Tag: Politics

  • LABOUR’S ELECTORAL SURGE: UPDATED

    So, in my last post I responded to a post that claimed that there was a resurgence of Labour support identified in local election results. I thought I’d follow that up with a more detailed look at how things are going. The chart above tracks the change in The Labour Party’s share of the vote […]

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  • IT WAS HARRIET WOT WON IT

    I have quite admired Harriet Harman in the past, insofar as, as a woman on the left of British politics, she’s had to put up with a lot of shit thrown her way and she’s coped with it with a certain amount of grace and occasional flashes of humour. However, I fear that when the […]

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  • WHAT THE LABOUR PARTY IS FOR: OR, WHERE YOU CAN SHOVE YOUR IDEOLOGICAL PURITY

    One of the many weird things about the Labour leadership election has been, as a member for nearly 30 years, getting lectured about Labour values by people who – to my certain knowledge – have never been members of the Labour Party, are not members of the Labour Party, have spent a great deal of time […]

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  • MARK FERGUSON IS BEING WRONG ABOUT KEYNES AND BUDGET SURPLUSES

    Mark Ferguson seemed like a decent, thoughtful bloke who did good work as editor of LabourList, so I was disappointed when he announced he was going to work for Liz Kendall’s campaign. I was even more disappointed today when he went out of his way to (i) misrepresent the work of Keynes and (ii) appear […]

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  • LABOUR AND THE LIMITS OF ASPIRATION

    In his piece in The Guardian today, positioning himself as a contender for leadership of the Labour Party, Chuka Umunna wrote: Our vision as a party must start with the aspirations of voters: to get on and up in the world, to see their children and grandchildren do better than they did, to get that […]

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  • THE ELECTION: NOT KIDDING OURSELVES

    There’s no shortage of people dissecting the election result but here are my initial thoughts. Labour did not lose because it wasn’t left wing enough for Scotland – even if Labour had taken every SNP seat in Scotland, it wouldn’t have won this election. In any case the policies Labour offered at this election were […]

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  • ONLINE COMMUNITIES DO NOT EXIST

    If you spend time on social media of any kind then the “flame war” (to use a fading phrase) is likely to become a way of life. Hate seems to be the first, and sometimes only, language of the internet. Sometimes the divisions that prompt these furious engagements are obvious. “GamerGate” – whatever its origins […]

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  • WHAT DOES LABOUR DO? FIVE OBVIOUS STEPS TO WINNING

    So, another set of elections, another ungood night for Labour. Admittedly it was a much worse one for the parties in government. Indeed it was so bad, that  if the swing against the Conservatives and Lib Dems was repeated at a general election, Labour could achieve a substantial parliamentary majority without adding a single vote […]

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  • WORLDCON PANELLING

    I, like lots of other people, got a bit excited when the organisers of Loncon3 sent out the draft schedule for this year’s Worldcon – but I’ve had some ongoing website problems, so it’s taken a while to get this online. But, at last, for anyone who might be interested, these are (provisionally, I think) the […]

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  • SOME THOUGHTS ON HOW LABOUR WINS IN 2015

    So this year’s elections are over, and lots of people are using the results as an excuse to try and shift their favoured political parties around, so I thought: “Why should I miss out?” I don’t think the European election results are either disastrous or brilliant for Labour. You can’t look at the raw figures […]

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