Positive thinking

Simon Tormey, University of Bristol And so the UK will head to an election on December 12 to try to resolve the spectacular mess that is Brexit. It’s an outcome many of us had been predicting for some time. The only surprise is that it came about as it did. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has, after all, just managed what seemed nearly impossible a mere few weeks back, which is to both achieve a compromise agreement with the European Union over the terms of withdrawal and convince the House of Commons that it should vote in favour of it , and by a princely majority of 30. So why did Johnson seek an election? And why, at the third attempt, did Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn agree? More generally, will an election get us out of the royal mess the UK finds itself in? It’s not if you Brexit, but how As far as Johnson is concerned, he wants Brexit, but he doesn’t want any old Brexit. He wants a “proper” Brexit, a clean break from the EU that will, as his mantra insists, d...

Paul Gregg, University of Bath   Jeremy Corbyn has signalled that a new Labour government under his premiership would drop social mobility as a policy goal and replace it with a focus on social justice. Labour said it would replace the current Social Mobility Commission with a Social Justice Commission, claiming the move would be a break from 40 years of political consensus around social mobility. But Corbyn’s speech at an education policy event in Birmingham in early June was part sense and part nonsense. He argued that social mobility was the idea that “only a few talented or lucky people deserve to escape the disadvantage they were born into” and it had resulted in “the talents of millions of children being squandered.” Yet the pursuit of social mobility in policy and research has never just been about the opportunities of a few bright poor kids. Such an argument is like arguing that gender equality is merely about getting more women on the boards of FTSE 100 com...