John Harris

The collapse into spite and bullying is symptomatic of the party’s disaffection from its working class base
Has there ever been a stranger political occasion than Tuesday night’s marathon meeting of Labour’s national executive committee? In an abridged version, the events of those six hours may one day make a good play, awash not just with division and bitterness, but plenty of bathos – from the moment when “the office took a delivery of…

This is a 20th-century party adrift in a new reality – its social foundations in trade unions and heavy industry either vanished or in deep retreat
The Labour party must currently be thinking collective thoughts akin to the old card player’s term: Who dealt this mess anyway? More than 80% of its MPs are now formally estranged from not just the leader, but from the 40 other MPs who support him. In a cruel…

One subject dominated political debate in Glastonbury’s activist area – but all is not lost
On Friday morning, I stood ankle-deep in the mud, held out a microphone, and asked the people walking away from the Pyramid stage to sum up their feelings about the EU referendum result in one word. I was after gut feelings rather than eloquence, and out they came: “Crap”, “Bollocks”, “Shocking”. Only one passerby went the other way: “Great –…

Brexit is about more than the EU: it’s about class, inequality, and voters feeling excluded from politics. So how do we even begin to put Britain the right way up?
“If you’ve got money, you vote in,” she said, with a bracing certainty. “If you haven’t got money, you vote out.” We were in Collyhurst, the hard-pressed neighbourhood on the northern edge of Manchester city centre last Wednesday, and I had yet to find…

Leave voters aren’t lemmings jumping off a cliff, and the left urgently needs to understand their choices

EU referendum polling day – live updates

What a strange, unsettling, anxious moment this is. I mean that partly in the sense of vote, but also of the emotions that are still raw after the death of Jo Cox, and what the last month or so has highlighted about the state of what…