Articles by Ben Jackson

Poverty and the Labour Party

Does Keir Starmer really want to be remembered as the Labour prime minister who presided over an increase in child poverty?

Social Democracy without Foundations? David Marquand and the Historiography of the ‘Keynesian Welfare State’

Considering David Marquand's historical writings of the 1970s to the 1990s and placing them in dialogue with other historians.

Beveridge’s Wager

'Misery generates hate' ran the epigraph of William Beveridge’s 1944 report Full Employment in a Free Society.

A Hundred Years of Labour Governments

Can there ever be a period of Labour government that is sustained in length and does not end in cries of betrayal?

A Hundred Years of Labour Governments

Can there ever be a period of Labour government that is sustained in length and does not end in cries of betrayal?

Introduction: Scottish Politics After Sturgeon

Where stands Scottish politics? It's a question with significant implications.

Scottish Politics After Sturgeon

Where stands Scottish politics? It's a question with significant implications for next year's UK general election and for the dynamics of British politics thereafter.

Review: Politics and the People: Scotland 1945–79, by Malcolm Petrie

Can Gordon Brown and Keir Starmer Save the UK?

Opportunities don’t come around very often, so let’s hope Labour is able to seize this one.

How Labour's Two Sides Might be Reconciled

The solution is surely to identify substantive policy overlaps between the two sides that would enable both factions to feel that they have gained a victory.

Hard Labour

There is something about the Labour Party that makes otherwise rigorous left-wing thinkers misplace their critical faculties.

English Votes for English Laws

The Conservatives have in effect become an English sovereigntist party.

Progressive Alliances

The Politics of the Labour Manifesto

At the outset of the 2017 election campaign there seemed to be a good chance that the Labour Party would be broken – possibly irreparably – on the anvil of nationalism.

Learning from New Labour

There is More Political Space for a Liberal Immigration Policy Than Ever

One lesson of Powell is that alarmism about immigration always ends up redounding to the discredit of its exponents.

Whatever Happened to the Conservative Party?

It has been widely observed that something has gone awry.

The Politics of Human Rights: A Response to Lord Sumption’s Reith Lectures

How convincing is the historical account that underpins Sumption’s argument?

The Labour Leadership Election: Getting it Together

On closer investigation the disagreement between left and right is less about policy, and more about entitlement.

Review: The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution. Voice, Class, Nation, by Scott Hames

The chronology of devolution has been obsessively picked over in Scottish public culture, but there remain sharp differences of opinion about its causal drivers.

A Crisis for Devolution?

To see the value of devolution, especially in the current crisis, it is worth remembering why it was introduced in the first place.

Any Illusions About the Conservatives Being Swept From Office Should be Abandoned Now

Some commonplace beliefs about the Conservative party have been tested over the last few months and most of them look wobbly.

British Politics Beyond the End of History: Marx, Hayek and Andrew Gamble

Although Marxism as an organised force is a shadow of its Cold War heyday, we seem to live in a time when calling someone a Marxist can still inspire a strange political frisson.

Liberty After Neoliberalism

The Covid pandemic has raised hard questions about liberty and the role of the state – and many Conservatives have been discomfited by the answers that their own government has given.