While we wait to find out whether UKIP can secure their first elected MP today, I’d like to take a bit of a bigger view. This comes on the back of a couple of events in the past week that I attended on the future of the EU, one as speaker and one as audience […]
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For a party that got so badly mugged at the weekend, the Tories looked surprisingly chipper this week. Partly this was due to Ed Miliband’s stumbles last week leaving space for David Cameron to make a strong speech yesterday that opened the campaign for the general election. Partly it was due to a decision to […]
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On Thursday last week I wrote a piece here about why I thought the UKIP annual conference might be a turning point. Gawain Towler, the party’s press officer, tweeted that this was ‘interesting’: obviously, he knew more about how potentially turning it might be. One could argue that UKIP has never had a good annual conference […]
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It’s conference session again and so a useful time to gauge where parties are at with their positions on the EU. Labour’s leadership largely avoided the issue, mainly because of the continuing pressure from various factions to press for a referendum on membership. Given Miliband’s anticipation (justified or not) that he will be in Number […]
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Today feels like a day for taking a long view. As Scotland votes, so we sit about, waiting to see what happens. For me, the experience is a salutary one, since it makes me think about how contingent political life can be. Of course, I should be used to thinking about contingency and conditionality: what is […]
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As we roll into the final week of the Scottish independence referendum campaign, things look to be closer than many (including myself) had anticipated: even if a No vote looks more likely than not, the success of the Yes campaign in mobilising and motivating voters mean that this will be a deeply consequential vote whatever […]
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