UK Politics

I am very tired of the labels used in the Labour Party to categorise people. You are either supposed to be a Blairite or Brownite, a reformer or a loony leftie etc. Further, these labels tend to be assigned by association rather than through any logic or sensible rationale. A...

I spent all of yesterday at the Compass Conference in London. Bit depressing, spending all of a summer Saturday indoors, but it was worthwhile to go along. The programme of the conference – attended by 1000 people they claim – was very impressive, with an enormous number of breakout groups...

Excellent news: the Labour Party has just released 2 new blogs. Bad news: these are about football! Yes, I’m quite serious. Alistair Campbell and Sadiq Khan MP will write blog entries about the World Cup – click here for the website. OK, it’s fun. But does Labour not have any...

From Polly Toynbee’s article from today’s Guardian: How tragically revealing that half of all prisoners are completely illiterate and another 20% have a reading age under eight. Plus prison numbers will hit record levels this week, and the UK has Europe’s longest sentences on average. Hell. And this is after...

June is Amnesty International’s anti-torture month, and a group of enterprising bloggers have set up Bloggers Against Torture. All you have to do is link to them (I have here, and also in ‘Links’ in the right column) and write about the issue – in my case this has been...

It must be a quiet news day in the UK as the new traffic policy ideas from the Conservative Party have hit the press, piloted by none other than that die-hard eurosceptic John Redwood. The bold idea is that drivers should be allowed to turn left at a junction even...

It was pointed out to me recently by Helena that for most Europeans, travelling from their home country to another did not strictly entail them going overseas and hence I ought to watch my vocabulary when talking about international travel. I was quite disgusted with myself when I reflected on...

OK, so we have known for months that Tony Blair has favoured nuclear power in order to keep the UK’s CO2 emissions down. Last night, giving a speech to the CBI, he gave the clearest statement yet that he backs a new generation of nuclear plants (Guardian article here). This...

I’m stuck. Really stuck. The more time goes on, the more Blair’s reputation gets battered, the more he comes up with more silly policies, the more I want him to stay as Prime Minister! Or, let me correct that, the more time goes on, the more I get scared and...

I winced when I read this article in The Guardian that veteran crooner Cliff Richard felt so sorry for Tony Blair in the aftermath of going to war in Iraq that he let Blair go and stay in his summer house in Barbados for free. I don’t know what makes...