Last night, Dispatches finally aired their special programme on the sleazy, behind the scenes world of how our political parties are funded. The whole thing had been heavily trailed in the Telegraph over the last few weeks. Actually, nothing about it shocked me at all and in fact, what it really demonstrated more than anything […]
The SNP and “progressive” politics: in any Westminster government involving the Nats, it’s the English poor who would suffer
Alex Salmond was doing the rounds this weekend, talking about the inevitability of a Labour minority propped up by the SNP as the government post-May 7th, and hinting around what that would entail. That’s his wont, and I wouldn’t expect him to be doing anything else at this stage of the election cycle, the zombie […]
Len McCluskey’s sideways compliment to the Liberal Democrats, aka does he think talking about this stuff really helps Labour?
Yesterday, Len McCluskey, general secretary of Unite, thought it a good idea to talk about just what the unions might get up to should the Tories win the general election. It essentially involves striking no matter what. This is all in response to the Tories looking to create laws around strike thresholds. Namely, that at […]
My thoughts on Budget 2015
First of all, budgets this close to the general election are kind of meaningless anyhow. Particularly in this age of hung parliaments. I mean, even if we get another Lib-Tory, there will almost certainly be an “emergency” budget in the summer. So what’s the point? Historically, they are opportunities for the governing party to present […]
What do the British people really want the government to do on border checks?
Yesterday morning, James Brokenshire, the Tory minister for security and immigration, was given a rough time of it on the Today programme. Not, as you might guess if you’d tuned out of the immigration debate of late, because of missed immigration targets or border checks being lax. In fact, he was being given a hard […]
How the SNP surge might actually help the Lib Dems in Scotland
It has been assumed by many a political pundit that the Lib Dems are facing an electoral massacre in Scotland on May 7th. Several have predicted that the party will hold only two of their current eleven seats – with some even suggesting that Charles Kennedy will lose his seat, bringing the Lib Dem representation […]
Seriously, who cares if Grant Shapps had a second job as a web marketer
Today the Guardian is running with a story about Grant Shapps having had a second job as a “multimillion-dollar web marketer” overlapping with his time as a Member of Parliament. It’s obvious why the newspaper is running this hard given we’re weeks away from a general election, but I want to talk seriously about this […]
If the neoliberal hegemony is crumbling, what exactly is going to take its place?
Seemingly at least once a week, I read in the Guardian an article about how capitalism is in its death throes. What’s conspicuous by its absence in every single one of these pieces is what exactly is going to replace it as an economic system. In the middle of the 20th century, the Left had […]
Has Westminster lost the political capital necessary to make the changes society requires?
I was on a panel at the RSA Tuesday evening which focused on the future of health policy. Given the line up contained both Polly Toynbee and Andrew Haldenby, I thought the discussion was going to be more adversarial than it turned out to be. Instead, everyone broadly agreed that the NHS needed to reform […]
There’s a perfectly sensible reason to exclude the SNP from the debates
David Cameron said he would only take part in a debate if it was held before the short campaign started. This was clearly a bid for the prime minister not to have to take part in any debates at all, which is why it’s so refreshing that the Daily Telegraph, often referred to in less […]