Sophie Watson is Professor of Sociology at the Open University. Her research tackles feminist theory, cities and the politics of public space. Her book City Pu...
Is meritocracy an effective device for legitimising socioeconomic inequality?
My father Michael Young’s objection to meritocracy was rooted in his belief in...
The illusion of meritocracy at school inflicts damage on children and young people – particularly those from working class backgrounds. More than that, meritoc...
Antisemitism and the Labour party has rarely been out of the UK’s political headlines in the UK since 2016. Yet as we argue in our new article in the Political...
A new world order awaits us on the other side of the pandemic. As we wait out this storm of uncertainty and possibility in our small pockets of isolation, the ...
The contemporary debate in UK higher education about the need to “decolonise the curriculum” stems in large part from the pressure applied by a sustained stude...
Sixty years after its publication, Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy remains one of Britain’s most influential, yet widely misunderstood, p...
The seemingly never-ending rumpus over antisemitism in the Labour Party has been capturing headlines for over four years now. This controversy is closely entwi...
Alpa Shah has always striven to understand inequality, and how to address it. When we meet at her home in North London on a damp day in Autumn, my head is full...
Jon Bloomfield’s article in the Political Quarterly on ‘Progressive politics in a changing world’ claims to explain the "fallacies of Blue Labour". Here’s a re...
In Jonathan Coe's recent novel Middle England, one of the characters offers this reflection: ‘A more cheering thought rose up: the realisation that here, on th...
This article presents a critique of Blue Labour in four key areas – class, economy, family and race. It sets out alternative ways forward to forge rather than ...
