Posted by Scott Nicholson

Do we lack ideology within the Labour Party?

Oldlabour logoI recently heard about a working paper that Eliane Glaser had written for the New Economics Foundation. In this Glaser writes about neoliberalism, how she feels politicians and the media reject political ideology as no longer relevant to our pragmatic political culture and about grassroots political alternatives. What interests me, is what this means for the Labour Party?

I personally feel that the Conservative Party have a definite ideology and we have often heard Labour Party MPs criticising cuts, the rolling back of the state and the wish to sell off the East Coast Main Line as ideologically driven. The question is: where is our ideology? Continue reading →

Payday loans, TV and Class

loan sharkWhen was the last time that you saw someone take out a payday loan on a television programme? When did you last see a show in which someone in full time work was struggling to pay the bills? I feel there is a discrepancy between the portrayal of poverty on our televisions and that which is experienced in Britain today.

The Office of Fair Trading believes as much as £1.8 billion a year is lent in the UK by payday lenders and the Public Accounts Committee state that two million Britons currently use payday loans. Ofcom reported that in 2008, 17,000 payday loan advertisement spots were shown on television and this increased to 243,000 in 2011 and 397,000 by 2012. These resulted in 12 million impacts from adult views in 2008,  4.2 billion by 2011 and 7.5 billion impacts by 2012, with each adult watching on average 152 television payday loan adverts in 2012. Continue reading →

Antibiotics and a crisis for capitalism

mixture of several pillsLast March 2013, England’s Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies gave the stark warning that antimicrobial resistance poses “a catastrophic threat“. Unless we act now, she argued, “any one of us could go into hospital in 20 years for minor surgery and die because of an ordinary infection that can’t be treated by antibiotics. And routine operations like hip replacements or organ transplants could be deadly because of the risk of infection.” Continue reading →