Welcome (belatedly) to my day: 12 October 2026 - a leadership challenge, or a challenge to the leadership?...My estimable colleague and our Editor-in-Chief, Caron Lindsay, wrote yesterday asking the question, "Is Ed Davey toast?". And a fine question it is too, although I'm perhaps not the obvious person to answer it. So, instead, I'm first going to look at the mechanics of it all. With the Parliamentary Party in the Commons due to meet tomorrow, what are the options? Charlie Maynard has moved in the confidence that he can secure enough votes to defeat Ed, and Ed knows it. That would potentially trigger Article 18.2(a) of the Federal Constitution: the Leader asking for an election or, Article ... (more) |
The Joy of Six 1590Jonathan Wilson explains why we're stuck with a Premier League in the clutches of the global mega-rich: "Clubs represent their communities and for fans support becomes an aspect of identity, a link to family and place and past, a role that has only become more significant as the influence of traditional institutions - the church, the workplace, the social club - has faded. Yet fans in England have almost never owned their clubs, which in part underlies the present crisis." "While investors get richer, the dysfunctional market inflicts a huge cost on children in care. Young people removed from their ... (more) |
What is Christian nationalism?There is a billboard on a main road near where I live, which has not carried any advertisements for some considerable time. However, it has become a canvass for the far right's meaningless slogans. Faced with studied indifference by the owners, the council has twice now painted over these tags, and the culprits appear to have moved on to defacing walls in nearby parks. However, I noticed the other day that a makeshift wooden cross (pictured) has been erected above the billboard in a clear attempt to differentiate the perpetrators from the multi-cultural society we now live in. The Ku ... (more) |
Is Ed Davey toast?The news that two Lib Dem front benchers, Alison Bennett quietly and Charlie Maynard with a bit more noise have resigned their positions this week should concern the party. It's been clear for some time that all is not well within the party, and the controlling, top-down management style adopted by the party leadership since the General Election in 2024. This sort of rigid discipline didn't work so well in the Labour Party in the first two years of the Starmer administration and it sure as hell is doomed in a liberal party. We are supposed to encourage independence of ... (more) |
Ellesmere Yard: A living relic of the canal ageEllesmere's canal basin is at the end of a short branch off the Llangollen Canal, which used to be called the Shropshire Union Canal, but was rebranded in the 1980s in the hope that would bring more visitors. At the point where this branch joins the main line stands an attraction I didn't know much about: Ellesmere Yard. The Canal & River Trust describes it:Established in 1806, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, Ellesmere Yard is steeped in history. Originally the headquarters of Ellesmere Canal Company, it played a critical role in the golden era of canal building, helping ... (more) |
The Lib Dem leadership should listen to our MPsPeter Black blogged this morning about the reaction to Charlie Maynard call for the Liberal Democrats to elect a new leader: The reaction has been predictable, with the leadership recruiting the usual suspects to go public in support of Ed Davey. Their social media posts are all suspiciously similar., and also slightly ridiculous, but ... what is really interesting is how few of them have gone public in this way. The politics.co.uk website lists just 17 out of 72 prepared to pin their support of Davey to a public mast. The rest appear to be keeping their powder dry. There ... (more) |
Latest PollBase is out, with all the British voting intention polls since the 1930sWith the end of another, rather interesting, quarter, another update to PollBase, my database of British voting intention opinion polls since the 1930s is now up. It includes the first PM approval ratings from 1938 and first national voting intention scores from 1939. Download the new version here. As well as another three months of data, changes this time include: Additional Gallup data from the 1951 Parliament from the Bodleian Library's set of Gallup/BIPO reports in the Conservative Central Office archives. Thank you to Marcus Collins for sharing his copies of this data with me. P.S. For the very latest ... (more) |
Dean Friedman: ArielI remember this so clearly from 1977 that it was a shock to find that it hadn't been a hit in the UK. It was a hit in the US and also controversial. How, you are asking, could such a sweet, bubble-gum pop song be controversial? Dean Friedman explains: My first label insisted that I edit and change the second verse to Ariel, in which I refer to her as "a Jewish girl". They were convinced that radio stations in the south would use it as an excuse not to play the record. (In fact, many stations in the south ... (more) |
State of Play: the classic BBC drama, part 2The latest edition of the email newsletter for my podcast, Political Fictions, is out and you can also read it in full below. But if you'd like to get future editions emailed direct to you as soon as they are published, sign up now: Get the books As well as covering some books in the podcast, we also mention others in the newsletter's bonus content. You can browse all the books mentioned and get them for yourself via my Bookshop.org page (affiliate link). Cory sees the light over State of Play Photo credit: BBC. This time we're returning to the ... (more) |
Can Davey survive as leader?The decision by the Liberal Democrat MP for Witney, Charlie Maynard, to resign his front bench post as part of a reported bid to oust Ed Davey as leader has really put the cat amongst the pigeons. This politics website reports that Maynard left his role as a Treasury spokesman on Friday afternoon amid wider criticism of Davey among Liberal Democrat MPs. He follows Alison Bennett, the Liberal Democrat MP for Mid Sussex, who left her role as care and carers spokesperson on 5 October without issuing a public explanation. As I posted here, earlier this month, Tom Gordon, the ... (more) |