Author Archives: tpbale

Last week saw reports of a couple of internal takes on why Labour lost the general election. In a report circulated to the national executive committee by the party’s election co-ordinators and leaked to the FT’s Jim Pickard, most of the blame was … Continue reading →

Left-wing campaign group Momentum attracted a mixture of anger and ridicule when it announced that it would not ballot its membership on which candidate it should endorse in the Labour leadership contest. Instead, the group simply asked members to vote on whether to accept … Continue reading →

Just after New Years, we – the ESRC-funded Party Members Project run out of Queen Mary University of London and Sussex University – released the results of a survey of Labour Party members that we’d commissioned YouGov to run for us … Continue reading →

If – and, in spite of our ESRC-funded Party Members Project survey last week suggesting he was some way ahead of his rivals, it remains a big if – Keir Starmer succeeds Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader, then one could well … Continue reading →

Designing and commissioning a survey and then releasing it into the wild is always a risky business – especially, it seems, if it involves party members.  After all, they are, almost by definition, incredibly passionate about their politics – so … Continue reading →

Each general election brings with it a bunch of new MPs itching to make their mark – especially if, as in 2019, it results in a big turnover of seats. And this one has given us a new intake of … Continue reading →

Boris Johnson has long been a familiar face in British politics, so why does his ideology remain, in the words of his role-model Winston Churchill, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”? It’s a puzzle to which there … Continue reading →

“I’m not going back to the wilderness . . . We are here for the long run, and we will deal with whatever the result of the election is”, Jon Lansman, founding leader of Momentum, the 40,000-strong praetorian guard of Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, said last … Continue reading →

The populist radical right wins power in different countries in different ways. In Hungary and Poland, what were initially mainstream conservative parties with populist tendencies drifted inexorably, and now, it seems, irrevocably, into illiberalism once in government. Brexit provides perhaps … Continue reading →

Everyone knows that Labour has the largest grassroots membership of any British political party, aided by thousands of keen Momentum activists. Everyone knows that as a result they will out-perform the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats when it comes to what … Continue reading →