‘The world is out of control’: how political strategist Claire Ainsley is challenging the left to take it back

From children struggling with their mental health to adults worried about AI, many of us feel neglected and ignored by politicians. How would Keir Starmer’s former director of policy fix that?Do you ever feel as if life is spiralling out of control? As if the world’s problems are too big, or politicians too small, to get a grip on everything from rising prices to emergent threats such as AI?If so, says the political strategist Claire Ainsley, you’re neither alone nor irrational. “It’s probably because you’ve got a lot to do, and the world is out of control,” she says cheerfully from her home in York, where she lives with her husband, an artist, and their two teenage children. But it is the politicians’ job to master fast-moving and complex events, she adds, and if conventional parties seem increasingly powerless to do anything about them, then populist alternatives will be only too ready with dangerously easy-sounding answers. Continue reading...