On Friday Vince Cable is due to give a set piece speech. Given that a week is a long time in politics the speech could, presumably, go through several revisions between now and then. But that hasn’t stopped people speculating, and unnamed individuals briefing, that Uncle Vince is going […]
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 […]
Last week a tweet by the estimable Stephen Tall crossed my timeline. The tweet pointed to his blogpost The Economist is right. Liberalism is winning. Which could be bad news for the Lib Dems in 2020. That immediately piqued my interest. After all, it is axiomatic, as all […]
My goodness the atmosphere around the Libdems is febrile at the moment. No sooner had it become clear that Friday’s Libdems4change petition was going to fizzle out than we learn of Lord Oakeshott’s freelance polling manoeuvre. It’s almost as if the timing of the leak of the poll […]
Mark Carney’s speech yesterday to an Inclusive Capitalism conference has attracted plenty of press coverage. And rightly so. It is a fascinating speech. But it is not necessarily fascinating for the arguments it sets out. The arguments are familiar. It is fascinating because it is Carney who is making […]
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 […]
Today is the second anniversary of this blog opening for business. Happy Birthday – Blorthday? No, that sounds awful – to me. Another year of offering a largely indifferent world some more or less coherent thoughts on a range of loosely related topics. This landmark arrives at a […]
It’s that time of year again. Autumn Conference can be reinvigorating. So I guess, from the party’s perspective, this isn’t a bad time to have to be reaching into my back pocket. But I have to confess that there has been plenty of reflection about whether to sign […]
A lengthy piece by Richard Reeves has just been published online by The New Statesman. There is much in it that I agree with. Apart, that is, from the main thrust of the argument. It would be worth performing a detailed discourse analysis on the piece, but now […]
[This is the text accompanying my presentation to the 2nd Social Liberal Forum Conference: “Social justice across generations”, King’s College London, 14/07/12. Not all of it was delivered on the day, because of the way the session panned out and because there’s too much of it. My thanks […]
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