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Would an EU referendum be a sign of weak leadership?

Who wouldn’t want a referendum? A respectable representative democracy, that’s who…

Politics is about value judgements. Good politicians balance technical advice with particular moral or ethical perspectives. They ponder the political implications of their own position to see how it fits with the prevailing mood. But in the end, having weighed up...

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  Would an EU referendum be a sign of weak leadership? Politics is about value judgements. Good politicians balance technical advice with particular moral or ethical perspectives. They ponder the political implications of their own position to see how it fits with the prevailing mood. But in the end, having weighed...
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  Is flirting in the office acceptable? Flirting: you could say that it is a fact of life, and nigh-on unavoidable in the workplace. After all, there’s many a loving couple some distance into their marriages whose eyes first met across that printer that never quite seems...
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  Why every politician should be making plans for Nigel Disaffected Tory voters on the cusp of taking out a full-page advert in the Times must have viewed last week’s UKIP surge with great relief. While £16,000 doesn’t buy much space in the national press, it will buy plenty of...
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  Party leaders eclipse councillors in local elections debate Every councillor in the 27 English Counties faces the electorate tomorrow – but the local elections have hardly caught the public imagination. One problem is the lack of practical change that will result from Thursday’s voting. The Counties are such...
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  Women need confidence to take chances in workplace Parliamentary committee inquiries nearly always claim to be wide ranging. In reality, some are, some aren’t. But when it comes to the Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee’s work on ‘Women in the Workplace’, the description is accurate....
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  Winners tough to pick in government Spending Review There’s no process better designed to ride roughshod across notions of collegiate Government than the Spending Review. Erstwhile political allies smile sweetly across the Cabinet table while briefing the press on the outrageous waste of their colleagues’ departments...
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  Would the Thatcher approach to leadership work today? Today, and for the last time, Margaret Thatcher dominated the national media. For a Prime Minister who supposedly never read the newspapers, her grasp of communication and ability to connect with voters set the benchmark for the politicians...
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  Rush to point the finger of blame in the welfare debate Here’s an interesting experiment to try today: ask people how much a standard benefit claimant receives in the UK. Don’t ask anyone who receives benefits or administrates some part of the system – ie, anyone who actually knows something about...
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  Are boardroom quotas for the UK doomed? Not even Europe’s biggest champion of female board quotas is targeting equality. By 2020, only 40% of board members in Europe’s biggest listed companies will be women even if Viviane Reding, the European commissioner for justice, is successful in imposing...
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  Workplace mediation: why its time has come While the number of employment tribunal claims fell in the past year, there were still almost 200,000. What can managers do to get the numbers down even further? The answer is to head off issues before they become serious –...
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  How Participatory Budgeting is engaging people with fiscal management For all the build-up, wrangling, minute-by-minute media coverage and reams of commentary and analysis, who actually follows the Chancellor’s Budget? I’m not pretending that it isn’t important. Given the UK’s myriad global economic connections...
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  CIPD research holds up a mirror to manager behaviour Too many managers have an inflated opinion of their ability to manage people. Eight out of 10 say they think their staff are either satisfied or very satisfied with them in charge, while just 58% of employees report this is...
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  A dangerous time for a leadership challenge? Westminster is buzzing with talk of a leadership challenge to the PM. It follows the five tests set for David Cameron, unofficially, by his disaffected backbenchers. The bad news is that three of those look to have been flunked already:...
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  Who decides What Works in public sector leadership? Oliver Letwin and Danny Alexander have announced a cunning policy wheeze. It’s called the What Works network (PDF), and it’s a step towards more evidence-based policy making. Presumably the idea was dreamt up on the back...
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  How to make your office environmentally friendly This article could just as easily have been entitled “How to save the world and money using just your office”, because in the modern world, one almost certainly leads to the other. Being environmentally conscious...
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  How sex scandals and stereotypes keep women out of politics Here’s one for the pub quiz – which country in the world has the greatest representation of women in its Parliament? Answer, according to the Interparliamentary Union: Rwanda, where they hold more than 56% of the seats....
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  How tech clusters are defying gravity Amid the economic gloom, a circuit board glistens. While the rest of the economy has stagnated, several high-growth, high-tech firms have burgeoned at light speed from being small operations to become world-leading companies....
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  Cameron is dwelling on short-term tactics, not long-term strategy In recent months David Cameron has been pulled in all sorts of competing policy directions. Crackdowns on visa applications for foreign students have been followed by fast-track visas for Indian students....
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  Transport journalist Christian Wolmar: why I’m running for London mayor Christian Wolmar isn’t much a fan of Boris. He is no fan of Ken either. “On the one hand you had Ken going on about fares – and that’s all he went on about,” he recalls of the last, deeply...
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  How Eastleigh by-election will test party leaders The career of a Secretary of State lies in ruins – more grist to the mill for the cynics who’ve lost all faith in politics. And with one carcass picked clean – at least until sentencing – the media flock...