What does this mean for the Tories? At the second time of asking, the Irish electorate appear to have given their assent to the Lisbon Treaty. Being parochial for a moment, where does this leave people and parties in the UK? The Conservatives are likely to be most affected, partly because Europe plays bigger in the Tory Party than in the others and partly because the party’s position has a large amount of uncertainty contained within it if the Treaty…
Could healthcare be his ‘No We Can’t’ moment? It’s coming up to a year since the last US presidential election and the shine has come off Obama’s presidency quite rapidly. His approval ratings with Rasmussen went negative during July having started off at around +30%. That’s a measure of those with a strong opinion rather than the balance of all expressing a positive or negative view (which is just about equal), but in a country where the turnout is comparatively…
CON 39% (-2) LAB 26% (-1) LD 20%(+3) Good news for Clegg’s party from YouGov A YouGov poll for tomorrow’s Telegraph will bring some welcome relief for the Lib Dems with a three point boost in their rating. Both the Conservatives and Labour are down, with the Conservatives dropping back below 40%. The changes are against the Sunday Times poll, conducted by YouGov and published on 11th September. All the changes are within the margin of error but only just in the…
Should Clegg’s troops should have more distinctiveness? The old Liberal Party nearly went out of existence in the 1950s but in the years that followed staged a recovery based round a distinctive localism, a sense of being outside the establishment and the caricature of a politician and of them being the ‘nice’ party. If you have no chance of power nationally, you have to offer the electorate something else. A ‘more pleasant and more local’ way of doing politics was…
What are the mechanics of the next nine months? Ireland’s second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty will take place on 2 October. Assuming it’s passed what happens next could have consequences for the UK election. Three other countries have yet to ratify. In Germany there’s a legal challenge to the Constitutional Court and secondly – and as a result of the ruling from that challenge – the need to amend some domestic legislation. That is currently scheduled to be done…
What’s the politics if the UK lost its AAA credit rating? While the Lockerbie release story has been dominating the news a more bread and butter issue has received scant coverage yet has the potential to have an even bigger impact on the election campaign. The government’s borrowing figures for July were much worse than expected – and needless to say, expectations weren’t healthy to start with. The scale of the battering that the public finances have taken in the…
How much threat is Darling’s position under? Since the Summer reshuffle when Alistair Darling apparently successfully fought off an attempt to remove him from the Treasury, speculation about his future has died down. Despite that, the odds on the next Chancellor being from the Labour party remain significantly shorter than Labour’s prospects at the next election. The Next Chancellor market on Betfair is not a particularly well traded one but it does have only a small overround so is fairly…
Foreign events have changed things before – could it happen again? In the immediate aftermath of the Iraq War, a senior Bush official was reported as saying “Real men don’t go to Baghdad, they go to Tehran.” If the neo-Cons who were pushing that agenda were as influential now as they were then, then the Iranian government’s current actions would be making their trigger fingers decidedly twitchy. Of course, not only are the neo-Cons of the Bush administration not in…