Recent Articles
’Labour is telling Britain it is now a conservative party – and we should believe it’, Guardian 28 June 2024
‘The Red Flag at half mast: How the electoral system and Tory governments shape the Labour party’, TLS 24 May 2024
‘Harold Wilson’s lessons for Labour: Keir Starmer would do well to study Wilson’s programme for national renewal’, New Statesman 13 April 2024
‘Keir Starmer’s bad history’, Red Pepper 29 February 2024
‘Conservative hostility to net zero proves the party has turned its back on British capitalism’ Guardian 22 January 2024
‘Human Says No’. review of The Machine Age: An Idea, a History, a Warning by Robert Skidelsky, Literary Review (November 2023)
‘Curse of Cane, review of The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years by By Ulbe Bosma, Literary Review (August 2023)
‘Britain, here’s a plan: stop applying old fixes to new problems. And stop obsessing about growth’, Guardian 26 January 2023
‘Why the Everyday Economy is the Innovation Labour Needs’, Political Quarterly (online November 2022)
‘The woes of startup Britishvolt should shock the UK out of its Brexit self-delusion’, Guardian 12 November 2022
‘Labour must not be trapped by the politics of national decline or revival’, New Statesman 21 October 2022
‘The Tories were once the party of the monarchy. Now they have other priorities’, Observer 11 September 2022
‘British Diplomacy in the Dock’, review of Arthur Snell, How Britain Broke the World: War, Greed and Blunders from Kosovo to Afghanistan, 1997-2021, New Statesman, 24 August 2022
‘Yes, we’re in a bad way. But to wallow in myths of British ‘declinism’ won’t help us thrive’, Observer 12 June 2022
’The west has declared all-out financial war with Russia. What does this mean?’, Guardian 3 March 2022
‘Why the left must abandon the myth of British decline’ or, Perry Anderson versus E.P. Thompson revisited, New Statesman (October 2021)
‘The Nationalisation of British History: Historians, Nationalism and the Myths of 1940’, The English Historical Review (2021)
‘How and why the idea of a national economy is radical’, Renewal 29.2 (2021)
‘Labour didn’t lose its ‘red wall’ – it never had one’, Guardian 9 July 2021
‘Pit stops: A study in the lost world of British labourism’, review of The Shadow of the Mine: Coal and the end of industrial Britain, by Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson, Times Literary Supplement 18 June 2021
‘Flying colours: The remarkable Frank Whittle’, review of Jet Man by Duncan Campbell-Smith, Times Literary Supplement 5 February 2021
‘One good thing could come out of Brexit: a bonfire of national illusions’, Guardian 1 January 2021
’Cummings has left behind a No 10 deluded that Britain could be the next Silicon Valley’, Guardian 18 November 2020
‘The Tories aren't incompetent on the economy – they know exactly what they are doing’, Guardian 11 September 2020
‘Notes from a grown-up country’, review of Why the Germans Do It Better by John Kampfner, Guardian 22 August 2020
‘Britain’s persistent racism cannot be blamed on empire alone’, Guardian 24 June 2020
‘The new age of autarky: how crises and upheavals are drawing Britain away from globalisation and back towards a national capitalism’. New Statesman 10 June 2020
‘How the myth of “Britain alone” overshadows VE Day’, New Statesman 8 May 2020
‘Never alone, and always strong: the British war economy in 1940 and after’, in The Economics of the Second World War: Seventy-Five Years On May 2020
‘Where Brexit and Covid-19 collide’, The New European 30 April 2020.
‘Labour has to free itself from the shackles of its own invented histories: To reinvent itself under Keir Starmer, the party needs a much richer understanding of its past’, Prospect 5 April 2020
‘Why the coronavirus crisis should not be compared to the Second World War: Military analogies are fuelling myths and fantasies about the UK’s wartime experience’, New Statesman 3 April 2020
‘When it comes to national emergencies, Britain has a tradition of cold calculation’, Guardian 17 March 2020
‘Boris Johnson Might Break Up the U.K. That’s a Good Thing’, New York Times 10 January 2020.
‘How Britain was sold: Why we need to rethink the case for a national capitalism in the age of uncertainty’, New Statesman 13 November 2019
‘Brexit is a necessary crisis – it reveals Britain’s true place in the world’, Guardian 9 October 2019
‘What has British science policy really been?’ in British Academy, Lessons from the History of UK Science Policy (2019), pp. 31-9
‘The Brexiteers’ greatest trick was convincing the old they hated Brussels more than London: The politicians and financiers of the Leave campaigns turned the latent politics of anti-London into the politics of anti-Brussels’, 7 August 2019, New Statesman Staggers Blog
‘Brexit is not a product of history: it’s something entirely new’ June 9, 2019 in the New Statesman’s Staggers blog 3 June 2019
‘A Misremembered Empire’ Tortoise 25th April 2019
Review of William Keegan Nine Crises: Fifty Years of Covering the British Economy from Devaluation to Brexit in the Literary Review
‘Haldane principle’s ‘centenary’ is a good time to bury its myth’, Research Fortnight 12 December 2018
‘The idea of deep continuity in British history is absurd. We’ve always been in flux’, Observer 18 November 2018
My Open Democracy Blog Why does the left ignore the British nationalism of the post-war government?
Review of Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce, Shadows of Empire – a review
Older Articles
‘The Prophet Militant and Industrial: The Peculiarities of Correlli Barnett’, Twentieth Century British History, Volume 2, Issue 3, 1991, Pages 360–379,