Their muddled thinking has killed their project To be wrong once is inevitable, to be wrong twice is unfortunate, to be wrong three times is careless, but to be wrong as many times as Change UK have been is to show all the tactical and strategic awareness of a garden leaf trying to outwit a playful cat. It’s not merely that they keep losing the game; it’s not even that they don’t seem to know how the game’s played; it’s…
Lots of talk over the past 24 hours about the Lib Dem slogan on one of its leaflets for the European parliament election campaign. Clearly the word “bollocks” is one that is on the very margins of what is acceptable in polite society but it does get home the message well. Also “Bollocks to Brexit” has the added advantage of alliteration and it is very clear where the party stands. This in sharp contrast to Corbyn’s LAB which is hamstrung…
https://twitter.com/jameschappers/status/1123357647573520385 How’s this going to play out tomorrow? The Tweet above might or might not be accurate but it comes at a very tricky time on the eve of this years locals. Because this years elections do not include London it has attracted for less media coverage than you’d expect. This is not unusual. The political media is based at Westminster and is very London-centric. Generally the pattern has been that the timing of the locals are put back in…
Having to face two big elections in a very short period of time looks as though it has taken its toll on TIG following what appear to have been a number of strategic mistakes. The following comment by IanB2 on the PB thread last night, is a good analysis and is worthy of a full thread on its own. “..Sad to say, I am beginning to think that TIG has blown its chance.,,They ducked the opportunity to do a policy…
Assessing the impact new group after its first month It is now almost a month since Chuka Umunna and others made their much publicised departure from LAB joining the new the Independent Group. The Wikipedia table above shows that’s happened in the standard voting polls since. These are separate from the surveys where there has been a special prompt for the new grouping which has produced some quite dramatic outcomes. In many ways responses have been dependent on the format…
The Independent Group is a vehicle designed for flexibility In March 1981 I was working at BBC News on the day of the famous Limehouse declaration which saw the launch of the SDP, the last big break away from the Labour Party. This was a massive development which until yesterday shaped our views of what a breakaway should look like. What Chuka and the other six MPs did yesterday was so different to 1981 because they weren’t creating a new…