Tag: Stephen Tall

Social liberalism and the Liberal Democrats

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 […]

Has The Good Right got it right?

I’ve only just found the headspace to catch up with Tim Montgomerie and Stephan Shakespeare’s The Good Right, an agenda for the modernisation of conservatism. I was reminded of it yesterday while reading Stephen Tall’s final – and excellent as ever – post for ConservativeHome. The overarching aim […]

Lib Dem blogging on the slide

Over at Liberal Bureaucracy a few days ago Mark offered an overview of activity in the Liberal Democrat blogging community. He argues that the trend is not healthy – fewer bloggers, less activity: So, there are less of us, and we’re quieter than we once were, which feels […]

Notes from a small gathering

Last night I attended a fringe meeting entitled Ten years since the Orange Book – What should authentic liberalism look like? organised by the Institute for Economic Affairs and chaired by Isabel Hardman of the Spectator. I can’t quite remember the last time I went to an IEA […]

A quick post on human rights

Today the Conservatives published their long-promised proposals for the replacement of the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights, although their thunder was stolen somewhat by early publication of the announcement yesterday at Jack of Kent. There has been plenty of speculation about what such a […]

Going down fighting

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 […]

Extracting apologies from the unrepentant

The Liberal Democrats seem to be getting into an almighty tangle over the Rennard affair. Stephen Tall offers a good overview of the state of play. It seems no one, apart from Lord Rennard and his chums, feels the outcome of the Webster inquiry is satisfactory. Many also […]

Browne study

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? […]

Participatory inequality and the rise of populist politics

It’s been a fascinating and frustrating few days in politics. On Thursday lunchtime I discovered that Claus Offe, one of the world’s most famous political sociologists, as giving a lecture entitled Participatory inequality in the austerity state about a hundred metres from my office late on Thursday afternoon. […]

Reaching the Terrible Twos

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 […]