Labour has lost the last four general elections. It has not won the popular vote in England since 2001; twenty years ago. We can go further: aside from the landslide Blair victories of 1997 and 2001 Labour has not comfortably won 40%+ of the vote since 1970; over fifty years ago. Labour is not in power in Westminster or Scotland. It may shortly lose (or be forced to share) power in Wales. It does not directly control any county councils…
1) An elected executive based on defined positions such as Education, Health, Police, Immigration etc. where each position is directly elected after: Candidates are winnowed down to three runners. Each has their specific proposals costed by the Civil Service. Each proposal has to have a statement of the improvement it is expected to bring and a tangible way of measuring progress along with expected timescales. Measurement to be done by the Civil Service. The advantage of this approach is that…
For four years, the town of Wootton Bassett bore the sad duty of receiving the repatriated war dead from Afghanistan and Iraq. It did so with dignified compassion. For 345 men and women, the town’s people lined the streets reverently. They comforted the bereaved. They remembered the soldiers’ service. The oak of the coffins and the brass of the fittings were polished to a mirror sheen and wrapped with union flags on their final journeys. When the town’s duty was…
As Sting once sang, you can’t control an independent heart. Boris Johnson, however, seems set to try. In the face of opinion polls showing that the SNP are heading for an overall majority at Holyrood with a mandate for a fresh referendum on Scottish independence, he is giving every impression of a man who intends not to agree to one being held. Scotland is not yet a colony of Westminster. If, however, the UK government tries to block the clearly-expressed…
When YouGov published their multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) election model during the 2017 General Election campaign, it’s fair to say that it was met with a great deal of scepticism (though not from Alastair Meeks). Sure, expectations about the size of the Conservative majority had been scaled back, but a hung-parliament? Labour gain Canterbury? No chance… In the end the Tories did a little bit better than the model predicted and Theresa May clung on to power. But the…
The DUP’s whole raison d’être is to preserve the union. It has throughout its history set its face against every compromise with nationalists that might lead to further entanglement with the Republic of Ireland (their older supporters will still spit out references to “the Free State”, as if it were the Federation in Blake’s Seven). Though you wouldn’t know it to listen to them now, they fiercely opposed the Good Friday Agreement. In 2016, they decided to take a holiday…
Barring a much bloodier insurrection than the one mounted two weeks ago, Joe Biden will assume the presidency of the United States on Wednesday. Where does that leave the UK? Britain has long prided itself on its special relationship with the US, choosing to overlook the fact that the US tells France that is its oldest ally, that it has a strategic partnership with Israel and so on. For many Leavers, focusing on the Anglosphere was a central rationale for…
Donald Rumsfeld once famously said: “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know”. For that, he won the Plain English Campaign’s Foot In Mouth award…