When a political movement cannot quite explain where Britain should go, it apparently finds comfort in explaining where Britain used to be.
The Union Jack Won’t Fix Britain: Farage, Braverman and the Politics of National Nostalgia by Lawson Akhigbe
A Trillion-Dollar Economy, But Whose Nigeria? By Lawson Akhigbe
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his APC government have proclaimed an ambition to build a one-trillion-dollar Nigerian economy.
ANDY BURNHAM MUST GIVE BRITAIN AN IDEOLOGY, NOT ANOTHER MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT’S POWERPOINT by Lawson Akhigbe
There was something important about Andy Burnham's intervention at Prime Minister's Questions. Not simply because of what he said, but because of what it appeared to recognise: Britain has not merely been badly governed. Britain has been travelling in the wrong ideological direction for decades.
Back to Basics, Rebranded: Burnham’s High Streets and the Politics of Looking Busy by Lawson Akhigbe
John Major's government never intended "Back to Basics" to become a punchline. Launched in 1993 as a pitch for moral and civic renewal, family values, personal responsibility, respect for the old certainties, it was retail politics in the purest sense: cheap to announce, easy to photograph, and entirely disconnected from the actual machinery of governing a mid-sized post-imperial economy adjusting to the ERM's wreckage. Section 28 sat quietly in the background as inherited scaffolding for this mood music, and the Education Act 1993's sex-education clauses supplied a fresh, deniable coat of paint. None of it required legislative heavy lifting. All of it signalled seriousness to an audience that wanted reassurance more than reform. The scheme collapsed, memorably, when half the cabinet turned out to be failing the basics they were instructed to return to.
When the Living Governor’s Pen Meets the Dead Monarch’s Signature: Nigeria’s Land Use Act Versus Britain’s 1925 Registration Revolution by Lawson Akhigbe
In 1925, while Britain was still recovering from one war and quietly preparing for the next, its legislators decided that land law had become an expensive medieval farce. The result was a cluster of statutes, most notably the Land Registration Act 1925, working in tandem with the Law of Property Act 1925, that performed a quiet but decisive act of administrative hygiene. They did not nationalise the soil. They did not turn every landowner into a tenant of the state. They simply made the register the master of the title, and the process of dealing with land a matter of bureaucracy rather than political favour or ancestral archaeology.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 