Has he a plan to avoid the weekly grillings? One of Tony Blair’s first moves when he came to power in 1997 was to change Prime Minister’s Questions. For decades the PM had had to face the House twice a week – Blair changed it to once but doubled the time available. He was new in the job, there’d been a landslide and change was in the air. The plan was met with little resistance. Is it fanciful to think…
Will Enfield be the next Wyre Forest? Dr. Richard Taylor caused a shock when he won the Wyre Forest constituency from Labour in 2001. His success was based on a campaign to save Kidderminster Hospital. At the same time, a small political party, Kidderminster Hospital Health Concern, won a number of seats on the local council on a similar platform. Although Dr. Taylor’s majority was cut in 2005, he was the first Independent Parliamentary candidate since 1945, to win his…
BPIX gives the Tories a 10% lead and puts the LDs on 15%? British Polling Index has carried out another of its intermittent surveys for the Mail on Sunday. The pollster has not been listed as a member of the British Polling Council and whenever I have requested further information my emails have been ignored. In its first published survey for the paper since April BPIX has the Tories on 41%, Labour 31%, with the Lib Dems at 15%. The…
A guest contribution by Innocent Abroad A tired third-term government with a leader past his sell-by date is a recurrent theme in British politics. The Tories have been there often enough, and the Liberals too, just before World War I. This is Labour’s first experience of it – the party has never held office (discounting the wartime co-alition) for more than six years at a time before. What is new is the inability of the Tories to achieve the kind…
A guest contribution from Tabman “The founding of the Labour Party owes more to Methodism than Marx. Discuss.” At the heart of this classic A-Level Politics question is an examination of the founding coalition of the Labour Party – the finding of common interest between the “Working Manâ€, in the form of the TUC, and the “Concerned Middle Class†represented by socialist intellectuals such as the Fabians. This founding coalition has changed shape and emphasis over the last 100 years,…
Writers can be forgiven the occasional cliché when the situation they are trying to describe is an extreme one of its kind. So just as last Saturday Wayne Rooney was as sick as a parrot and Owen Hargreaves covered every blade of grass on the pitch, John Prescott is beleaguered. Having already got himself into a hole where Tony Blair seems to just about accept that his position within the Labour party entitles him to the pay and perks of…
ICM gives Labour a boost; YouGov is steady In the wake of the Blaenau Gwent results, Labour supporters must have got some partial comfort from the ICM poll in the Sunday Telegraph this weekend: Labour’s share had recovered by 3% to 35%, just one point behind the Tories on 36% (a 1% drop). The Liberal Democrats were unchanged at 18%. (The changes are relative to ICM’s previous poll published just 12 days before.) The last survey from YouGov, however, as…
Gore and Gingrich reflect on their chances Last August, when I last covered the 2008 US presidential election, the favourites for the nominations were Hillary Clinton by a considerable margin on the Democratic side, and John McCain and George Allen roughly neck-and-neck for the Republicans. Eleven months later, Clinton and McCain have remained strong in the betting while Allen has faded. Tradesports rates Clinton a 43.45% chance for the Democratic nomination; on the GOP side McCain is at 41.15% and…