Rather than a ‘burden on the taxpayer’, the welfare state should be understood in normative terms as productive social investment.
Social rights—securing Europe’s future
In Vilnius, at a high-level conference on the European Social Charter, it felt like a paradigm shift was taking place.
Asylum and migration: a positive alternative policy
It’s time for a Gestalt shift from curbing ‘irregular’ migration to pursuing integration for mutual benefit.
Facing Europe’s huge challenges
The outlines of a new progressive narrative for Europe are emerging amid the smoke from forest fires and the war in Ukraine.
Impartiality and public-service media
The media storm in Britain around a television personality speaks volumes about why the UK has become a dysfunctional state.
Tackling the cost-of-living crisis
Inflation is a number. But addressing it is not just a technical issue, best left to (usually male) economists.
Brexit: why does Northern Ireland matter so much?
So little appears at stake in the Northern Ireland protocol yet it’s at the heart of the Brexit deadlock. But then it’s a proxy for something else.
Northern Ireland—the unhappy ending Europe’s story must avoid
Europe has always had its anti-enlightenment side. Northern Ireland graphically presents its extreme manifestation.
Universal Basic Income: a disarmingly simple idea—and fad
Universal basic income is a disarmingly simple idea based on a disarmingly simple premise. The digital revolution threatens massive technological unemployment; ergo, every citizen should be paid a basic income regardless. Like all simple ideas, however, things get more complicated on closer scrutiny. For decades there have been jeremiads predicting that workers would be replaced […]
Social Europe Needs A Positive Vision
In his magisterial One Hundred Years of Socialism, Donald Sassoon described how, under the influence of the 19th century German leader Karl Kautsky, the European social democrat movement embraced a mechanistic scheme by which the immanent crisis of capitalism would somehow issue in a transition to socialism. This conveniently offered a reassuring fatalism about the […]