Privileged lives matter: the British opponents of cancel culture and their very debatable motives

Privileged lives matter: the British opponents of cancel culture and their very debatable motives

Isn’t it a disgrace that you can’t express all your half-baked saloon bar prejudices without someone wanting to make a deal out of it? This is not the way that the self-declared opponents of cancel culture put their case of course, but then, they are being pretty incoherent. Let me help Sarah Vine and Adam Boulton, though both of them really should know better, being eminent political journalists and all that. A libertarian approach to this question would run as follows. Anyone could…

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It’s time to ban Americans

It’s time to ban Americans

Voluntary, unenforced quarantine isn’t enough for high-Covid19 countries President Trump likes to congratulate himself on having closed the border to China in early February as an effective preventative measure against Covid-19. That he should do so isn’t too surprising: congratulating himself is his default setting and his administration has routinely adopted an anti-China stance, as part of Trump’s efforts to rebalance the trade deficit between the two countries. Even so, while the measure was hardly sufficient, it was at least…

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Davey moves to a 65% chance on Betfair for the LD leadership

Davey moves to a 65% chance on Betfair for the LD leadership

Ed Davey, the only Lib Dem cabinet minister from the 2010-2015 coalition still to be be an MP, has now edged up to a 65% chance on the Betfair exchange on the election to choose the successor to Jo Swinson who, of course lost her to the SNP at GE2019. Quite what this is based on is hard to say but Davey, currently joint acting leader, has been getting a bit more media attention than his opponent, Layla Moran. It…

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Labour: time to turn blue?

Labour: time to turn blue?

What became of Maurice Glasman? Only those of us with a tendency to don the proverbial political anorak will recall the name, but Maurice (now Lord) Glasman was once the intellectual guru du jour for Labour. With roots in the Living Wage campaign and community organization, Glasman coined the term Blue Labour, a profound policy reaction to the perceived human emptiness of Blairism and the Third Way. For a while in the early 2010s Ed Miliband seriously dallied with Glasman,…

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Sunak continues to outperform both Johnson and Starmer in latest Ipsos MORI favourability ratings

Sunak continues to outperform both Johnson and Starmer in latest Ipsos MORI favourability ratings

The latest Ipsos MORI Political Pulse shows Brits to be more favourable towards Chancellor Rishi Sunak than they are towards PM Boris Johnson or LAB leader Keir Starmer. Some key points. 48% are favourable towards Sunak and 22% unfavourable. These numbers have not changed much since the pollster first asked the question in May where 47% were favourable and 18% unfavourable. Johnson continues to divide opinion with roughly as many favourable towards the Prime Minister (41%) as unfavourable (42%). In…

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Spotting the Difference – what really matters to Johnson when deciding who is in or out

Spotting the Difference – what really matters to Johnson when deciding who is in or out

The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland – has usually been seen as a hospital pass (any point during the Troubles), an internal exile for those having to earn their passage back to the mainstream (Mandelson) or somewhere to put rivals or nuisances (Francis Pym, Jim Prior). In some cases, PMs have trolled the residents of that benighted province (Shaun Woodward, Karen Bradley, for heaven’s sake!) Few have shone in the role. One who did was Julian Smith. In his…

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New polling analysis by Peter Kellner suggests that the Tories could lose power if an election was held now

New polling analysis by Peter Kellner suggests that the Tories could lose power if an election was held now

The data points to a 7% CON to LAB swing since GE2019 in the “Red Wall” The polling expert and former President of YouGov, Peter Kellner, has an article in the latest New European based on his study of the data from the last four weeks of Opinium polls. Unlike most other pollsters this firm has a range of cross tabs that make such an analysis possible. These include vote splits in the seats gained by CON from LAB at…

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