It’s election year and it’s no great surprise to see a number of hatchet jobs on the Lib Dems across the print media, especially the right wing tax exiled/foreign owned press. Part of the reason I write blogs is to be a (low circulation) liberal counterblast to the partisan media that generally does us no favours. Some of the stories lately have been trumped up and specious attacks that I won’t dignify with a response. One piece however, by George Eaton in the New Statesman, hypes up the Greens prospects in Bristol, and asks a serious question – Can the Greens ever overtake the Lib Dems? My sh ..read more

2024 is a massive year for elections in the UK, not least because on May 2 London – the most important city in Europe – goes to the polls. Our capital city has been electing a City Mayor and an assembly since 2000. In the past the political agenda for London hasn’t changed greatly between one election and the next. Despite the fact that the last election happened only three years ago (thanks to a pandemic-related delay), 2024 feels really different from the last one with several new talking points. Let me take you through them . . . London’s blue light services I don’t think anyone pretends th ..read more

We can be pretty certain that later this year there will be a change of government and that the Labour Party will regain power at the General Election. Quite apart from drawing parallels between the electoral outcomes of 1997 and now, we also need to be mindful of Labour’s policy DNA and what might happen in the coming years. What have they got up their sleeve they didn’t have time for in the 1997 – 2010 period? The idea of ID cards is now fringe in terms of political debate, but occasionally I see data science nerds and the chief architects of ID cards, Tony Blair and David Blunkett, continue ..read more

We’re less than a month away from this year’s Local Elections. I’m glad that they don’t coincide with a General Election. I believe local government is an important end of itself, and by being a stand alone election it gives opposition party activists a chance to really focus and stick it to the Tories, who deserve another chapter in their own version of Decline and Fall. I covered off what I regard to be five important and interesting contests in my previous blog. Here are another six councils where the Tories are likely to lose control, or offer some major talking points. Gloucester – set to ..read more

We’re just over a month away from the first big elections of the year – the Local Elections and the London Mayor/GLA contest (which will be covered in a separate blog). I’d like to draw your attention to some of the more interesting and significant contests happening up and down the country. The big picture is that 2641 seats are up for election, spread across 107 different councils. The Conservatives currently hold 985 seats, Labour 966, Lib Dems 410 and the Greens 107. My main hunch is that the Tories are going to lose 250 – 500 seats, quite who will be the main beneficiary we’ll have to wai ..read more

He jumped before he was pushed, Blackpool South MP Scott Benton resigned yesterday meaning he won’t be ejected from the House of Commons by a recall petition. Who says there’s no good news? In a crowded field Benton was one of the most abrasive and obnoxious MPs on the Government benches. This is the latest step in a long process of detoxifying parliament that will involve the ejection of a lot more Tory MPs later this year, hopefully. What we already know about the General Election is a large number of Tory MPs are set to stand down, on top of several that have already been ejected due to by ..read more

A few years ago social housing campaigner Kwajo Tweneboa appeared on daytime TV, he’s been on several current affairs programmes fighting the good fight for council and housing association tenants. Kwajo’s great, we need more people like him. Across the desk was Reform UK’s Ben Habib, looking particularly gormless and for a few minutes he pretended to care. Asking someone from Reform about an essential public service like housing is a bit like asking your local WI members about Death Metal – the two worlds will rarely collide. Over the past few years opinion polls have been relatively stable b ..read more

If you’re a political anorak or a massive Fatboy Slim fan you’ll be familiar with the notorious ‘Daisy’ party political broadcast from 1964. It was shown only once because it was thought to be too melodramatic but it’s been talked about ever since. The purpose of Daisy was to portray Lyndon B Johnson’s opponent in the Presidential election, Barry Goldwater, as an extremist because he’d toyed with the idea of using nuclear weapons to end the war in Vietnam. America had first deployed nukes in Japan in 1945, but after that the Soviets had created their own bomb and there had been sabre rattling ..read more

You’ll have seen several takes on Jeremy Hunt’s budget already I’m sure, I’m going to focus on the built environment. You know we’ve got a climate emergency, a cost-of-living emergency, it’s also the case that we’ve got a public sector buildings emergency. There’s a massive repairs backlog for schools, hospitals, council houses, prisons, police stations, fire stations, MoD estates, leisure centres, law courts and minor roads. There’s a scarcity of public buildings too, we need to build lots of new ones, as well as repair the ones falling apart. When Boris Johnson ascended to power I was struck ..read more

It’s election year, and I’m sure we’re going to see some ostentatious victory stunts from the Lib Dems, in the past we’ve injected razzmatazz into politics by involving showbiz stars, drawing on our strong links with the entertainment world. This reached a zenith in 2010 when the likes of Colin Firth, JK Rowling, Armando Iannucci, Daniel Radcliffe and Professor Richard Dawkins were on a list of high profile backers published by the party. For many their enthusiasm cooled when we entered government, enacted gay marriage, brought UK aid to the UN level, raised the income tax threshold and brough ..read more