Reshuffle day is for politics nerds as transfer deadline day is for football supporters. You hope for some big name signings and some surprise moves between big clubs, but most of the activity takes place in the lower divisions. What was the most interesting component of today’s activity? […]
The evolving Miliband-Mail saga is by turns fascinating, troubling and encouraging. The saga is fascinating because it suggests that Miliband is properly getting under the skin of the political right. His Conference speech presented a very diluted form of social democracy. It represented a tentative departure from the […]
What a difference a speech makes. The reaction to Ed Miliband’s speech on Tuesday has been remarkable. The initial press reaction was hysterical. In a matter of minutes Miliband went from an ineffectual leader who was frittering away Labour’s poll lead through inactivity to a clear and present […]
[Originally posted at The Conversation, 25/09/13] The commentariat has gone into overdrive in the wake of Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour party conference. Does it represent, at last, the shattering of the neoliberal consensus? Is it the articulation of a vision for a more inclusive and humane social democratic […]
In today’s Telegraph Chris Grayling goes on the offensive. And his article certainly is offensive. It’s an offence against nuanced debate for a start. Grayling’s argument in summary is that Britain is in “a global race” that is getting tougher. The Conservatives “support wealth and job creators” and […]
Last weekend’s Liberal Democrat conference was hailed by most of the mainstream media as a victory for Nick Clegg over the party’s grassroots activists. Commentators across the right wing press congratulated him on a job well done. Clegg engineered a situation in which the party voted to adopt […]
Tim Farron is by far the most accomplished orator among the current generation of leading Liberal Democrat politicians. Rarely does one of his speeches as Party President pass without someone making use of the word “barnstorming”. His speech on the opening day of this year’s autumn conference was […]
Harriet Harman has post at the Huffington Post today. The theme of the post is that, regardless of what the Liberal Democrats say, they can’t be trusted: Nick Clegg has repeatedly said one thing and then done another. Time after time Nick Clegg has tried to distance himself […]
Over at Liberal Democrat Voice today Tom Brake provides an update on the progress of the Lobbying Bill, focusing particularly on Part 2 because of the extensive criticism it received both inside and outside Parliament last week. Brake’s post notes that: It is not, and has never been, the […]
The more I think about economic policy the more I think that there isn’t a big enough dose of interpretivism applied to it. This thought recurred yesterday reading George Osborne’s set piece speech in which he, as Isabel Hardman of the Spectator put it, “trashed” Plan B. I […]
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