Category Archives: Uncategorized

‘Under “Brexit Badenoch”, what is the future of the Conservative Party?’, The Independent, 26 April 2025.

ow many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, runs the old joke, but the lightbulb really has to want to change. The same goes for political parties. For all the talk about Sir Keir Starmer somehow fooling his … Continue reading

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‘Brexit and the Conservative Party’, UK in a Changing Europe, 25 April 2025.

The impact of Brexit on the Conservative Party provides a textbook example of the remedy being worse than the disease. Cameron had always been a soft or small-e Eurosceptic, as much concerned with the symbolism as the substance of UK’s … Continue reading

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‘Rachel Reeves needs to change the record’, Linkedin Pulse, 27 March 2025.

“Politics,” according to the economist J.K. Galbraith, “is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable” – and that’s precisely what Rachel Reeves can argue she’s done in her Spring Statement. No-one … Continue reading

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‘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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‘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

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‘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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‘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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‘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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‘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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‘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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