Category Archives: Politics

The EU referendum campaign revealed the need for a fairer debate on immigration

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By Bethany Peters

‘Record strain on the NHS leads to £2.45bn black hole’: This was the headline of the Daily Express on 20 May 2016 as the country was preparing to take to the polls to vote in the EU referendum. One could easily presume this to be a current headline in reference to the lack of government funding for the NHS, but the ‘strain’ was actually pertaining to the pressure that immigration was putting on the health service. A new report from the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power, based at the Policy Institute at King’s, has analysed UK media coverage of last year’s Brexit campaign and found that migrant-blaming was rife in the run-up to the vote. After the result, hate crimes in London were said to have increased by 20%, and sadly, Home Office statistics have shown that a spike in hate crimes occurred across the rest of England and Wales too. As we head to the polls less than 12 months later, perhaps this time around the public should be questioning the way in which immigration is portrayed by the media. Continue reading →

London’s trade in services must be prioritised in Brexit negotiations

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By Tony Halmos

Now that Article 50 has been triggered, both sides in the Brexit talks have laid out their starting positions – and a general election has been called to give the government a mandate for delivering Brexit – it is time to take stock of what London needs most and make sure that all its efforts are steered in a united way to achieve this. Continue reading →

How the US presidential campaign was won and lost – four insights from the people closest to the action

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Tony Halmos, Director of the King’s Commission on London and a Visiting Professor at the Policy Institute, recently attended Harvard University’s Campaign Managers’ Conference, where operatives from both the Trump and Clinton presidential campaigns shared insights from their time working on the election. In this blog, Tony discusses some of the things he learnt at the conference. 

0n 30 November and 1 December, the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government hosted its regular post-US election ‘Campaign Managers’ Conference’ – a two-day review of the presidential campaign by those most closely involved in it. The event itself has been running every four years since 1972, just after each presidential election, but this year’s gained more media coverage than usual, after audio of a short, angry and robust exchange between the Trump and Clinton campaigns was published. But the conference generated light as well as heat, revealing some interesting insights about how the campaign was won and lost. Continue reading →

Policy Idol finalist Bakht Baryar tells his story

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Bakht_PolicyIdolBakht Baryar was a final year BSc Political Economy student at King’s College London and a finalist at Policy Idol 2015.  His pitch titled “An anchor in Africa: the value of the state of Somaliland” won Bakht the award for Best Delivery at the competition.  In this blog post, to coincide with the launch of Policy Idol 2016, Bakht tells us why he decided to enter the competition and what it was like to take part.  You can read the details of Bakht’s pitch and watch his winning three minute pitch online. Continue reading →

The UK in a Changing Europe

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Prof Anand MenonHere at the Policy Institute we host a number of external initiatives that form our Policy Park. The idea is that by creating a diverse ecosystem for policy analysis we can help put forward the most innovative thinking in today’s most important policy issues. The Policy Park is currently made up of the Media Standards Trust, the Ramphal Institute, the Pensions Policy Institute and the ESRC funded The UK in a Changing Europe initiative. In this podcast, Professor Anand Menon, Director of The UK in a Changing Europe (and also European Politics and Foreign Affairs professor at King’s), chats with the project communications officer Ben Miller about the purpose of the initiative and what they hope to achieve through their work. Continue reading →