The Starmer project was supposed to last a decade, it might not make it to the spring. Despite having one of the largest majorities in parliamentary history, the political project Starmer leads is so brittle it could snap at any moment . How on earth did a man with a majority of 172 seats lead this political project towards near certain disaster in just over a year?  The answer, or at least one of them, lies at the very heart of the Starmer project and how it was constructed.

In his Debt: The First 5000 Years , anthropologist David Graeber provides a series of insights that, when properly understood, challenge the central tenets of conventional economic thought. Most significantly, Graeber’s claim that all money is debt, and by extension a social relation, fundamentally undermines decades of economic orthodoxy which claims that the government must balance its books and, more generally, that ‘one must pay one’s debts’ . Indeed, if all money is debt

Whilst the Labour Government is being hounded from outside and torn apart from inside, the Tories, who should surely be revelling in such red dismay, are largely excluded from the debate; all heads are turning, whether it’s mainstream media or twitter bubbles, to what Reform have to say. Farage has been bullying the Tories for longer than I can remember, but this is the first time that he and his party of charlatans is squatting in the centre-right voter base that the Tories

To Have or To Be?  turns fifty in a few days. Written by Erich Fromm, a German social psychologist, it analysed the corrosivity of ‘late capitalism’, an epoch most obviously characterised by consumerism. Consumerism comes with constituent attitudes. It encourages us, for instance, to value assets based on their saleability. Entrenched in our consciousness, via the unconscious, Fromm argued that many of these attitudes altered our understanding of ourselves, our contemporaries

Over the summer, Britain’s shocking disparity in education was laid bare, as circa 40% of students failed their maths  and English GCSEs, the worst-performing region being the West Midlands. Despite being the third-largest spending area ( behind only welfare and the NHS ), the UK’s education system is another public service in crisis. Following years of austerity, the lasting effects of COVID-19, and the punishing cost of living crisis, students across all years face the burd