via @PSbook . UKIP produce "fake" LAB leaflet in Oldham pic.twitter.com/NJsZsSzRke — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) November 16, 2015 UKIP thinks Corbyn is a negative for LAB – but how much of a negative? I’ve never been convinced by the above style approach to campaigning which is quite common – a mock leaflet that looks as though it has come from your opponent. This is the sort of thing that activists really like but does it get through to potential LAB…
Antifrank on  “picking your battles carefully” The government is heading for a major confrontation with junior doctors over pay restructuring. Jeremy Hunt is looking to change their terms of employment to facilitate his vision of a seven day a week health service. Junior doctors feel that the revised terms pull the rug from under them. They feel that Jeremy Hunt is spoiling for a fight and that he is looking to impose his terms on them. As a result, they…
He needs to look like a potential winner not a loser For the moment at least Mr Corbyn’s authority within the Labour Party derives directly from the sheer scale of his victory in the leadership election in September. His winning margin, of course, was even greater than that of Tony Blair’s in 1994. So whenever questions are raised as is inevitable within the Parliamentary Labour Party given his lack of support there, his team will point to the September voting…
Picture: The classic 90s game, Lemmings. Referenda are odd affairs. Two sides, both of which are passionately invested in the success or failure of the proposition, seek to woo disproportionate numbers of far less interested voters to their respective causes. Votes are counted, not marked out of ten for enthusiasm. Each side must resist the temptation to make arguments that fascinate those who are already-engaged but which make the barely engaged switch off. Activists on both sides of the EU…
Was this the match that lost the 1970 election for Harold Wilson and ultimately ushered us into the European Community? Most of the country will be focussing on the football next June. Since the second world war, the greatest general election upset was not 2015 nor 1992, but Harold Wilson’s surprise loss in 1970. Most of the polls and the commentariat expected Labour to win a majority comfortably yet the Ted Heath’s Tories won a majority. Some have attributed Labour’s…
Last night we had the second Democratic Party Presidential debate and the tragic events of Paris were discussed. Clinton’s past record came under scrutiny, first her support for the 2003 Iraq War (which Sanders said helped the rise of ISIS) and her tenure as Secretary of State. She came through all of this largely unscathed. Where she made a mistake was when the issue of the large donations she’s received from Wall Street, she said it was down to the…
Q Nothing else would so effectively combine surrender with contempt for the electorate Parties that do badly at elections should always reflect on why that was the case. It’s not an easy question to ask because almost certainly there’ll be tough answers, if the question’s answered honestly. In all probability, those answers will include ‘our campaign was ineffective’, ‘the public did not support our policies’, ‘we did not look credible as a government / force of opposition’, ‘our record in…
Paris is in lockdown: museums, schools, Eiffel Tower closed. More on our live blog: https://t.co/VeAl0Lkz9Z pic.twitter.com/QsZYotOa8q — Financial Times (@FT) November 14, 2015 Friday’s attacks on Paris show that the terror threat remains. It’s time to fight back with every means at our disposal and take the fight to ISIS writes Keiran Pedley. But do we have the stomach for it? I thought quite hard before writing this piece. I wasn’t sure whether or not it was too soon. To…