ShiftingGrounds

Now, some of my best friends are heterosexual – and while the same doesn’t yet apply to gays – I fully support their right to be married in the church. Of course, I’m being sarcastic.

Whoever the genius is who thought of One Nation Labour, I take my hat off to them. Because what this divided country desperately needs is rebalancing.

The Olympics are coming to town for the first time since 1948. And in 2012, as just in the aftermath of the second world war, a housing crisis has been brewing in Britain. In fact, it’s reaching boiling point.

Cuts versus stimulus, stimulus versus cuts. It’s a binary choice we hear more and more of these days. And it’s getting boring.

There are two ways of viewing the government’s use of emergency legislation to extend Sunday trading throughout the Olympics.

One way is is that the Sunday Trading (London Olympic and Paralympic Games) Bill, which will temporarily suspend trading laws for the biggest retailers during the games, is a betrayal of the spirit of the Olympics.

Sitting around texting, watching crap films on telly, napping half the day away and drinking four glasses of wine before two. It sounds idyllic. In Francis Elliott and James Hanning’s new book ‘Cameron: Practically a Conservative’, we get a tantalising insight into the interior life of the prime minister and how he unwinds of a weekend.

Boris Johnson has won the mayoral crown, once more defeating Labour’s Ken Livingstone. And rumour has it that Kelvin MacKenzie is betting £1000 at 10/1 that Cameron will leave this year with Boris taking over as Tory leader.

In the beginning, there was Wall Street, and then the global Occupy movement was born. To be fair, it was fairly successful. For a while.
In public squares across the world, the political elite who instigated the disaster of economic liberalism were baited and denounced by a reawakened citizenry.

Regardless of whether or not Ken manages to turn the tide of Boris’s intimidating poll lead on May 3rd, one of the ideas in his manifesto is such a gem that it simply mustn’t gather dust on the Labour party’s policy shelves if he’s defeated.

It’s an unusually hot spring afternoon in east London.
As colourfully painted barges chug past the new Olympic Media Centre and day trippers wave from the boats, I find myself standing with a youngish woman in a slightly ramshackle – but nonetheless luscious – communal garden on the banks of the canal.
And things are getting radical.