John Harris

Labour’s cluelessness leaves the Lib Dems to rally those against hard Brexit | John Harris

Friday, October 28th, 2016

If Tim Farron’s party can overcome the legacy of coalition, Witney and Richmond Park suggest it could give a voice to the groundswell of anxiety and outrage

Mapping out the likely features of the Brexit Age, it is hard to know where to start. Headlines about government support for the Nissan factory in Sunderland and GDP rising immediately after the referendum do not detract from the big picture: the UK’s post-EU future remains gloomy, and then some. We are, it seems, at the start of a new era of border queues, inflation, renewed austerity, with the prospect of rising unemployment, and the exit from Britain of banksand other financial services. They may be modern villains, but they are also one of the only dependable sources of tax revenue we’ve got left.

Related: The Richmond Park byelection is a golden opportunity to fight Brexit | Hugo Dixon

The snowballing Brexit disaster will create a groundswell of public anxiety and outrage

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Britain’s political modernisers have been crushed, and their replacements have no vision | John Harris

Friday, October 21st, 2016

Technology will have a huge impact on us all, but Britain’s new generation of leaders look back to grammar schools and railway nationalisation despite the convulsions ahead

“If you had to choose any time in the course of human history to be alive, you’d choose this one.” So says Barack Obama in the editorial that opens the “Frontiers issue” of Wired magazine he has just guest-edited. On the face of it, it’s a sentence so banal that it barely merits comment. But set against the backward-facing mindset currently defining so much of politics – from the rise and fall of Donald Trump to the mess of crabby nostalgia that drove a lot of the vote for Brexit – his words seem defiant.

Related: A world without work is coming – it could be utopia or it could be hell | Ryan Avent

Related: Should we scrap benefits and pay everyone £100 a week?

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Teaching assistants on strike: ‘If I don’t fight the pay cuts, I can’t look my daughter in the eye’

Tuesday, October 11th, 2016

These stalwarts of the classroom help parents who are struggling and children who are falling behind. In some English schools they now face pay cuts of 25%. Do they think they can win?

At the gate of Lakeside primary school on the south-eastern edge of Derby, a mini-drama is afoot. It’s 8 o’clock on a Thursday morning, and a small group – most of them women – are forming a picket line, while others hand out leaflets to parents.

Some mums and dads quietly bemoan the fact that the school will close at midday and that they have had to make childcare arrangements. But many are loudly supportive. One man, Mark Stacey, announces that, rather than cross the line, he is taking his two kids home.

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Don’t let England be rebranded as a nation of bigots | John Harris

Tuesday, October 11th, 2016

People power, not politicians, led the fight against intolerance in the 1970s. We need that grassroots spirit again

To quote those legendary Englishmen the Beatles, it was 20 years ago today (or thereabouts). In autumn 1996, the Tory-run Department of National Heritage issued a press release featuring the term “Cool Britannia”. Tony Blair and the prime movers of New Labour were already on that political wavelength. In his conference speech the previous year, Blair had said that he aspired to make Britain “a young country … with a common purpose, ideals we cherish and live up to … ready for the day’s challenge: ambitious, idealistic, united”. By the following year, a new Labour government was working on nothing less than “the rebranding of Britain”. Now, ruinously, we have been rebranded again.

Related: Walls Come Tumbling Down by Daniel Rachel review – where have all the political musicians gone?

The liberal left also shares responsibility for leaving the question of what England is to more destructive voices

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