We already have a radical left alternative to UKIP's unpleasant populism, but that doesn't mean there is nothing to learn from them.
David Cameron's lobbying bill exposes the hollowness of his muscular claims about cracking down on crony capitalism. Britain's democracy remains under corporate capture.
The Scottish parliament is on its way to passing a law that would assign a state 'named person' to every child in Scotland until the age of 18. Not only is this an unacceptable intrusion on liberty but it could actually harm the state's ability to track genuinely at risk children like Mikaeel Kuma
The reasons why up to 500,000 people in the UK need emergency food aid are inherently gendered. Low pay, the rise in food prices, and punitive welfare reforms work in tandem with regressive Tory gender policies to push women and the poor to the brink.
One of the most recent advances has been to successfully advocate for the adoption of a Socially-Responsible Licensing policy on intellectual property (including therapeutic agents) developed by University College London, the latest in a series of public research institutions to do so.
The inherent power of numbers explains why all sorts of data, good or bad, can become a potent weapon to shape complacency and subservience in society.
As political rhetoric against migrants reaches a new height, it's Robert Burns' birthday. We're re-publishing a letter he wrote in 1786 to the representative of Scottish Highland landlords, as if from Beelzebub. He is defending the right of Highlanders to migrate to Canada and seek a better life,
Scotland needs to grow its democratic culture - and the independence debate is helping it do just that.
The horrible death of Canadian Alois Dvorzac in UK immigration detention was big news. What if he'd been from Eritrea or Zaire?
In England and Wales the probation service works. The Coalition government is privatising it anyway, at speed. A former probation officer assesses an oversight committee's anxious report on government plans.
NHS England has still not done enough to inform patients of the privacy-busting implications of the new 'care.data' scheme, former home secretary David Davies tells openDemocracy.
