Dear Nick (if I may call you that),
I’ve been thinking about the next election. There seems to be a decent chance that there will be a hung parliament. It is, of course, possible that one party will be so close to an overall majority that they will form an alliance with one of the small [...]

Today will see the writ moved for the by-election in Norwich North where Dr Ian Gibson has resigned. In advance of the poll on 23rd July, the Universities & Colleges Union have commissioned a poll that makes interesting reading.
The headlines are, with my comments underneath:
Half of people aged 18-34 (48% of people aged 18-24 years [...]

A question posed by Matt Wardman.
Here’s the data he presents, from PSR Keele, as a chart.

What this tells me is that, in terms of actually winning the election, assuming that Labour do at least moderately well in Scotland and Wales, it’s only England that matters. We need to wait to see what effects devolution has [...]

Lord Oakeshott, a LibDem peer, has used parliamentary privilege to say what everyone knew: the seven Barclays memos about tax avoidance schemes are available on Wikileaks. Those are the memos that Barclays had removed by an injunction – aka gagging order – at half past two in the morning on the seventeenth of March.
From today’s [...]

Yesterday saw the Progressive London Conference at Congress House in London. All in all, I thought it was pretty good. There seemed to be very few nutty lefties there and I was pleased that there were a few people there I knew and recognised from my CLP, from blogging, from uni and around and about [...]

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne called for the Office of National Statistics – rather than the Home Office – to be given direct responsibility for crime figures.
As reported by BBC News. I think he’s probably right. We need to have absolute confidence in our statistics and, even though, as Huhne says, in today’s [...]

Mayor Johnson
The headline news is, of course, the victory of Boris Johnson. It is no secret (at least if you’ve been reading this blog!) that I was and remain a strong supporter of Ken Livingstone and that I have very grave doubts about the Johnson mayoralty. I have tried to draw a comparison between [...]

Sunder Katwala, general secretary of the Fabian Society, has written an open letter to Lib Dem MPs in London asking them to give their second preference. I hope that they do make public statements in support of Ken. The race is close and Ken’s prediction from a while back when people were treating Johnson as [...]

As we all now know, Nick Clegg will not be joining a Conservative or Labour government. His speech at his party’s conference was unequivocal:
Will I ever join a Conservative government? No.
Will I ever join a Labour government? No.
He’s starting to sound like Iain Paisley. Unfortunately, like the good doctor, he’s a slippery wee thing. You [...]

A recurring theme of late is honesty in politics or, rather, the lack thereof. Politicians want to appear as straight-talking but frequently are not. Three things have struck me on this today.
Brian Paddick, the Lib Dem candidate for Mayor of London. As the Evening Standard reports, he has said that the Underground is the most [...]