The Tories are still riding high in the polls. The prime minister’s personal ratings remain outrageously positive, as do the numbers reflecting faith in the government. So, it would be highly logical for you to rubbish the idea that the rally round the flag affect is on the wane at all. But I believe at […]
Here is the emerging split on the right. Time will tell how deep it goes – and how that affects the Conservative party
One of the things we learned definitely from the December general election was how united the right was compared with how divided the left had become. While the right was able to group around Boris and the Tories, those who wanted the Conservatives out of government were split several ways, most prominently between Lib Dems […]
Don’t Leave, Organise: what a meeting of Labour’s new left rearguard tells us
“The previous comments made by some of the individuals on this call are completely unacceptable. These are not people who support the values of the Labour Party. This is being made clear to the Labour MPs who attended the call in the strongest possible terms and they are being reminded of their responsibilities and obligations.” […]
Why the #FBPE hashtag failed – and the general lessons from that failure
Some might immediately dispute my headline. “We got six million people to sign a revoke petition! There were several marches through London attended by hundreds of thousands of people!” All right, but Brexit happened. Sort of. It’s hard not to see a pretty hardcore version of a real Brexit taking place at the end of […]
Has the public really lost all faith in the mainstream media? Here’s a theory
Sky News commissioned a YouGov poll late last week around several topics, one of which was trust in the media. It came back with very low figures in favour of the mainstream media: 72% of respondents said they did not trust newspapers, 17% said they do. 64% said they do not trust television news, 24% […]
Why Ed Davey and the Lib Dems’ Ramadan fasting stunt is such a bad idea
For those of you not following the minutiae of the Liberal Democrat party at the moment, which I imagine is almost all of you, Ed Davey is leading many members of his brigade, MPs and councillors, to fast for Ramadan. Your first question here should be: why exactly? Has Ed Davey and many other Lib […]
Why liberals should stop being condescending about St George’s Day
Today, as most of you reading will already know, is St George’s Day. It is England’s national day. Each year on this date, several things occur. One is that a certain portion of the population gets out their crosses of St George and revels in their idea of Englishness. This is sometimes benign, it is […]
This will be the biggest impediment to Labour winning another election – and it’s not the Corbyn gang’s antics
The one thing that has managed to break up the news cycle a little bit over the past couple of weeks, away from CoVid and the government’s handling of it, has been the latest shitstorm within the Labour Party. The departing Corbynistas have burnt the crops behind them like fleeing Russian peasants, trying to send […]
Here’s why Keir Starmer will never be accepted by the far left and what that means for Labour’s immediate future
Starmer ran on a platform of uniting all factions of the Labour Party. This was an admirable one in many respects – that it was also the most politically advantageous strategy to have adopted, we will leave to one side for now. Yet as soon as he was leader, the backstabbing by the far left […]
Why free speech is under threat in a post-Covid world in ways we haven’t begun to seriously consider yet
Free speech as an issue has had a hard time of it over the last ten years. A large section of the left has given up on the concept of it completely. That this has happened at the same time as the rise of the “I’m literally a communist” meme is not coincidental. The portion […]