This is the third in a series looking at the challenges and opportunities for the 7 main Great Britain parties. Today we will look at the emergence of Reform UK. Breadth vs depth It is worth comparing Reform with the LDs, as the two sharply contrast. Reform got a slightly higher share of the vote in 2024, but the LDs got many more seats. To understand why, we need to look at the distribution of votes for each party. Vote…
This is the second in a series looking at the challenges and opportunities for the 7 main Great Britain parties. This time we will look at Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalists. Plaid have received a very consistent share of the vote (apart from the very first Senedd election). In UK General Elections, they do slightly better in years when the Tories are doing badly. Geography I would recommend Tim Marshall’s Power of Geography books. These show how geography has impacted…
Series introduction This is the first in a series looking at the challenges and opportunities for each of the 7 main Great Britain parties in turn. Before looking at the situation for Labour in detail, we will review what happened in the 2024 election UNS is dead In recent elections, we have seen Scotland having very different elections than the rest of the UK. In 2024, this widened with a large divergence in different areas of England as well, which…
June will see the King’s Birthday honours (even though his birthday is in November) and new peers will be created. Unless Starmer breaks the depressing precedent, new peers will include major party donors, loyal backbenchers and party officials, and other people that party leaders like. A Guardian columnist will call for an elected second chamber, which would mean yet more politicians. Some new peers will be good: respected former Cabinet Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, think tank bosses or policy-oriented academics. But…
For every amount of indignation “surrendering our territory for no reason” that can be stoked, India has stoked quite the opposite feeling of anti colonial indignation at the previous status quo, now leading to their day of triumph, for It’s come to this win for India after a long campaign by them sponsoring the fight for this outcome. We own it in eyes of UN. We don’t have to yield to UN court judgement’s, but we do need to be…
1. Introduction “The New Leviathans” is a book by John Gray. It is not an easy read. It is overwritten and despite its short length it is too long, taking frequent digressions: so much so in fact it may be two books mashed into one or repurposed. But it does introduce the concept of “hyperliberalism”: a theoretical framework that unites “woke” and identity politics and academic liberalism under an umbrella term and provides a history. So let’s have a look….
A little over four decades ago, a small Cambridge computer company had a big problem. Their biggest-selling product used an elderly microprocessor, just as their competitors were moving to more capable ones. However, those processors were stopgaps that would soon be overhauled. So, the company, asked, why not go for a newer generation of microprocessor? The only problem was that no suitable microprocessor existed. During a trip to a chip-design company in America, they were surprised to discover that the…
With the death of Pope Francis at 88 after a 12-year pontificate, this header will look at the candidates to succeed him. In Italian, the candidates are known as Papabili (literally Pope-ables). The rules Surprisingly, only 2 official rules govern Papal elections: These 2 rules mean that the potential pool of candidates is almost half a billion and includes the likes of Joe Biden, Cristiano Ronaldo and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Fortunately, there are also several unofficial rules: The election process is…