“Newspapers / the media / leafletting / canvassing [delete as applicable] are surely the least of his problems!” Can you really imagine a UK political activist saying any of those four possible phrases about the campaign for someone running for mayor of a London borough, and not leaving themselves open...
On October 7th Eurostar announced a £700 million investment plan to purchase 10 new 16 car e320 trains from Siemens that will run from 2014, and from 2011 onwards upgrade the interiors of its existing 28 trainsets. Following that DB showed two ICE3 trainsets at St Pancras on 19th October,...
Attending Personal Democracy Forum, re:publica and other equivalent events has – both directly and indirectly – opened my eyes to the writing and thinking of a whole group of US public intellectuals. I’ve had fun meeting Jeff Jarvis, have heard Lawrence Lessig, Clay Shirky and Cory Doctorow present, and have...
On October 19th Jon Cruddas delivered the Aneurin Bevan Memorial Lecture, entitled ‘Taking back the Big Society”. The text of the speech is available at Liberal Conspiracy here and if you’ve ever heard Jon Cruddas deliver a speech live you can almost imagine how he would have delivered it (I...
Since mid-September I’ve been a resident of Tower Hamlets, Bethnal Green & Bow constituency to be precise. I’m still trying to work out what’s going on there, and how I might do something in the local Labour Party. I’m hence not in a position to be able to comment on...
I’m a big fan of using social media – particularly Twitter (via one of more hash tags) and blogs – during large events and conferences. The event itself, the speakers’ presentations, are like a rock being dropped into a pool, and the social media reactions are the ripples going out...
Political Betting has raised the issue of whether David Miliband’s decision to get Diane Abbott onto the ballot paper in the end costed him the leadership. The line is that Abbott being on the ballot motivated more on the left of the party and affiliated organisations to cast their ballots,...
I’ve just sat through a largely uninspiring panel at Labour Conference entitled “European Social Democracy: The Path Back To Power”, organised by FEPS and EPLP. Roger Liddle chaired in his charming but rather bumbling manner, and the panellists were Philip Cordery, Roland Rudd, Claude Moraes and Rushanara Ali. None of...
James Kirkup on the Telegraph Blog has raised the interesting idea that David Miliband, pipped to the Labour leadership by his brother, might leave UK politics for the IMF. Kirkup says the info on this comes from Bagehot in The Economist, and as Bagehot used to be Charlemagne for that...
I’m in Sweden at the moment, one of the most gender-conscious countries in the world, and motivated by this I’ve been thinking about the impact of election systems on gender representation, inspired in part by this from Talking about the EU. The general rule is that list-based election systems tend...
I spent a few hours today at a seminar about left wing blogging in Sweden in Eskilstuna, a medium sized town 90 minutes south west of Stockholm. I was invited there by Fredrik Pettersson, one of my web clients. My presentation from the seminar is here, but this blog entry...
So wrangles about how and when to hold a referendum on the future of the UK’s election system rumble on… and how messy the whole thing gets. The only given is that there will be a referendum sometime in this parliament – it’s in the coalition deal. So even if...