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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Where will the Lib Dems be come December 31, 2015?
I can hear the Clegg haters on Twitter responding to the title I’ve given this article already: with any luck, dead and buried. But as I’ve already highlighted the central importance the Liberal Democrats, through the magic that is the First Past the Post voting system, will probably have on who governs post-May 2015, as […]
So long as young people continue to not vote, they will be ignored by Westminster
There’s a raft of stuff in the Guardian his morning about young people and voting. A big poll has been done on 17 – 22 year olds. Most of what comes out is roughly what you’d expect: this group is more pro-European, more liberal generally than those in older age groups. The stuff that is […]
Who will be the next leader of the Conservative Party? All of the candidates and the odds on each of them winning, right here
The next leadership contest within the Tories could happen as soon as four and a half months from now. Even at its latest, it’s only a little over two years away, given the timeline Cameron himself has outlined. So it seems to me that getting to grips with who might feature in that race and […]
The Lib Dems are the only thing standing in the way of the Tories getting a majority in May 2015
There’s been a Guardian/ICM poll done this week, measuring Westminster voting intention in Scotland. It’s not quite as bad for Labour as some of the other Scottish polls done recently, but it’s still pretty awful. The SNP has a 17-point lead over Labour, enough of a lead, on uniform swing, to reduce the Scottish Labour […]
If the Labour Party is sincerely targeting Sheffield Hallam, they’re acting like morons
I read an article in the Daily Telegraph yesterday about how Labour has decided to target Sheffield Hallam next May. It has all the hallmarks of a story put out to fill space on the basis of little actual content. Some “senior Labour figures” had told the Telegraph that behind closed doors Hallam is being […]