Not from from the little terraced house that my father grew up you will see Hands Across the Divide (pictured right). It is a statue that somes up the hope of peace not just in Londonderry/Derry but across the whole of Northern Ireland. The two men who best summed up that reaching across the divide are probably John Hume from the city of Derry and David Trimble, who coincidently like me also comes from Bangor, indeed his family went to same church as my mother's family and he went to Sunday School along with her. A young David Trimble is ...
As the two contenders for the Tory leadership engage in a race to the bottom in terms of honesty, relevance and decency, my friend John Cole, a fellow former teacher of Economics who served for 14+ years as a Liberal Democrat on Bradford Metropolitan Council, decided to put together a list of mistaken Tory policies which have been implemented in our lifetimes. We started with an aim of about a dozen, but the list grew longer and longer. My apologies that this post is somewhat longer than usual. John is relatvely youthful so the first item was not in his ...
The latest edition of my weekly political polling round-up, The Week in Polls, is now out. As it says: Most political polling is unsurprising in its findings, and problems come from people's insistence on trying to make the unexceptional sound exciting. After all, who wants to tell their boss that the poll they've paid for was a bit boring and doesn't really say anything new? (It's why Twitter is often better for polling commentary than the media as Twitter's got plenty of experts only too happy to say, 'actually, it's more boring than that...') Sometimes, however, the polling absolutely justifies ...
Sun, 17:59: May 2017 books https://t.co/vt3IhQ01Kz Sun, 20:16: Just to say, if you are both a marquess and a viscount, you generally give the marquess title first. #EnolaHolmes Mon, 10:45: What the UK needs from the next Conservative leader https://t.co/1mILbajVxw Brutal. "The problem of the last few years isn't that we made the wrong promises — it's that we haven't delivered on them."
It has been a summer of absurd claims and counter-claims, and that's just the Tory leadership battle. But the idea that the recent travel chaos in Dover and around the channel tunnel is down to the French not providing enough border guards is one of the most absurd. The Guardian reports on the view of travel experts that the traffic management system on the M20 - introduced during Brexit - was causing "massive disruption". They want the government to come up with a long-term solution. The paper adds that authorities in Dover declared a critical incident as holidaymakers reported waiting ...
