Yesterday saw the opening salvo in a war of words destined to continue for the next four months (so get used to it, in other words). The Conservatives claimed that Labour has a £21 billion hole in their budget plans; Labour obviously denied this. Most of the Tories plans for holding onto the keys to […]
Archives for January 2015
Is talk of a Labour-Tory coalition simply click-baity nonsense? Or is it a real possibility?
At Labour conference last year, I organised an event at which Maurice Glasman said that in the case of another hung parliament, Labour should have coalition talks with the Conservatives straight off and ignore “the Liberals”. This would be the “Grand Coalition” of many a Westminster pub lunch discussion, ones which most of the participants […]
Excerpt from the “Domiano Ndege” chapter of “The History of the African Continent”, by Dr Thomas Neider, 2008
Domiano Ndege’s “All African Republic”, as he proclaimed it, was short lived. A man named Mobutu Sese Seko took over Africana and renamed it Kinshasa several months after the revolution which removed the Belgian imperialists. Mobuto turned Domiano’s fledgling Central African fiefdom into the country of Zaire. Domiano Ndege and three of his closest cabinet […]
Ed Balls essentially concedes the general election in a Guardian article: what it reveals about Labour’s post-May problems
On New Year’s Day, the Guardian printed an article authored by Ed Balls. It’s quite the read. The essential argument that Balls wants us to take away from it seems to be that Labour represents the centre ground, while George Osborne and the Tories represent an extreme. Now, many other people have already written about how […]
Is UKIP’s attempt to woo left-wing voters rebounding on them already?
The piece in front of you was inspired in part by a great FT article by Kiran Stacey and Jim Pickard yesterday. It’s called “Ukip’s tilt to the left upsets traditionalists” and it details the tensions within UKIP as it tries to rid itself of the, as the article puts it, “More Tories than the […]
Top five projected 2015 moments
These are things I hope will happen in the coming year. They are arranged in no particular order – the numbers are arbitrary. It’s all good. You will note a certain degree of optimism, at least from my perspective, in all of these predictions. It’s why I’ll add this caveat here: these aren’t so much […]