Tag: Labour

  • IT’S ALL JUST A CASE OF (LABOUR’S) HISTORY REPEATING

      This is why Miliband prized unity in 2010. Hoped to break post-defeat cycle. Split merely deferred. — George Eaton (@georgeeaton) July 31, 2016 George Eaton’s Tweets (above) made me think about the pattern of Labour history and how the current mess is part of a cycle that goes right back to the very first […]

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  • THE POINTLESSNESS OF COMRADE CORBYN

    So, today, Jeremy Corbyn launched his leadership campaign. It was the opportunity for him to make the case that he was the genuine radical that his supporters have been claiming. To put his case that “Corbynism” was the revolutionary (perhaps that’s too charged a word) change that some see as inevitable if he is re-elected. […]

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  • WHO WILL REPRESENT THE FORTY-EIGHT PERCENT?

    THERE IS LIKELY TO BE A GENERAL ELECTION BEFORE THE TURN OF THE YEAR AND IT IS ALREADY CLEAR THAT THE THREE MOST POPULAR POLITICAL PARTIES – LABOUR, TORY AND UKIP – WILL BE PUTTING FORWARD POLICIES THAT ACCEPT THE UK’S DEPARTURE FROM THE EUROPEAN UNION. WHO WILL REPRESENT THE FORTY-EIGHT PER CENT WHO VOTED […]

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  • ELECTIONS, APPLES, ORANGES, MISINFORMATION AND SIDES

    A quick follow up to my last post. I’ve had people insist to me that it is perfectly valid to compare the latest local election results with the 2015 elections. So I want to make clear why this simply isn’t true. Here are the results from the latest local elections presented in a map (see […]

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  • LABOUR’S BETRAYAL OF SYRIA

    War has always been a topic that has caused the Labour Party problems and it seems increasingly possible that whether or not Britain should bomb Syria has the potential to create deep, and possibly irreparable, splits in the modern party. There’s a particular oddness in this situation, since Britain’s capacity to have any significant influence […]

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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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