Everyone’s putting out their manifestos this week, so I decided that I would review the Greens version. Why not Labour, Tory, Lib Dem, UKIP even? Lots of people are going to do that. Not many are going to give the Greens some serious analysis – it’s that darn Westminster elite, plotting against the Greens and […]

I recall being at a panel event given by a think tank a few years back in which a journalist from a well known newspaper asked about how quickly George Osborne was shrinking the debt. One of the panellists, an economist, told the journo that Osborne isn’t shrinking the debt, nor is even trying to […]

There was a very good Peter Kellner article in the Sunday Times yesterday entitled, “The new forecast takes account of Labour’s parlous prospects in Scotland – and the Tory failure to make progress in the rest of Britain”. Despite the Lib Dems not featuring in the title however, they loomed over the whole piece like a […]

Nick Clegg, in an interview with the Independent that went out yesterday, said that a Tory minority government would be “chaos”. Strong words; I thought I’d try and think about this objectively and see just how chaotic a Tory minority government would actually be – if at all. Looking at the first bit of what […]

For some time now, at least eighteen months, received wisdom in Westminster is that the following things were almost certainly true in regards to the general election: one, there is going to be another hung parliament. Two, that the Tories would emerge as the largest party again. There seemed to be too many factors going […]

Imagine this on May 8th: the Tories have ended up with 270 seats in the House of Commons, the exact same number as Labour. The Lib Dems have 30, the SNP 40. The rest of the House is comprised of tiny parties with a handful of seats, the DUP being the largest with 9. If […]

Yesterday came Labour’s announcement about their plan to get rid of non-dom status in Great Britain. Hundreds of years of tax exile, brought to a shuddering halt by Prime Minister Miliband. Well, not really. This was a typical Labour announcement, on par with the tuition fees tinker and the zero hours fudge. If you look […]

Out on the campaign trail yesterday, the prime minister gave an interview to the Daily Telegraph. During the course of it, he made a plea to those thinking of voting UKIP to “come home” to the Conservative Party. This is actually what he said specifically: “They can see the tougher approach we’ve taken to immigration. […]

People ask me on social media what my dislike of the SNP stems from. I’m not Scottish, nor have I ever lived there; my only link at all to the place is my Glaswegian grandmother, but she has nothing to do with my anti-SNP vibe. It’s very simple: I don’t like nationalism, of any stripe. […]

One of the more predictable outcomes of the seven-person-slam leaders’ debate held last Thursday evening was that Nicola Sturgeon came out of it well. She’s a very good public speaker, few in England would have heard her speak, and best of all from her perspective, she’s in the party riding highest at the moment, all […]