A year ago, the Coalition pledged to end the practice of child detention in the UK. Yet the real agenda of the UK Border Agency has not changed. The detention and enforced removal of children remains a key aspect of immigration control. Can the government be pressured into honouring their promise?
Nobody has raised real debates in national or supranational parliaments to discuss the excesses of the securitarian discourse. Quite the opposite: the left has adopted the security discourse wholesale as its own and entered into a kind of auction with the right.
Centre-right parties across Europe are announcing the failure of multiculturalism. We are witnessing a co-ordinated revival of Enoch Powell's idea of the aggressive outsider out to dominate the rest; only now race and immigration are being played out on the terrain of culture and religion
Last Thursday's election revealed the power of the traditional British establishment. The lessons of history show that the left must never underestimate the Tories
Right-wing populist parties tend to be anti-multinational and anti-intellectual: they endorse nationalistic, nativist, and chauvinistic beliefs, embedded - explicitly or coded - in common sense appeals to a presupposed shared knowledge of ‘the people’.
Much of the blame for the No to AV vote lays with Nick Clegg, Compass and the Electoral Reform Society. But we must also acknowledge the illegitimate and ultimately undemocratic nature of referendums in the UK
Scottish independence would spell the end of Great Britain. The UK would live on, but would need to be radically re-defined and re-designed. Constitutional reformers should grasp the opportunity presented by Scotland’s possible departure from the Union would open the doors to large-scale constitut
Why is widespread social anxiety fuelling xenophobia rather than criticism of neoliberal capitalism? What role has the state played? Have we arrived at the paradoxical situation where the best we can do is to call on the state to do its job?
Liberal Democrat life peer Trevor Smith sets out the implications of 5 May for his party. He argues that, while Nick Clegg will not resign as a result of crushing electoral results nationwide, they cannot return to 'business as usual'. The Lilb Dems must formulate a set of objectives, to restore p
Why did the Yes to AV campaign fail, and what can we learn from its mistakes? Compass campaigns organiser Joe Cox and writer and researcher Ralph Scott set out four reasons why the campaign failed to convince the public to vote for reform on 5 May
Arguing for electoral reform in isolation from a full bloodied constitutional settlement that includes the UK's national question was far too limited and asked to fail.
The contrast between the SNP's resounding victory in Scotland and Britain's decision to embrace our current FPTP voting system suggests that we have entered an explosive political decade. The 'Scottish Spring' signals an opportunity for a genuinely democratic party south of the border
