Letter to My MP on the DUP Deal
After Thursday’s extraordinary election result, I have had trouble keeping up with the news, let alone my thoughts on it.
News and Current Affairs
Political happenings in the UK and abroad…
The Next Leader of the Opposition
Even though the next contest is not even on the horizon, the next Labour Leader can be one of only 47 MPs. For it surely cannot be anyone who, knowing […]
In Defence of Coalitions
Just to get the emotional stuff out of the way – I’m still angry with the Liberal Democrats for enabling five years of cuts that went too far too fast, the […]
Days in May
For five days after the 2010 election, no-one knew who would become Prime Minister and form the next government. The electorate had made its choice of MPs. But it had […]
How Scotland Will Be Lost (The Neverendum Act II)
After the relief yesterday that the Union was to stay together, I’ve been pretty depressed at the many expressions of the kind of UK politics that many in Scotland were […]
The Vote-Match Trap (or “Personalities, Not Policies”)
There’s a superficial intellectual appeal to these quizzes that are supposed to match you up to a political party. But fun though the quiz format may be, I think there’s […]
Democracy and the Hypocrisy Threshold
This morning in his interview on the Today Programme the Mayor of London blustered about a ‘tiny minority’ of the workforce on the tube being able to call a strike. […]
76,641
Messing about with the boundaries of constituencies to make our first past the post electoral system “fairer” is a ludicrous own goal that is only going to highlight how manifestly […]
War on Tau
Apologies for the hyperbole in the title, but if we are to believe this BBC article on National Tau Day, pi has provoked violent anger in people “They feel like […]
One Person, One Vote
First, let’s nail the lie. Under the alternative vote, during counting, when a candidate is eliminated (as all but the winner eventually are, starting with the one with least votes) […]
Me and AV
Apparently no one gets excited about AV (Alternative Vote) except me. Even the yes campaigners interviewed on the radio are at pains to say how they know it’s nobody’s favorite […]
Please Can We Have Our Party Back?
I don’t object to Lord Kinnock supporting Ed Milliband, or being pleased that he has won. But his comment, that “we’ve got our party back” just makes me depressed. Where […]