John Blake Articles

As the Major government limped to its destruction at the hands of New Labour in 1997, it played a few final cards in a desperate bid to cling on to the political hegemony established in 1979. There was the famous New Labour, New Danger poster, which only served to...

Tristram Hunt made a strong start in his new role as shadow secretary of state for education last weekend: a clear and passionate exchange on the Andrew Marr show (best line: ‘I’ve got a PhD from Cambridge. No one needs to tell me about rigour’) followed a frank...

—Stephen Twigg’s recent speech, No School Left Behind, can best be thought of as a kind of schooling ‘births, marriages and deaths’ column. The ‘deaths’ in question are those of the national curriculum as we have known it, and the free schools policy as it has been...

Last week Paul Richards wrote a well-considered piece on the rightness of a commemoration of the centenary of the first world war, and of the need for Labour to support the government and ensure that such a commemoration is a moment of national unity. In all this Paul...