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Category: Campaigning

Men of Honour?

Men of Honour?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJxxQM7GxJA In Peter Hennessey’s Reflections radio series, Margaret Beckett was asked why she abandoned the Catholic faith of her childhood.  The event which crystallised her disenchantment was John Freeman asking Cardinal Heenan what one word summed up the Church.  Margaret waited, expecting something like “charity”or “love”. The Cardinal’s answer was “Authority”. Perhaps not a surprising answer for an institution long steeped in hierarchy and an acute sense of its own magisterium.  But in light of the revelations over recent years of…

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The sick rose. The disease in the English hard right and the failure of the rest of the right to confront it

The sick rose. The disease in the English hard right and the failure of the rest of the right to confront it

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Picture Credit: Wikimedia Commons On 16 June 2016, Thomas Mair fired a gun at Jo Cox MP, shouting “Britain first, this is for Britain. Britain will always come first. We are British independence. Make Britain independent.”  He then attacked her with a knife, shot at her again and again shouted “Britain first”. Sentencing him for murder, Mr Justice Wilkie, said to him: “You affect to be a patriot. The words you uttered repeatedly when you killed her give lip service…

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The LDs to outperform the Tories in Thursday’s by-election is the best bet out there at the moment

The LDs to outperform the Tories in Thursday’s by-election is the best bet out there at the moment

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Ignore the GE2017 result & look at what’s happening on the ground Yesterday on Betfair someone wagered a few pounds on the Tories at 1000/1 to win Thursday’s Lewisham East by-election. This means that if he bet £10 he’ll lose £10 for all the signs are that the blue team is just running a token campaign in the seat where LAB got 67.9% of the vote in June last year. To make things harder the CON candidate is a leaver…

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The Conservatives must again make the case for private enterprise, profit, choice and competition

The Conservatives must again make the case for private enterprise, profit, choice and competition

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1929 Conservative poster The risk is an unwitting drift into a new left-of-centre consensus Some revolutions are begun by small steps; others are revealed by them. Of itself, Chris Grayling’s announcement this week that the government was bringing the East Coast Mainline back into public ownership, was nothing unusual. It is, after all, the third time in the 20 years of the privatised era that the East Coast franchise has failed. Furthermore, for the government, the return to state-run operations…

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The last LE2018 post: How the main academic election predictions did

The last LE2018 post: How the main academic election predictions did

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A key part of election analysis each year are the two academic seat projections which seek to project party Council gains and losses. These play a big part in setting the media narrative over party expectations. Professions Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher have been doing this for years and their projections are based on what has been happening in the local council by-elections in the run up to polling day. The other is from Oxford Professor Stephen Fisher who is…

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Fake news and how to deal with it

Fake news and how to deal with it

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Russian propaganda—whether on chemical weapons in Syria, the nerve-agent attack in the UK, or the downing of the Malaysian Air flight over Ukraine—rarely attempts to explain the evidence but only to obfuscate it. But that’s what the guilty do. https://t.co/F3zwckGjVa — Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) April 23, 2018 Revealed: John Bolton Chaired anti-Muslim Think Tank That Spread Fake News With Help of Russian Trollshttps://t.co/jiHNLNm3mW — Haaretz.com (@haaretzcom) April 23, 2018 DNA is perplexingly long. Almost 98% of the human genome is…

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To election junkies like me the Cambridge Analytica stuff is fascinating but where is it going to lead?

To election junkies like me the Cambridge Analytica stuff is fascinating but where is it going to lead?

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Isn’t it just election losers seeking to undermine the legitimacy of results? Given the amount of publicity the Cambridge Analytica story has had over the past few days both in the UK and in the US the big question is where is this all going to lead politically? The Westminster SNP leader, Ian Blackford, used both his allocated PMQ questions in the clip shown above. In the US are the revelations going to make it that bit harder for Mr…

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Chris Rennard’s “Winning Here” – the requiem for the battered Lib Dems or the handbook for another revival?

Chris Rennard’s “Winning Here” – the requiem for the battered Lib Dems or the handbook for another revival?

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A review of Chris Rennard’s newly published “Winning Here” “ Paddy’s personal ratings were shown to be very high in our poll, even at the outset of the by- election campaign. This helped to persuade him of the validity of the other poll findings.” Thus Chris Renard then the LD director of campaigns and elections coaxed Paddy Ashdown into accepting his formula for winning the 1993 Newbury by-election. The humour and shrewdness about people’s motivation mark this first volume of…

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