Positive thinking

One freezing night of January 2019, 150 people packed into a church hall in the Hertfordshire town of Stevenage, some 30 miles north of London. Students, teachers, support staff, parents and grandparents had come to support their community’s secondary school against the Conservative government’s plan to hand control to a super-wealthy couple. A young man called Dylan Jones, the school’s “head student”, stood up to speak. “I have been part of the school since 2012,” he said. “It’s the best it’s ever been. It’s just a shame that those who have not had the same opportunity as me to see every student, every class, and those who have not seen us for the true community that we are, have decided that they can push us around because we do not have a voice.” In England today almost 9,000 schools with more than 4 million pupils operate outside of their democratically-accountable local authorities. These schools are state-funded but independent of local control. The charitable trusts that r...

According to new research by openDemocracy, almost half a million pounds of highly targeted donations from secretive Tory funding clubs bankrolled the Conservatives’ historic gains in Labour-held constituencies in the Midlands and northern England. Although this ‘dark money’ funding is technically legal under UK law, transparency campaigners and opposition parties have demanded a review of British election laws and called on the Conservatives to end the secrecy and publish the names of all those who bankrolled the party’s victory.   Dozens of victorious Conservative candidates in so-called ‘red wall’ seats received significant cash injections from secretive Tory funding clubs, much of it without any need to identify the donors.  Many of the same winning ‘red wall’ candidates also received cash from individual billionaires and obscure companies based in London, far from the constituencies where the money was spent.   The Conservative Pa...