Not a good few days to be a British football fan. No, make that Scottish, English or Northern Irish football fan. England’s abject 3-2 defeat by Croatia at Wembley this evening meant that none of the 4 UK ‘nations’ has made it through to the European Championship finals in Summer...
Good news today regarding Britain’s relationship with the European Union (I don’t get to say that very often!) The European Movement is re-launching this afternoon in Westminster, with Charles Kennedy as its new Chair. Whatever Kennedy’s background, it cannot be denied he is a high profile and charismatic politician –...
2 Spanish cartoonists have been fined for drawing a cartoon depicting the Crown Prince Felipe and his wife Letizia having sex – see the original cartoon here, and the BBC News article. Make of the cartoon what you want, but there are 2 important issues here: trying to break the...
Today would have been Election Day. As October is now behind us it would be pleasant to be able to draw a line under what has been an awful month for Labour. Yet try as I might, I find it hard to be upbeat looking forward. First we had all...
Discussions in the Conservative Party about the creation of an English Grand Committee have been causing a bit of a stir in the last few days. As I’ve argued before, these sorts of issues need to be ironed out, but letting the Speaker of the House of Commons decide what...
Seemingly there’s no limit to the efforts to which ‘Lib Dems are always the nice guys‘ Andy Mayer will go to draw attention to Miranda Grell’s appeal over her conviction for electoral offences – he’s listed his own blog using Google Adwords when someone searches for Miranda in Google. Quite...
I can’t do the complex topic of the British Constitution justice in a swift Sunday night blog post, but plenty of concerns about British constitutional structures have been playing on my mind since the Brown ‘non-election’ furore on 6th October, and ongoing fights about the EU Reform Treaty. In short...
I’ve been a bit slow on the uptake writing this as I’ve been away in Belgium for the last 5 days. Contrary to what I had so much hoped Miranda Grell was found guilty of 2 charges of claiming a Lib Dem opponent was a paedophile in a court ruling...
How long should elected politicians serve? It’s a perennial issue for all levels of government. I’m not in favour of fixed terms of office – that’s for the individuals concerned and especially for the parties themselves to decide. While the rest of the Labour Party is getting worked up by...
UK prison officers staged an unofficial strike yesterday. Today came Brown’s response: keeping public sector pay rises low is essential to keep the lid on inflation. OK, that applies to the entire public sector, but will that reassure the prison officers? That might have been an acceptable line while he...
Will Hutton has penned what can only be described as an eloquent and rational rant in today’s Observer about the irrationalities of the the world’s financial markets – it’s short and well worth a read. The essence of his argument is that governments are so in awe of the importance...
So the ‘debate‘ about whether Britain should hold a referendum on the EU Reform Treaty rumbles on. The Tories snipe from one side that this is indeed the same as the European Constitution, a document Blair was ready to put to a referendum. This is set against the backdrop of...