When the exit polls came in on election night I saw the same reaction from everyone watching: total shock. Their astonishment was not at the projected hung Parliament we had all been expecting, or at the Tory lead over Labour, but at the thought that the Lib Dems, whose ascendancy had apparently been the story [...]

Filed under: conservatives, labour, libdems, ukpolitics on May 22nd, 2010 | No Comments »

The Labour Party is at a crossroads. It has lost an election, and lost power, but its position is far from disastrous. Labour has nearly a hundred more MPs than the Tories did in 1997, and its in-fighting over the last few years has been nowhere near as debilitating as Tory civil war was in [...]

Filed under: labour, ukpolitics on May 14th, 2010 | No Comments »

Interesting times. With an extraordinary Con-Lib coalition about to be finalised, David Cameron and Nick Clegg must be all but salivating at the prospect of imminent power as a forlorn Gordon Brown skulks off into obscurity and Labour braces itself for a spell in opposition.
It looks like a catastrophe for the outgoing government. But [...]

Filed under: conservatives, davidcameron, jonathanbirch, labour, ukpolitics on May 11th, 2010 | No Comments »

It’s a scandal: in the 2008 US Presidential Election, 47% of the votes counted for nothing! Rather than granting each candidate a slice of power proportional to his or her vote share, America inexplicably uses an antiquated “winner takes all” approach. Consequently, over 50 million voters received no representation whatsoever in the White House.
That [...]

Filed under: electoralreform, jonathanbirch on May 4th, 2010 | 2 Comments »