In the space of a little under two years Nick Clegg has gone from the immense popularity of ‘Cleggmania’, where at one point he was the most popular political leader in Britain since Winston Churchill, to being reviled by a substantial number of people, especially among the chattering classes. The cause of this dramatic change of fortune is the sense of betrayal felt by some that in 2010 after the General Election he took the [...]
In recent months there has been a lot of talk about a period of industrial strife to equal or surpass any since the winter of discontent in 1978/79. This has mainly been caused by public sector union anger over proposed changes to their pensions, and has led to some days of disruption due to strikes. The government, their advisors and even the Labour peer (Lord Hutton) they asked to look into the problem of funding [...]
One of Labour’s favourite lines of attack on the present government is that it consists of predominantly middle-aged, relatively rich white men, and therefore they have little or no real understanding of reality. While it is undoubtedly true that the Coalition government does contain an unrepresentatively large number of rich and privileged individuals, this argument – when deployed by Labour – is entirely hypocritical, because almost all of the higher echelons of that Party share [...]
Stephen Hester, the man in charge of the public-owned RBS, has agreed to forgo his bonus after being criticised by sections of the media but not, bizarrely, by some Conservatives – a few of whom seem to think that public servants deserve private sector bonuses. Ed Miliband has claimed most of the credit of course. The poor man leaps on so many bandwagons it was inevitable that one of them should prove roadworthy eventually. But [...]
In recent weeks politics has been dominated by the debate around Scottish independence. Very rarely is there a news bulletin or newspaper without someone pronouncing on the issue. Last year the major constitutional question – apart from the referendum on the Alternative Vote – was on offering more powers to the Welsh Assembly, and for the last decade nobody in Britain has been able to escape from the issue of devolution in Northern Ireland. The [...]
Our economic decline is a great triumph of capitalism. Last week saw an interesting battle take place. Essentially each party leader laid claim to being the ‘nicest chap’. The PM and his deputy entered the debate on ‘moral capitalism’ that Ed Milliband initiated with his speech to the Labour conference back in September. There seems to be a tacit agreement between the three men that this is going to be the ‘defining issue’ of our [...]
Boris has done it again; he’s confounded all expectations of what politicians are meant to do and stuck to his principles. He has done this through freezing his share of the council tax bill for another year (a real-time decrease). For the Council Tax Freeze to have a real effect for all Londoners, many London Assembly members have to agree to the freeze, and yet they seem very reluctant. Indeed, the ubiquitous Twitter user Boris Watch has [...]
I have no sympathy for Diane Abbott, the Labour MP for Hackney and member of Ed Miliband’s Shadow Cabinet, following her racist remarks on Twitter last week. Diane Abbott is part of a left-wing clique, a small but powerful minority, for whom the BBC and the Guardian often act as mouthpieces, who consistently speak out against institutions which have transformed our country for the better. Abbott, like most of the current Labour leadership, has turned hypocrisy [...]