Tim Bale’s Blog- ‘Norman Tebbit carried a torch for a “true-blue” politics now embraced by Nigel Farage’, Independent, 8 July 2025
- ‘Why we need to halt “hard right” in its tracks’, The Loop, 10 July 2025.
- ‘Why are Tories suddenly in favour of proportional representation?’, The Independent, 25 June 2025.
- ‘London isn’t a Labour city any more — the three key questions that new polling raises’, The Standard, 24 June 2025.
- ‘Starmer’s immigrant rhetoric and politics of migration’, Anadolu, 23 May 2025.
- ‘Starmer’s winter fuel allowance “U-turn” sets him on a tricky path with backbenchers and voters’, The Conversation, 22 May 2025.
- ‘Nigel Farage has the crowd, but not the plan – and the clock is ticking’, LBC, 3 May 2025.
- ‘Under “Brexit Badenoch”, what is the future of the Conservative Party?’, The Independent, 26 April 2025.
- ‘Brexit and the Conservative Party’, UK in a Changing Europe, 25 April 2025.
- ‘Rachel Reeves needs to change the record’, Linkedin Pulse, 27 March 2025.
Author Archives: tpbale
‘Cutting welfare goes against Labour’s core values – that’s the point’, The Conversation, 19 March 2025
“It’s one thing to say the economy is not doing well and we’ve got a fiscal challenge … but cutting the benefits of the most vulnerable in our society who can’t work, to pay for that, is not going to … Continue reading
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Tagged cuts, Labour Party, politics, symbolic-politics, Welfare
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‘Who are Reform members?’, House Magazine/PoliticsHome 4 January, 2025.
Nigel Farage has been banging on about ‘the People’s Army’ for over a decade. Turns out he’s finally recruited one. Reform UK says it now has a membership of well over 100,000, overtaking that of the Conservatives. So, who are those members, … Continue reading
‘2024 proved two-party politics is in its death throes. It could be Nigel Farage’s opportunity’, Big Issue, 1 January 2025.
If the 2024 election proved anything – aside from the fact that the majority of people who bothered to vote rid of a government that had run things for 14 long years – it reminded us that the UK is no longer a country … Continue reading
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Tagged electoral-reform, fragmentation, Nigel Farage, politics, pr, reform-uk, uk-party-system
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‘What do Britons Want in a Political Leader?’ (with Paul Webb and Stavroula Chrona), Political Insight, 2 December 2024.
In 1964, US Supreme Court Justice, Potter Stewart, famously gave his opinion in a case that revolved in part around what did and did not constitute hard core pornography. ‘I shall not’, he wrote, ‘today attempt further to define the … Continue reading
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Tagged Conservative Party, dark-triad, Labour Party, leadership, party members, politics
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‘What does Trump’s victory mean for UK politics?’, LSE Blog, 12 November 2024.
Elections can sometimes make us crazy, even when they’re going on elsewhere – especially, perhaps, when they take place in the USA, where the results inevitably have more implications for the rest of us than do contests taking in smaller, … Continue reading
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Tagged badenoch, Conservatives, culture-war, Farage, Labour Party, politics, trump, woke
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‘Labour is struggling, but there are four reasons Conservatives cannot be complacent’, ConservativeHome, 26 September 2024
Not for the first time, it was Focaldata’s James Kanagasooriam – the analyst who initially drew attention to the Red Wall’s potential to turn blue in 2019 – who put his finger on it before anyone else. “Labour”, he predicted a … Continue reading
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Tagged Conservative Party, defeat, Elections, keir-starmer, Labour Party, recovery
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‘Out of the box: the Tory case for electoral reform’, House Magazine/PoliticsHome, 18 July 2024
Britain’s first-past-thepost (FPTP) electoral system has always been something of a sacred cow to the country’s Conservatives. But it’s one they now need to think seriously about slaughtering. At the beginning of the 20th century, most of the Conservative Party’s … Continue reading
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Tagged Conservative Party, electoral-reform, Nigel Farage, reform-uk
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‘Wealthy, white and rightwing: the Tory members holding the party’s future in their hands’, Observer, 6 October 2024
The Conservative party is more than just 121 MPs. It’s also tens of thousands of ordinary members. The £39 a year they pay to belong might not entitle them to any real say on the party’s policies, but it does … Continue reading
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Tagged Conservative Party, party members, tory-leadership, uk-politics
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‘What makes a good leader – according to Tory members’, House Magazine, 30 September 2024
Whether the Hansard Society’s Audit of Political Engagement, published in the spring of 2019, helped persuade Boris Johnson to get Brexit done “by any means necessary”, we shall never know. But its finding that just over half of respondents believed that … Continue reading
‘UK election: Reform and Green members campaigned more online – but pounded the pavements less’, The Conversation, 27 September 2024 (with Paul Webb and Stavroula Chrona).
It’s party conference season in Britain, a chance for members to meet and talk through their successes and failures from the election campaign – and start talking strategy for the next. Perhaps inevitably after it suffered such a crushing defeat … Continue reading
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