England – Page 9 – Slugger O'Toole

After #GE2015… UKIP “We are legion…”

Mick Fealty on May 13, 2015, 6:51 am

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One way to think of UKIP is as a bunch of Elizabethan freebooting privateers, who are now revelling after having sailed into northern and Midland ports and lain waste to Labour‘s formerly secure golden hoard of working class voters. As Gerry Lynch spotted on election night, the figure which gives you a real indication of what has happened to UK politics is that the combined percentages of Conservatives and UKIP add up to 49.5. The broad assumption always was that UKIP was a right wing affair …

Anatomy of an English Defence League demonstration

Barton Creeth on May 9, 2015, 8:52 pm

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While out on a jog this morning I received a text from my wife, “There’s some crazy racist demonstration at the Blackhorse Road station”. That’s right, I remembered, the English Defence League is in town. I had received a flyer earlier in the week asking residents of the area to attend a counter-protest organised by Unite Against Fascism and We Are Waltham Forest. I turned myself around and headed over to the tube stop to check out what the …

All the right votes in all the right places – how the Tory electoral strategy triumphed

Peter Donaghy (Salmon of Data) on May 9, 2015, 8:39 pm

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The General Election of 2015 has been the worst for opinion pollsters since their calamitous evening in 1992. Whilst almost all pollsters and commentators had expected a hung parliament, with weeks of constitutional crisis, deadlock, and possible three party coalitions, in the event the Conservative Party won an absolute majority. As was widely predicted, Labour were all but wiped from the electoral map in Scotland. But this eventuality had already been baked in to the forecasts; the real shock was …

GE2015: The Autopsy

Robert Campbell on May 9, 2015, 5:16 pm

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When there’s something puzzling or suspicious or unnatural about a death, there’s an autopsy. Sometimes it’s obvious what happened, sometimes it takes time and tests to discover the truth; just very occasionally it’s not possible to determine with certainty the sequence of events. Before 10 pm on Thursday night, we were all wrong; and immediately afterwards, only John Curtice was right. He was so very right that Paddy Ashdown said he’d eat his hat, and Alastair Campbell said he’d eat …

Look over there…a view of the UK election from Ireland

Johnny Fallon on May 6, 2015, 11:21 pm

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I have never made a secret of the fact that I am no expert on politics outside of Ireland. I watch elections in other countries in a disinterested fashion. The systems are strange and I find it gives you an insight into just how bizarre politics can look when you are not involved. The UK election is probably the most interesting one in my lifetime. Up until now all I have ever seen is a strange and undemocratic voting system …

Mr Cameron, The Tories & ‘compassionate’ conservatism: compelled to justify neoliberal politics at #ge2015?

Chaminda Weerawardhana on April 22, 2015, 9:26 pm

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As the 2015 British general election campaign gathers momentum, the prospect of a hung parliament looms large. Concerning Scotland, the 2014 Scottish Referendum may have produced a result that was to the satisfaction of supporters of the ‘no’ campaign, but the Scottish National Party’s subsequent rise as an extremely decisive contender in national-level politics could be described as the seminal consequence of #Indyref. Irrespective of the ultimate election result, the SNP, led by the articulate Nicola Sturgeon, is definitely set …

UKIP appeals to disaffected lower middle class…

Mick Fealty on April 22, 2015, 2:53 pm

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I’m not sure this is such a surprise, but the British election study has looked at UKIP’s support in Britain and discovered that it doesn’t have such an appeal to the working class as many thought: “The idea that many Ukip voters are working class and that they therefore pose a threat to Labour’s support in the election has gained considerable currency ….But we find this is wrong; the working class basis of Ukip has been strongly overstated.The Party’s strongest …

ITV leaders’ debate was “UK Politics Unplugged” in cacophonous sound and vision…

Mick Fealty on April 3, 2015, 8:32 am

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So, some quick post election debate thoughts: The sentiment where I was watching was why can’t we have women politicians as articulate and as politically attractive as Leanne Wood and Nicola Sturgeon. Although it was pot luck the Plaid Cymru leader got to perform the takedown on Nigel Farage over foreign HIV patients getting NHS treatment, it was what people will remember her by. Much as the SNP and Plaid gained profile, it comes at the detriment of Carwin Jones …

The past is another country

Robert Campbell on March 22, 2015, 4:02 pm

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The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. —LP Hartley A recent post about the ‘Curragh Incident’ (here) surprised me by the number and content of the replies. It was a short piece about a single event, though one that seems to have made the British government realise that they could not impose ‘Home Rule’ on all of Ireland by force. Though often called a ‘Mutiny’, this is technically incorrect. I could have written at much greater …

Six Degrees of UKIP – the link between university qualifications and voting intention

Peter Donaghy (Salmon of Data) on March 9, 2015, 11:27 pm

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According to the analysts at firstpasthepost.net, who have analysed bookmaker’s odds for each seat in the upcoming General Election, there are seventeen constituencies where UKIP have a 25% or greater chance of winning election to the House of Commons. These include the two seats that they are defending; Clacton, and Rochester and Strood. Also on the list are a number of seats in Kent and Essex, including the seat Nigel Farage is targeting of Thanet South, as well as a …

Rod LIddle’s howler on the under punching of Irish Cricket…

Mick Fealty on February 23, 2015, 12:55 pm

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So, perhaps we should spare a thought for poor Rod Liddle. It shows what can happen [Erm, not you Brian! – Ed] when a former BBC producer loses the benefit of his hard working programme researchers. Here’s Rod writing on the eve of Ireland’s victory over the West Indies last week… Go back another three years to the 2011 World Cup and England’s defeat by Ireland. Again, that’s humiliating. All the decent Irish cricketers — not many, I’ll grant you …

Vegetarianism Stalinism Part 3: Natalie Bennett and Thought Crimes

Turgon on January 31, 2015, 11:38 pm

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Mick noted the GB Green Party leader Natalie Bennett’s interview with Andrew Neil last week below. Much of the attention was focused on the Basic Income as Mick has noted. Also interesting was Ms. Bennett’s idea of replacing the Armed Forces with a Civil Defence Force whilst at the same time turning the British Defence Industry to making wind turbines: that at the same time as opposing the Global Arms Trade. The inconsistency in that position was pretty ably noted …

Bercow’s #DigitalDemocracy report – how does it challenge NI Assembly?

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on January 26, 2015, 11:58 pm

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The Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy issued their report Open Up! on Monday. The brain child of the House of Commons Speaker John Bercow, the commission has no powers and no teeth other than the persuasiveness of their recommendations. The report is centred around five targets: By 2020, the House of Commons should ensure that everyone can understand what it does. By 2020, Parliament should be fully interactive and digital. The 2015 newly elected House of Commons should create immediately …

Testament of Youth (QFT 16-29 January) – powerful on-screen adaptation of Vera Brittain’s extraordinary WW1 memoir

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on January 14, 2015, 9:05 am

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Most war films focus on the lives of those who join up, concentrating on the action at the front. Yet many more people are left behind at home than enter the military. Testament Of Youth quite brilliantly captures the life of Vera Brittain (played by Alicia Vikander), an intelligent and boundary-pushing young woman who in 1914 dreamt of becoming a writer and fought with her father (Dominic West) in their rural middle-class Buxton home to be allowed to sit the …

Is the TUV a major party? Consultations from Ofcom & BBC Trust open on which parties should be offered Election Broadcasts

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on January 8, 2015, 4:30 pm

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Ofcom has launched a consultation around this year’s list of “major parties” that will be offered at least two Party Election Broadcasts on non-BBC TV and radio channels (ITV, STV, UTV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Classic FM, Talksport and Absolute Radio) ahead of May’s General Election (and the English local government elections the same day). The current major party list includes: In Great Britain, the Conservative Party; the Labour Party; and the Liberal Democrats. In Scotland and Wales respectively, the …

New powers for Scotland threaten constitutional crisis for the UK

Brian Walker on November 29, 2014, 11:37 am

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David Cameron’s claim that the Smith report will create “a stronger Union “ rings hollow when set against his insistence that the case for English votes on English laws is “ unanswerable,” If it means that English MPs should have a veto on any measure they don’t like that a future Labour government proposes, it will create a constitutional crisis . Equally hollow sounding is Scottish Labour’s praise for a good deal from Smith on the transfer of income tax powers …

Despite the rise and rise of UKIP it remains a little confused on the matter of Northern Ireland

Jane Hardy on November 24, 2014, 9:49 am

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The more cynical political analyst might conclude there were two Monster raving loony parties standing in the Rochester and Strood byelection this week that resulted in the return to Westminster of Mark Reckless, UKIP’s second MP and a former Conservative. Standing on a ticket that was principally anti-immigration and anti-Europe – and Reckless got into deserved trouble for suggesting at the hustings that legitimate migrants from Europe and elsewhere would be sent home after staying a “fixed period”, not the …

UKIP’s latest successes could yet damage it

Turgon on November 23, 2014, 5:21 pm

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Slowly the dust is beginning to settle on UKIP’s latest by-election victory. This one could be analysed as more or less important than the last one dependent on a number of factors. Rochester and Strood was a considerably less attractive target seat for UKIP than Clacton on Sea. It has much less of the older, poorer, white, “left behind” demographic which has been previously identified as the classic UKIP voter. Furthermore it seemed that Mark Reckless is not as popular …

“vices and follies of the powerful are much less despised than the poverty and weakness of the innocent.”

Mick Fealty on November 19, 2014, 4:18 pm

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This is soooo good, I’m just going to post a big chunk of it below. It’s Chris Dillow nailing a key problem with the UK media’s obsession with bringing celebrity to the big politics table… He cites an experiment (pdf) by James Andreoni and Justin Rao involving a constructed roleplay scenario involving a ‘dictator’: There are two things going on here. One is that if someone communicates with us, we tend to become more sympathetic towards them – even if …

Northern Ireland Executive has been ignoring the financial crisis since 2007

Mick Fealty on October 29, 2014, 7:59 am

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In the BelTel, Liam Clarke has an excellent summation of just how Stormont’s Executive got itself into this mess: The origins of the crisis lie in 2007, the final year before the property crash, when the Executive parties agreed a number of eye-catching giveaways. Water rates were set aside, at a current cost of £180m a year; our leaders held regional rates down, giving us the lowest household taxes in the UK, and there were also free prescriptions for everyone …