Category Archives: UK Politics

A historical perspective. One among many.

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I hope we can all agree that it is hard to change someone’s mind using arguments if their understanding of history is very different from yours.

Over the past week, I’ve spoken to people I know who have far more sympathy than I have with the rioters currently disfiguring Britain’s streets.#

Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Southport_riot.jpg

Read more here.

Politics is dominated by people who are interested in politics. That’s a bad thing.

A new year thought for you.

The Conservative Home website tells us that nearly 60% of their panel of Conservative Party members now watch the cranktastic hyper-partisan GB News channel — the BBC only just shades the poll for first place.

60.7% watch the BBC regularly compared to 57.21% who tune into GBN in the same way. Sky (31.38%) and ITN (18.54%) both pale by comparison.

As ConHome puts it…

“GB News, in political terms, has settled somewhere to the left of Reform UK (Richard Tice is a presenter) but well to the right of, say, the Conservative Parliamentary Party’s centre of gravity.”

Read more….

 

The rights conferred by the membership of a political party

We can probably agree that, if someone can exert power without responsibility or legitimacy, we have a moral duty to take it from them in any way we can.

If not, please stop reading now.

Continue reading here.

 

Want to take the big money out of British politics? Here’s how.

This was published in openDemocracy recently. The only thing I’d change to the idea is that I’d change this from “it could be 100% tax-deductible, or claimable from welfare payments” to “it could be 100% tax-deductible from VAT, because everyone pays at least £50 a year in VAT, right?”

(The average household generates around £4,700 in VAT income to the treasury).

https://twitter.com/Paul0Evans1/status/1435265149468876811

 

A two-part post on how the UK could get out of the mess caused by the Brexit referendum

This is a two-parter on Slugger O’Toole.

Part one – the poor design of Article 50 damages both the EU and the UK. Fixing it could be a common cause that we could focus on immediately.

Part two – – now would be a good time to apply the brakes and deliberate.

Labour antisemitism and the problem of political hobbyism

It’s hard to overstate the importance of “anti-imperialism” to the modern post-Leninist left. Their highest priority is to spread the word, and all kinds of moral gymnastics can be forgiven if they help to open public eyes to this not-so-obvious cause of all of the world’s problems.

It’s a touchstone. The most important argument to win. Their problem is that it’s also a tough argument to get across. For this reason, Israel is a godsend. It provides a useful, simple, parable that helps make the case for something that is a foundational belief to a political sect.

Read on….

On mandated MPs

In this post, from 2007, I forecast that New Labour were in danger of begetting the current catastrophe. The article also predicted that the Lib-Dems would probably not go into coalition with Labour (and why), and readers may want to note the identity of the nightmare ‘back seat driver‘ that a mandated parliamentary party would be forced to take direction from….

https://twitter.com/paul0evans1/status/752074496694247424