Two separate conversations in Brussels this week, both with Brits, but with people of very different political persuasions, led me to the odd conclusion summed up by the title of this blog entry – Britain leaving the EU is more likely if Labour wins the UK general election in 2015...
One election – in Italy – has just concluded. Another – the by election in Eastleigh – takes place on Thursday. Each in their own way shines a light on the deficiencies of modern representative politics, and there are some contrasts between the two votes that I would like to...
So UK Immigration Minister Mark Harper has said that a mandatory ID card scheme is under consideration in the UK for “Romanians, Bulgarians and other Europeans” according to The Guardian. This immediately set alarm bells ringing in my mind, as EU citizens should be treated the same way as ‘locals’....
Sorry if I am slow to the party, but academic Colin Crouch first coined the term post-democracy in 2004. I only encountered it a few weeks ago through this LSE blog post. Crouch’s words: A post-democratic society is one that continues to have and to use all the institutions of...
Alex Andreou has had a go at UKIP on the New Statesman website. It’s a detailed, but relatively standard, attempt to critique the party – that they have no coherent, let alone costed, policies, and that many of the people in the party or associated with the party are either...
There are two common, and incorrect, justifications for not acting in politics. The first is that now is not the right time, because at the moment everything else is more important. That is the justification most often used by opponents of an In-Out EU referendum in the UK, and is...
Yes, most of UKIP are opposed to gay marriage. The party is largely composed of right wingers, people with conservative values. We knew all of this. If, like me, you support gay marriage, then UKIP’s position is wrong. This evening, with the chairman of Young Independence (UKIP’s youth branch) Olly...
Yesterday, via Twitter, my attention was drawn to this story on Tory MP Steve Barclay’s website entitled “New charges for foreign lorries will boost local business”. Immediately I’m thinking sounds like a distortion to the EU’s single market. So I set out to try to find out what was really going...
So former TV presenter Gloria De Piero has set out to examine why people hate MPs. Steven Fielding traces a long history of this, and says the problem is nothing new, although its scale may be. But the issues De Piero raises are important nevertheless. The most interesting line in...
“We need a Labour case for the EU, not a patriotic case for the EU – a response to Fighting for Britain’s future by Glenis Willmott With David Cameron’s long-awaited EU speech taking place later this month likely to promise some sort of European Union referendum, Labour politicians are starting...
“If you are a Labour Party member you have probably received the party e-mails asking you “Could you be a candidate?” for a parliamentary by-election and shrugged your shoulders – of course I cannot be a candidate in Rotherham if I live in Plymouth, or in Middlesborough if I live...
It is perhaps human to think that things were always finer in the past. Where politicians were honest and behaved as statesmen, rather than being weak and populist and bending to every whim of the news agenda. But what has changed in the last decade is our ability to know...