So a snap General Election it is then. The stars are surely aligned for substantial Conservative gains. They appear to be polling double the vote share of the Labour party at the moment. That would deliver a thumping majority. The Commentariat has already expended plenty of effort over […]
You don’t have to be one of those fancy poststructuralists or a dyed-in-the-wool discourse analyst to find the narratives around Brexit fascinating. But it probably helps. Much discursive work was done in advance of the Referendum vote to obscure the issues – to promise in vague terms that […]
There’s an understandable tendency among those who voted Leave in June to get upset at the suggestion they’re a bit dim. That they didn’t – and, even as the evidence accumulates, still don’t – understand the negative consequences of the result. So if we work with the assumption […]
[Originally posted at the SPS Comment and Analysis, 03/11/16, under a slightly different title] We are about to see one of the welfare policies of the late, only occasionally lamented Coalition government bear particularly ugly fruit. On Monday the process of lowering the Overall Benefit Cap (OBC) from £26,000 […]
The right wing response to yesterday’s High Court judgment regarding Article 50 has been over the top. I was going to say predictably over the top. But I’m not sure I would have predicted that it would have been quite so recklessly vitriolic. The Daily Mail’s front page […]
The way Theresa May has gone about co-opting the EU Referendum result to serve her own political ends is audacious. The construction of the referendum outcome as being a mandate to pursue the harshest of hard Brexits is utterly without justification. Its construction as a mandate to give […]
I’ve been watching the multi-car motorway pileup that is the Labour party at war with itself – on social media and elsewhere – for the last few weeks with a sense of bemusement. I’m surely not alone. It seems to be an object lesson is miscommunication and wilful […]
I’ve been thinking a bit about how best to negotiate the situation in which the UK did not – or at least not in the near future – trigger Artlcle 50 to start the process of Brexit. The prospect that our next Prime Minister will be a reality-phobic extreme […]
I’ve been thinking about possible scenarios for the future following the Brexit vote. None of them looks particularly appetising. Anyone concerned about the risk that the discontents driving much of the Leave vote might take more violent form, if expectations are not met, would be right to be […]
Like many others, I’ve been mesmerised by the news since last Thursday’s narrow referendum win for Leave. The pace of events has been extraordinary. You feel like if you nip to the shops for an hour it is almost guaranteed that you’ll miss some further seismic political event […]
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable”
(JK Galbraith, 1908-2006)
“Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult”
(Samuel Johnson, 1709-94)
“No section of the people has ever been excluded from political power without suffering legislative injustice”
(Millicent Garrett Fawcett, 1847-1929)
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