We’re living through a rerun of the 1930s. It must be so, because everyone on my social media timeline tells me so. It seems to be taken as a given that Britain, like all Western societies, is a seething pit of racist, authoritarian, sentiment, itching for an undemocratic strongman to overthrow democracy and civil liberties. So, on the subject of Brexit, the Left and the Right, Leavers and Remainers, all fear the Tommy Robinsons and the Wall of Gammon that turns up at …
Here’s a question for future historians: will the UK media be blamed as much as its politicians, should Brexit really hit the skids in just a few weeks’ time? If not, it really should. Take one story as an example from the weekend: Jacob Rees-Mogg’s fanciful suggestion that a £13.8m shipping contract awarded by the UK Government as part of its emergency No Deal preparations may have collapsed from political pressure from notoriously anti-business Leo Varadkar. The premise? Arklow Shipping Limited, the …
This week a messianic nationalist party of still dubious respectability came within 600 by-election votes of cementing beyond doubt its credentials as the main electoral threat to the senior coalition partner.
Born and live in London, brought up in Dublin, roots in East Belfast. Occasional blogging at mckinney.me and far more frequent tweets at twitter.com/mckinneytweets.
YouGov have produced a wonderful composite of all their February 2013 polling to try and give a realistic picture of which bits of the electorate are behind UKIP’s polling surge into double figures , a trend which was clear well before the party pushed the Tories into third place in the Eastleigh by-election last week. There are reasons why one needs to be slightly cautious about polling composites, but with 28,944 total respondents and 2788 UKIP supporting respondents, this is …
