least. It was more a thought experiment than a serious attempt to influence political debate. The article and the idea sank without much [...]
We need a Patient Explanation of Sensible Keynesianism
The political debate in the UK is now all about the size of the state. A recession kicked off by the greed and risk taking of the bankers and financiers has been allowed to flip into a war between the parties about how much public services can and should be cut as we look down [...]
Towards a Reformed Conservatism? I don’t think so.
The big political event in Britain over the last week was the launch of Phillip Blonds’ new Tory think tank ResPublica. I’ve known Phillip for a few years – since he was a humble academic in far flung Cumbria – and have watched him move at incredible speed to the centre of debate under the [...]
The Principles of Communal Reciprocity
Jerry Cohen’s camping-trip fable offers a down-to-earth approach to social-democratic principles.
Being a socialist often requires a leap of faith. Though there are real institutions we can point to that at least in part embody key socialist values such as equality and community – the NHS of course springs to mind – the cause of [...]
The missed Opportunities of the Labour Party Conference
I have just returned from the British Labour Party’s annual conference. It was a sobering affair. Gordon Brown and his ministers are trying to start a ‘fight back’ against the Conservatives who, at the start of the week, held a commanding lead in the opinion polls. This is a tough ask. Any party that has [...]
The Social Democratic Challenge
Social democracy, in any meaningful sense of the word, has been in crisis for decades. Even amongst the Nordics the game for years has been accommodation to capital and not leadership of it. In the immediate post-war years social democracy set the agenda, next came a period of capital accommodating itself to our social agenda [...]