Labour in Newark: Ruthless or wrongheaded?
Soft-pedalling the campaign is a sign of both weakness and strength Conventional wisdom says that general elections are won or lost based on the decisions of a few tens of thousands of swing voters across the country’s marginal seats. As an assertion, it was never entirely true – those voters made next to no difference in 1983 or 1997 for example – but in an increasingly fractured party system, the assumptions on which it rests become more and more questionable….