After months of worry, devolution’s loved ones finally got some news from Dr May. The patient, it turns out, isn’t terminal, but sadly there will be no return to the old, vibrant ways. Devolution has suffered ‘life-changing injuries’. The policy that once formed the centrepiece of Conservative thinking was not absent from yesterday’s manifesto but […]
First the good news. We’re having a vibrant debate about social care funding slap bang in the middle of an election campaign. Now the bad news: the policy that has prompted the debate is a stinker. Theresa May and her advisers deserve credit for instigating the former and derision for the proposing the latter. How […]
Manifestos are always launched with a certain amount of excitement, but none more so than the Conservative Manifesto this morning. While the Lib Dem’s manifesto explicitly positioned them as the party of opposition, the Tory manifesto would reveal what the next government’s priorities and promises would be. Except it didn’t quite do that. After the […]
Reading the Labour manifesto was a bit like watching a magician determined to show you every trick they have ever learned as quickly as possible moving from disappearing an elephant to finding a coin behind your ear and back again. The ambition was admirable, if slightly unhinged, but Lord it was tiring after a while. […]
I was planning for this to be a blog about the implications of Labour’s freshly leaked manifesto for local government. As it turns out this is a very difficult thing to do. Labour’s plans – were they enacted – would amount to such an ambitious and radical overhaul of multiple policy areas that every part […]
The Women’s Equality Party manifesto was published late on Friday, and unlike other party manifestos, has been expressly drafted with the intention for other parties to adopt its policies. While the manifesto focuses on their core aims with no specific section on local government, there are a lot of proposals that touch on services that […]
The issues crying out for solutions in this election remain woefully unaddressed. For years the UK has struggled with a rapidly ageing population, an unbalanced economy and a mess of a housing market. Politicians of every party have promised a lot and delivered little in all of these areas for years but at least they […]
The links between problems like homelessness, substance misuse, mental ill health, violence,domestic abuse and extreme poverty often go unrecognised by services and systems mostly designed to deal with one issue at a time. As such, people rarely get the help they need and cycle in and out of chaos. But in dealing with one problem […]
