Sadiq Khan has decided to built his entire mayoral campaign on rent controls. I’m not exaggerating for effect: he has declared the upcoming London mayoral contest to be a veritable “referendum on rent controls”. I was wondering whether to vote vote Rory Stewart or Sadiq Khan in May – Sadiq has thankfully made it easy […]
The Suez crisis and the dream of the US trade deal that lives on and on – and how it is always discussed on the wrong terms
At the heart of the right-wing flavour of British Euroscepticism lives a dream trade deal with the United States of America (for reference, the heart of Lexit is communism in one country, so take heart, things could be even worse). It has always been there, going back to the mid-2000s and the rise of UKIP. […]
Why the 50,000 customs officers story is so symbolic of these ridiculous times we live in
The most amazing thing about the 50,000 customs officers story is the way that the government subsequently handled it. The Road Haulage Association put out a press release this week detailing that around fifty-thousand more customs officers will be needed to deal with the load of new paperwork post-Brexit. This is because they estimate that […]
Here’s the problem with the Lib Dems trying to convince voters of their “progressive” credentials
I have by chance spoken to a few Lib Dems over the past fortnight about the state of the party and what they see, if any, as the chances of recovery. The answer I got back, in slightly different forms, went something like this: the Lib Dem activists and most of the parliamentary party see […]
How the government is starting to remind me of the Yes to AV campaign – and that certainly isn’t good
Long time readers of this website will have known me to compare things in politics with the Yes to AV campaign a fair few times in the past. All I can say is that the Yes to AV campaign was such a perfect distillation of how not to do politics, that rare example of the […]
Here’s the main problem with all political parties at the moment: the memberships
What has become received wisdom is that modern politics in the West is too removed from people and their every day concerns. That parties have become too remote. While there is truth in this, the solutions all parties have taken on board to combat this problem have been the wrong ones in reaction to this […]
My review of the Labour leadership leaflets – all three covered (sort of)
The actual starting gun to the Labour leadership contest has now been fired. Ballots go out over the next couple of days, meaning voting for the next Labour leader will be commencing very shortly. As a registered supporter this time round, I have been at the receiving end of all of the contenders’ leafletting. I […]
The border down the Irish Sea issue – and where it goes from here
Since the EU referendum came and went in 2016, leaving destruction and woe in its path, Ireland has been a thorn in the Eurosceptic’s side. What to do in order to avoid a hard border between north and south came to dominate negotiations between the UK and the EU during Theresa May’s premiership; one could […]
What Labour does not seem to understand – and why this will continue to drag them down
During the period between the EU referendum result becoming known and the December 2019 general election, a three and a half year epoch unto itself, many Remainer commentators found it astounding that no matter how many things the Leave campaign had stated were visibly disproven (“we hold all the cards” became “they are bullying us”), […]
This is the economic theory the Tories really seem set to test at the end of this year. To say it’s risky would be vastly understating it
The weirdest thing about the political times we live in is that the government has pledged to make a revolutionary change at the end of this year and no one is really addressing what that might mean. Part of this is Brexit burnout; part of it is that we just had a general election in […]