OPINION

Hope you had a good summer.  With the conference season now in full sway, we just wanted to let you know about the Social Liberal Forum's own plans next week.  Please do come to our fringe meeting next Monday.

PARTY CONFERENCE

The Social Liberal Forum will be holding a joint fringe meeting with Compass on Monday 21 September at 20:15-21:15 in Connaught 1, the Connaught Hotel.  "Overcoming political barriers to equality" will fea

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I read The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better whilst watching the last two seasons of The Wire and so Chris Grayling's claims last week that parts of the UK were beginning to resemble the Baltimore portrayed in that TV series did cause me to smile wryly. Grayling's

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By Duncan Brack This article was originally published in Reinventing the State: Social Liberalism for the 21st Century

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Yesterday, Health Secretary Andy Burnham wrote an article for the Guardian aiming to set out the clear blue water between Labour and the Conservatives on the National Health Service. In doing so, he inadvertantly demonstrated quite how vapid Labour's vision for the NHS really is. It was summed up in one sentence:

For Labour, it all comes down to defending the N in NHS.

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By Richard S. Grayson This article was originally published in Reinventing the State: Social Liberalism for the 21st Centur

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Writing on Comment is Free today, Vince Cable argues:

There is now a compelling case for a high pay commission to measure the claims of top earners that their rewards are justified and necessary, even if they offend natural justice and our sense of fairness. Britain increasingly resembles one of those developing countries whose economy and society are dominated by internationally mo

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The debate in the us about healthcare seems to be getting increasingly insane, with Obama being compared to Hitler, Sarah Palin spreading lies about "death panels" and assorted nonsense. A repeat of the debate in the early 1990s when the Clintons attempted to introduce healthcare reforms of their own was to be expected, but this debate is decidely more wacky. One interesting side aspect of this debate has bee

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Yesterday, obscure fact fans, was the 98th anniversary of the first Parliament Act*. The Parliament Act 1911 came about because of Asquith, Lloyd George and Churchill's 1909 'People's Budget' which proposed paying for, among other things, the first state pension with a rise in taxation aimed mostly at the most wealthy - and in particular proposed establishing a land tax. The landed gentry wouldn't stand for that and, having control of the

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