I looked with amazement at the headline on the London Labour Party's glossy election leaflet that plopped through my letter box. It said: "Ken or cuts." The People's Ken has never been short of chutzpah. If he's re-elected, the real message is more likely to be "Ken and cuts".

Any retrospective on Livingstone's mayoralty must begin with his manifesto for the 2000 election. In it, he said that "to solve [...]

I walk down a local pavement, past a row of shops. Three boys, aged between about 12 and 14, have managed to get on to a single bike and are riding at me full tilt. I shout at them to stop. They get off. The youngest holds up his fists in my face like a boxer, but they all go on past me. Moments later, I'm doused with a stream [...]

A little warning from history. As an issue, housing has, for years, mouldered near the bottom of electoral attention (as transport used to). But remember: the Tories twice rose to power, from previous election plights, on the back of promises about houses. In 1951, they promised to build 300,000 houses a year. Harold Macmillan, housing minister and future prime minister, delivered. Outcome: 13 years in office. In 1979, they promised [...]

I think of it as "my year of the NHS". Don't shy away. I'm not writing the story of my time on a ward. I once worked with a journalist who'd been an assistant editor on the old-style Punch. The two unsolicited articles they received most often were "My driving test" and "My hospital visit". Both went straight back.

Fortunately, I've spent very little of my life in hospital beds, [...]

It was when I heard Chris Mullin on the radio, dismissing the petrol tax protesters as a lot of "loony tunes", that I began to wonder if the left had gone off its head. Before he became a junior minister, Mullin was himself a notable loony tune - which translates, I suppose, as "off message" - and often a very effective one. I still have on my shelves his pioneering [...]

Writing about equality in Britain, R H Tawney said: "the word, 'class,' is fraught with unpleasing associations, so that to linger upon it is apt to be interpreted as the symptom of a perverted mind and a jaundiced spirit." Perversely or not, there was lots of jaundice on offer, this past month, after Gordon Brown's onslaught on Magdalen College, Oxford, for not accepting a bright comprehensive school pupil from Tyneside.

Every political party needs some very clear, simple manifesto offer, which brings down to earth, for voters' benefit, all the windy clouds of rhetoric. For the Labour Party, since the second world war, this has usually revolved around the party's presumed status as guardian of the NHS. For the Conservatives, for almost as long, the issue was not hospitals, but houses. If it's not careful, Labour will hand this offer [...]

I stand on the roof of a ten-storey car park in the middle of Peckham. The view is stupendous. Northwards it stretches from Battersea power station, right across to the Millennium Dome. Bang in the middle is St Paul's. The London borough of Southwark has its town hall in unlovely Peckham Road. It has started to advertise itself, with admirable chutzpah, as a "part of central London". But from my [...]

Some people may, even at this late hour, be fretting about what the inside of the Millennium Dome may finally be like and whether it will pull enough visitors in. Those who feel friendly towards the project, that is; its enemies will be preparing to rub their hands in glee. But one conclusion I draw from these two scholarly studies of the world's first and most famous international exhibition, held [...]

On the wall are five vividly coloured pictures on sheets of sugar paper. Reds, greens, yellows, blacks. Portrait heads, almost all looking directly out at you.

I soon find out they are a kind of totem, a reminder of a lasting responsibility. The office belongs to David Hargreaves, a quiet revolutionary, and one of the most thoughtful writers on education in our time. Hargreaves, though once chief inspector for the [...]