Archive for the ‘British current affairs’ Category
Now it gets interesting …
March 1st, 2010 by Roger Darlington
It’s 66 days to the likely date of the General Election (Thursday, 6 May 2010) and the latest opinion poll – the Sunday Times/YouGov survey – shows the Conservatives just 2% ahead of Labour. As I blogged here, when we were 100 days from the election, the Tory lead was 11%. As we near the […]
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How many electoral systems are there in Scotland?
February 25th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
I used to be something of a minor expert on electoral systems which puts me in a very small and geekish minority. It all started when I worked in the House of Commons in the the early 1970s as Research Assistant to the Labour Party spokesperson for Northern Ireland Merlyn Rees at a time when […]
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100 days to General Election
January 26th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
Here in the UK, it’s exactly 100 days to the most likely date of the General Election: 6 May 2010. The good news for the Labour Government is that at last the recession is officially over. The bad news for the party is that, in the latest opinion poll, the Conservatives are 11% in the […]
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Should we have a Windrush Day?
January 25th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
I was born on 25 June 1948. I like the symmetry of the date – exactly midway between Christmases, so spreading evenly the childhood joy of receiving presents. Furthermore this was a most historic time. Domestically it was the time that the National Health Service was created (5 July 1948). Internationally it was the start […]
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Two British views of the British General Election
January 19th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
Nick Cohen fears that Labour could be heading for a massive defeat in a few months’ time – see this blog posting. He could be right. But try this for an alternative scenario: the Conservatives win the largest number of seats but no overall majority, go to the polls again in May 2011, and a […]
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An American view of the British General Election
January 19th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
Of course, the British General Election has not been called yet, but it has to be in the next five months and it will probably be on Thursday 6 May 2010. So it’s interesting to read this American view on the forthcoming poll. Especially useful is the graph about the imbalance between votes and seats […]
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David Cameron and that poster
January 16th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
Conservative Party leader David Cameron has received a lot of publicity – much of it critical – for the airbrushed poster that prominently featured his face. There have been some great spoofs of the poster online which you can see here.
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Should it be David or Ed?
January 5th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
There is currently no vacancy for leadership of the Labour Party, but the “Guardian” today devotes no less than six full pages of its G2 section to a discussion of who would be the best successor to Gordon Brown when – as widely expected – he leads Labour to defeat at the General Election, probably […]
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What’s special about Leicester?
January 3rd, 2010 by Roger Darlington
1) My sister lives there so I visit the city regularly – the last time as recently as a week ago. 2) Some time in the next five years, it will become the first British city where everyone is a member of some ethnic or religious minority – see this article.
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All this “elfansafety”
December 5th, 2009 by Roger Darlington
I spent five years as the national health & safety officer of a major British trade union, so I become very concerned when I hear the media alleging that we’ve become health & safety mad (as in this story from the “Daily Mail”) and some politicians insisting that expenditure of health & safety should be […]
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