Something good is going come out of the riots: people care about them. No news event since the 1980s has had people so aroused to read the news and try to really understand what has been happening. The events of recent weeks are a challenge to all traditional partisan narratives, and, to put it simply, [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized, conservatives, davidcameron, labour, spendingcuts, tonyblair, ukpolitics on August 16th, 2011 | No Comments »

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 »

All five Labour leadership candidates are interviewed in this Saturday’s Independent. It could almost be a spoof from Tory head office. Ed and David give identical answers more than once: closer to ‘Two Little Boys’ than Cain and Abel. Both of them name their parents as the greatest influence on their political careers. Diane Abbott [...]

Filed under: davidmiliband, edmiliband, labour, ukpolitics on August 30th, 2010 | No Comments »

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 »

The surge of support for the Liberal Democrats over the last week is proof of an extraordinary political coup, pulled off by the Labour Party. When people cast their votes on May 6th they will cast them not for or against the government, but for or against the Conservatives. David Cameron is the central figure [...]

Filed under: conservatives, davidcameron, labour, libdems, ukpolitics on April 23rd, 2010 | No Comments »

An aide to the Prime Minister spreads some nasty gossip in a private email to a blogger. The blogger’s emails are hacked, the emails are leaked to another blog, and the aide resigns. It’s a juicy and very modern tale of a spin doctor getting a taste of his own medicine. But is it really [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized, bbc, conservatives, davidcameron, jonathanbirch, journalism, labour, ukpolitics on April 12th, 2009 | No Comments »

Creative Commons licensed photograph courtesy of Flickr user jgraham.
Even after eleven years, there’s still something a bit shocking about tuition fees. If the vice-chancellors get their way, fees will rise to at least £5000 per student per year. It’s a policy that flaunts its pragmatism on its sleeve. I still think fees defy any principled [...]

Filed under: barackobama, education, jonathanbirch, labour, religion, ukpolitics on March 17th, 2009 | No Comments »

Photograph courtesy of World Economic Forum
Last year I made a fairly failsafe prediction that David Cameron would have a good 2008. Gordon Brown’s contempt for PR was only ever going to boost his public image in the short term: foresaking spin is fine until you have a policy to present or defend (say: a tax [...]

Filed under: jonathanbirch, labour, ukpolitics on September 23rd, 2008 | No Comments »