So Labour have lost the Crewe and Natwich election, the Tories winning their first by-election in 26 years. Huzzah.
At last Labour seem to be getting the kind of kicking they’ve long deserved - a kicking I’m hoping might finally shake them out of the complacency that’s seen a supposedly left-wing, pro-EU government with no viable [...]

Yes, we all know the current government is hopelessly inept at PR, quite inept at sticking by its decisions, and quite fond of authoritarian intervention (whether on The Terrorists or The Smokers). So it’s nice to be reminded that, on aggregate and including their oh-so-cuddly leader, the Conservatives still hate women and hate gays.
Dunno about [...]

Kinnell. Cameron’s Tories are really going for the unexpected candidates. I thought it was far out when they got Zac Goldsmith, editor of The Ecologist and one of the consistent frontrunners for most hated Tory on hatemytory.com, to stand for MP.
But now they’re ditching Steve Norris as their attempt at London Mayor. Good. People made [...]

Following the recent vote in the House of Commons, that the House of Lords be 100% elected, Nick Barlow has proposed that they be elected by STV. He notes that one proposal is that lords be elected at the same time as the European election, with a third of the lords being elected each time, [...]

I didn’t get to hear the John Humphreys interview with the Prime Minister when it was broadcast on Friday. Happily, it’s archived on the Today site. The interview itself is available in Real Media format. BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson analyses in Real Media. Most newspapers commented on Saturday; the BBC summarised the interview as [...]

The rising prison population isn’t only a British concern; it also makes the news in Italy. However, the comparison with Britain breaks down on at least two counts: firstly, because the size of the prison population is considerably smaller (in both absolute and relative terms); secondly, because the Italian government has taken the novel step [...]

Noone’s going to like me for saying this, but I’m going to say it anyway:
The Democrats will lose the midterms. And that’s probably all they deserve.
Don’t get me wrong – that’s not what I want to happen. What I want is for the Republicans to be thrown out on to the street, and for the [...]

We’re shafted several times over by our first-past-the-post electoral system. Let me count the ways: it’s unrepresentative, it occludes choice, it wastes a majority of votes, it under-represents women (with interesting second-order effects on corruption). It gave us Tony bloody Blair.
And according to this recent study from the Ratio Institute in Stockholm, it also hands [...]

It’s now a few days after Lords Reform Day and Paul has already written another, well-worth-a-look piece here, which makes this attempt to fulfill my pledge by writing a related article a little late. Still, hopefully it’s of some relevance and interest…
The idea behind Lords Reform Day and its sponsor organisation, the Elect The Lords [...]

On this, the 95th anniversary of one more wishy-washy unfulfilled political promise, it is time to stop dodging, stop delaying and stop equivocating. Either we live in a democracy or we do not.

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do? - John Maynard Keynes
If you wanted to encapsulate in a single incident the reasons why the voters in just about every major democracy are losing faith in their politicians right now, you could do worse than to go back to Washington University, St [...]

First the good news. The Liberal Democrats narrowly beat Labour in the local elections as a percentage of the national vote (with 27%). This being a 22% increase on what they managed during last year’s General Election, you could say they have not had a bad few weeks. After all it is only the second [...]

It looks like the dust has finally settled after the elections. People are jockeying for position, accusations of disloyalty are flying around, but nobody’s disputing what the numbers say. The Prime Minister is still there, for now. He’s been announcing to anyone who will listen that he tells his allies what to do and not [...]

In the 2005 general election, Tony Blair was elected to serve a full third term as Prime Minister. He has been given a clear mandate by the electorate and it is right and proper that he honour the commitment he made to them only last year.
So say Mr Blair’s supporters. Blair himself has again made [...]