politics

There are some books I re-read regularly. Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 is one; I read it every time there’s a presidential election on. In 2008, the first time around, it was a ghastly memento mori for the failure of a great movement campaign, and also a reassuring reminder of…

Chuka Umunna is apparently off to Boston, Lincolnshire to understand Brexit. He should save himself the journey. You can understand Boston really well from the simple fact that it has elected a Labour MP – indeed anything other than a Conservative – precisely once in history, immediately after the First World War. It’s really conservative.…

One thing the referendum campaign has cheered me up about, paradoxically, is the social acceptability of outright racism. One thing it’s profoundly depressed me about is the social acceptability of outright bullshit. Consider the Leavers’ arguments about immigration. If you’re not going to make some essentialist argument that foreigners are just bad – i.e. to…

The Monkey Cage has an interesting post on how British political parties spent their money in the 2015 general election. Specifically, they plotted spending as a percentage of the short campaign limit against how marginal each seat was. The more marginal a seat is, the greater chance you have of picking it up – or…

So it looks like the local elections didn’t go so badly. While we’re in the intermediate phase between Corbyn’s Labour doing something reasonably well, and them throwing it all away through some sort of terrible cake-and-arse juggle, I’d like to take note of something. John Curtice reckoned we should expect a net-loss of about 170…

I usually like Jim Pickard’s work for the FT, so I was a bit disappointed by this piece. We certainly do need some data journalism on the surge of Labour Party membership, an underreported fact of British politics and one that has been going on for some time. This mobilisation predates Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign…

People occasionally wonder why there are still so many Republicans running for president. We can make a simple model of the situation to understand this. Any candidate who decides to drop out of the race will probably drop out in favour of some other candidate, throwing their support to that candidate. They can expect some…

So I was saying to Dan Hardie that every couple of days, I feel relatively optimistic about Labour. Thousands more members sign up. And then either Jeremy Corbyn or John McDonnell does something incredibly strange. Actually, I was literally interrupted at this moment by a notification on my phone, because Ken Livingstone had just done…

The British Election Study is back and it’s very interesting indeed. Here’s the key chart. The pink zone is essentially people who were convinced by Labour but not motivated to go and vote. Either mobilisation fell dramatically in 2010-2015, or else we managed to turn a lot of heads, but not get them to turn…