Will there be a price for the SNP upsetting Hillary?

Will there be a price for the SNP upsetting Hillary?

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Can Salmond now stand accused of being “soft on terror”? In the run-up to today’s release of Abdel Baset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Libyan spy who jailed in 2001 for blowing up Pan Am flight 103 with the loss of 270 lives, Hillary Clinton made a public plea saying the Scottish authorities should allow him to die in prison rather than being released on compassionate grounds. She said: “I just think it is absolutely wrong to release someone who has…

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April 11 2009 – the day the Labour government died?

April 11 2009 – the day the Labour government died?

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UKPollingReport Was it political failure and not the economy? One of the regular arguments on the site is whether it’s the economy or politics that drives changes in public opinion and how people will vote. I’ve long been part of the political failure camp and the table of YouGov polls from UKPollingReport, I would argue, backs me up. Just look at what happened in mid-April 2009. Labour had been happily coasting in the 30s since September 2008 and reached a…

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Is this a smart idea for the Tories or not?

Is this a smart idea for the Tories or not?

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Telegraph Could the strategy mean there’s even more exposure for Brown? A big discussion point on some Tory-inclined blogs today has been the Daily Telegraph story, quoting an unnamed shadow cabinet minister, that the party is planning, in that lovely term coined by the Lib Dems in 2005, a “decapitation strategy” to target the constituencies of several leading Labour figure. The paper quotes their source as saying: “..Certain Labour Party big beasts, and they know who they are, are already…

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Why are bloggers suddenly on the defensive?

Why are bloggers suddenly on the defensive?

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Is the mainstream media trying to hit back? Suddenly I’m getting calls from all over the place from journalists and academics who are looking at blogging. Maybe it’s because of the harsh economic climate in which the press is now having to operate but there certainly seems to be an effort to disparage this part of the new media and I just worry about possible moves to impede us. Even that weighty publication, the Financial Times has tried to put…

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PB could be getting its own exclusive poll

PB could be getting its own exclusive poll

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Will “we” end up with getting the best prediction? Discussions are taking place on a plan that would give me something that I have always wanted for the site – a regular monthly poll of voting intentions carried out exclusively for Politicalbetting.com by a leading polling organisation. For at the moment we have to rely completely on others and when polls do come out the information that’s available is usually quite limited. Often we have to wait for a few…

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Is Labour paying the price for the “easy years”?

Is Labour paying the price for the “easy years”?

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Did they fail to keep up when the Tories were so feeble? I continue to be flabbergasted by Labour’s abject failure to score a hit over the Hannan-Tories-NHS affair. They were presented with everything they needed to impede the Cameron surge and have failed to capitalise. The Health secretary who is also a Cambridge English graduate, Andy Burnham, has simply been unable to find words that work and the result is that the story has lost almost all of its…

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Is Glasgow NE going to be a Glasgow East or a Glenrothes?

Is Glasgow NE going to be a Glasgow East or a Glenrothes?

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Wikipedia Is Labour good value at 8/13? So far I’ve not got excited about the pending by-election in Glasgow NE – the seat made vacant by the resignation of the speaker, Michael Martin. Because of the tradition that major parties do not contest the Speaker’s seat there is no direct comparison with what happened at the general election. Martin stood as the speaker not as Labour candidate. He got 53.3% of the votes with the SNP, who did stand, in…

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