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“We’re standing up for Britain” or “We’re all in this together”– ways to...
A tweet by Emma Burnell pointed me towards this blog post by Tracy Hill about UKIP, and the threat they pose to Labour. You can read the whole blog post to look at the stuff about UKIP, but there is...
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Behaving in politics as if we were normal people –“prefigurative action”
It is perhaps human to think that things were always finer in the past. Where politicians were honest and behaved as statesmen, rather than being weak and populist and bending to every whim of the news...
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The decline cycle of party politics
So former TV presenter Gloria De Piero has set out to examine why people hate MPs. Steven Fielding traces a long history of this, and says the problem is nothing new, although its scale may be. But the...
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Nationalist rhetoric? Or Europeanisation of trucking?
Yesterday, via Twitter, my attention was drawn to this story on Tory MP Steve Barclay’s website entitled “New charges for foreign lorries will boost local business”. Immediately I’m thinking sounds...
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Sod what Olly Neville said. It’s what it says about UKIP as a party that’s...
Yes, most of UKIP are opposed to gay marriage. The party is largely composed of right wingers, people with conservative values. We knew all of this. If, like me, you support gay marriage, then UKIP’s...
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The UK-EU argument is a proxy for the vital debate about the UK’s economic,...
There are two common, and incorrect, justifications for not acting in politics. The first is that now is not the right time, because at the moment everything else is more important. That is the...
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On UKIP and legitimacy
Alex Andreou has had a go at UKIP on the New Statesman website. It’s a detailed, but relatively standard, attempt to critique the party – that they have no coherent, let alone costed, policies, and...
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On post-democracy
Sorry if I am slow to the party, but academic Colin Crouch first coined the term post-democracy in 2004. I only encountered it a few weeks ago through this LSE blog post. Crouch’s words: A...
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ID requirements in the UK, and migration within the EU
So UK Immigration Minister Mark Harper has said that a mandatory ID card scheme is under consideration in the UK for “Romanians, Bulgarians and other Europeans” according to The Guardian. This...
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Grillo or Eastleigh? Give me Grillo any day…
One election – in Italy – has just concluded. Another – the by election in Eastleigh – takes place on Thursday. Each in their own way shines a light on the deficiencies of modern representative...
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How a Labour victory in 2015 makes the UK leaving the EU more likely
Two separate conversations in Brussels this week, both with Brits, but with people of very different political persuasions, led me to the odd conclusion summed up by the title of this blog entry –...
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Anne Fairweather is not a Labour MEP candidate for London. What is going on?
I suppose I should have had my suspicious that all would not be right with the selection process for Labour’s new MEP candidates when the initial information about the process was so thin. So it’s with...
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Some thoughts on PPE and its role in UK politics and society
“What I’ve never really understood,” a philosophy lecturer at Merton College who hadn’t taught me asked me at a leaving reception upon graduating in 2001, “was why you actually wanted to study PPE?” My...
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So Cameron starts a charm offensive across the EU
Realising his speech in January did not go down too well in EU capitals, David Cameron is this week embarking on a charm offensive across Europe. He’s visiting Madrid, Paris and Berlin, among others,...
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Labour’s MEP lists. I’m angry and disappointed.
So, as reported on LabourList earlier, Labour’s MEP lists are now out, and I am angry and disappointed by the outcome. The full list of names, together with one line bios, website links, and Twitter...
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Right then, Nicki Brooks, Labour candidate for MEP in the East Midlands: what...
09:05 on 9th April, this comment appeared in response to my blog post about Labour MEP selections, by a chap called Joseph who also did not leave a valid e-mail address and is hence untraceable: Hi...
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Online networking: we can shine the light on their malevolence, but we cannot...
It has been an interesting week. My posts about Labour’s MEP selections, and the panel member in the East Midlands, Nicki Brooks, who seems to have selected herself, have prompted all sorts of debate,...
View ArticleAn open letter to Gordon Pattison, Regional Director of East Midlands Labour
Dear Gordon, I am writing to you to ask some questions about the European Parliament selection process conducted in your region. I have been accused by Jonathan Ashworth MP of making ‘cheap...
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UKIP, the Lernaean Hydra of British politics
In Greek mythology the Lernaean Hydra is a monster with many heads, and every time one head is removed two more grow in its place. So too, it seems, is the case for the UK Independence Party just now....
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Swivel eyed loons, party membership and post democracy
So Tory Andrew Feldman may or may not have said that some of the party’s members are “swivel-eyed loons”. I am not especially bothered whether he said it or not, because as far as I am concerned it is...
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