New Labour was pronounced dead on Saturday as Ed Miliband professed his desire to take the party in a different direction. The era of Blair, Brown, and Miliband senior is over, and so now seems the perfect opportunity to reflect on its record, beginning with the election of Tony Blair as Labour leader in 1994, and [...]
Filed under: crime, defence, education, gordonbrown, health, labour, tonyblair on September 30th, 2010 | No Comments »
I’ve spent the last few days squirming on behalf of India, a country I fell in love with during the four months I spent there in 2008. There have been many stories of India’s apparently imminent failure to deliver a successful Commonwealth Games, stories that I know will provoke utter mortification in that intensely patriotic [...]
Filed under: davidcameron, davidmiliband, foreignpolicy, india, media, sport on September 24th, 2010 | 1 Comment »
After the thrill of the election campaign and the euphoria of the first TV debate came the disappointment of election night for the Lib Dems as they lost seats and failed to make great inroads into the vote share. Given that they now sit in government, with five ministers around the cabinet table and (at [...]
Filed under: conservatives, libdems, nickclegg on September 22nd, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Government appointments to advisory positions are often motivated by PR rather than an actual need for counsel; in the early days of Gordon Brown’s premiership, it seemed that there were more ‘tsars’ than in Time of Troubles-era Russia. However, this week two genuinely significant appointments have been in the news, one in the UK and one [...]
Filed under: barackobama, deficitreduction, georgeosborne, globalfinancialcrisis on September 13th, 2010 | No Comments »
Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, today outlines plans to cut the science budget while forging stronger links between science and business. A bit ominous, but not particularly surprising. The really ominous thing about this news is how the BBC has reported it. At the time of writing, the BBC News story quotes “Martin Reese, president [...]
Filed under: culture, jonathanbirch, journalism, ukpolitics on September 8th, 2010 | No Comments »
