Charles Clarke has said the PM should go. Clarke has form for this (as mentioned here and here on this blog). Charles Clarke has not thought Gordon Brown should be Prime Minister for some time now. I’d say he’s had that opinion since Blair’s ministry. Indeed, I should think there are no circumstances in which [...]

Over at the OpenLeft website, various worthies are asked the question “What is it about your political beliefs that put you on the Left rather than the Right?”. Various others have weighed in; I’d like to go through some of the comments people made and then have a go myself. Polly Toynbee Sunder Katwala Jon [...]

Today will see the writ moved for the by-election in Norwich North where Dr Ian Gibson has resigned. In advance of the poll on 23rd July, the Universities & Colleges Union have commissioned a poll that makes interesting reading. The headlines are, with my comments underneath: Half of people aged 18-34 (48% of people aged [...]

A question posed by Matt Wardman. Here’s the data he presents, from PSR Keele, as a chart. What this tells me is that, in terms of actually winning the election, assuming that Labour do at least moderately well in Scotland and Wales, it’s only England that matters. We need to wait to see what effects [...]

‘Governing party does badly in midterm election’ is hardly a shocking story. We are familiar with the arguments about local & Euro polls being second-order elections. We know that the Guardian advocated a vote for the Lib Dems or Greens1. We know that Labour’s fratricidal tendency has come to the fore. And yet, the share [...]

I’m going to come back to this one, but in the meantime I notice that theredrag.co.uk was registered in November of last year by ‘Ollie Cromwell’. It does rather look as if this was going to be a real clone of Paul Staines’ alter ego. Redrag.net has felt the need to point out that the [...]

In an open letter in yesterday’s Guardian, George Monbiot attacks Hazel Blears for being, well, Hazel Blears. I have no objection to whinging lefties. Indeed, I often whinge and (definitional objections notwithstanding) have been called a leftie. Monbiot gives us a bad name. Not only that, he makes what he wants to achieve and what [...]

Yesterday saw the Progressive London Conference at Congress House in London. All in all, I thought it was pretty good. There seemed to be very few nutty lefties there and I was pleased that there were a few people there I knew and recognised from my CLP, from blogging, from uni and around and about [...]

Pity the Hansard scribes who had to record and commit John McDonnell’s mace-laden protest against the lack of a substantive vote on the Heathrow expansion. Unable to bring themselves to actually describe what happened, they’ve plumped for Mr Hoon: [...] Necessarily, when judgments have to be made about the interests of the country, those decisions [...]

xD.