Batten Down the Hatches
Max Musson’s article on the disastrous ineptitude of the Conservative campaign in the recent general election leads me on to explore one or two further implications of the debacle – and it was a debacle no matter how much Mrs. May’s supporters protest that she actually won the election – perhaps she did, technically, but we all know who really won it. In Paul Nuttall’s resignation speech he said that within eighteen months Ukip would be “bigger than ever”…
What Now?
Many of us will have suffered a sense of deja vue as news came through of Ukip’s wipeout in the local elections. Although on a vastly greater scale, the disaster was all too reminiscent of the BNP’s obliteration at the general and local elections of 2010. While we could debate the cause of the BNP’s decline and fall – if it still mattered – there can be no doubt about the cause of Ukip’s eclipse. It is perceived…
Electoral Folly and Corruption in the Potteries
On 13th January this year and following significant policy differences with party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour MP for the constituency of Stoke-on-Trent Central, Tristram Hunt, resigned his seat and announced that he is to take up the position of Director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, thus triggering a by-election to be held on 23rd February. Stoke-on-Trent Central has been a solidly Labour ward throughout the last sixty-years or more and so one might…