The latest edition of my weekly political polling round-up, The Week in Polls, is out. As it says: Professor Paula Surridge made a great spot about the problem of looking at a poll's cross-tabs and thinking great wisdom is hidden in them... Find out more by reading The Week in Polls in full here, and you can sign up below to receive future editions direct to your email inbox:
Today we join organisations around the world in honouring those trans and gender diverse people who have lost their lives in the past year as a result of violence on Transgender Day of Remembrance. 327 trans people murdered. Most of them from marginalised groups. You can read their names and some details about their lives and what happened to them here. Half came from just three countries, Mexico, the US and Brazil. Read each one of their names and think of that life needlessly lost and then go and do your bit to create a world where this doesn't happen, ...
The Men's Football World Cup kicks off today in Qatar, starting one of the most controversial tournaments in history. As a football fan, the build-up to a major tournament is normally one of excitement, sweepstakes and pinning up a wall chart to follow the progress of the teams. The feeling this year is certainly very ... Continue reading Boycotting the World Cup & Alternative Ways to get your Beautiful Game Fix →
Today is the year when, because of the gender pay gap, women are effectively working for free for the rest of the year. Data from the Fawcett Society shows that the gender pay gap this year is 11.3%, slightly down on last year. This arises for several reasons. Despite legislation outlawing this being passed more than half a century ago. women are often paid less than men for work of equal value. Women also suffer from unfair barriers to career advancement because they are more likely to have caring responsibilities. This could be addressed by requiring employers to allow more ...
I remember when ABBA started to play Waterloo at the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest. My mother and I looked at one another: you didn't get proper pop songs on Eurovision. Ring Ring was their follow up in the UK, but reached only number 32. (Waterloo had topped the charts.) When they won Eurovision, ABBA credited Wizzard, and See My Baby Jive in particular, as an influence. I think you can hear a bit of Wizzard in the saxophone here too. Then came I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, which again failed to trouble the top 30. ...
It was always expected that a deal on tackling climate change and compensating for its consequences would go to the wire. And indeed, beyond the wire with the Conference of the Parties overrunning from Friday until an agreement early this morning. There is still unpacking to do on what was achieved. But the glass is perhaps half full as the developed world has agreed to the principle of reparation for loss and damage for extreme climate events, such as the extraordinary flooding we have seen in Pakistan recently and the extreme drought in Africa and elsewhere. But the glass is ...
Professor Norman McCord was one of my lecturers at Newcastle University nearly 40 years ago. We have kept in touch since I completed my PhD thesis 30 years ago. Back in the 1970s, Norman carried out a great deal of aerial photography. He discovered the Roman fort at Washingwell, near Whickham, in 1972 when he flew over the site heading to Corbridge to take photos before the A69 Corbridge bypass
A lot has been talked about the football world cup that starts today in Qatar. Questions like 'Should it have been awarded to Qatar?', 'How many construction workers have really been killed and injured?' and 'Where does having a global sporting event in a state where same-sex relationships are illegal leave the fight for sexual equality?' are all reasonable, but they don't address the fundamental question of what sports fans should do over the next month: to watch, or not to watch? I was in Qatar in December 2006 for the Asian Games, a continent-wide mini-Olympics with a range of ...
Courtesy of the excellent dataset UK House of Commons Election Results at Constituency Level, the last candidate to get zero votes in a UK general election was... John Curling, standing for the Liberal Party in Devizes in 1865. Other candidates were available and did get voted for. Those other candidates were two Conservatives and, it being a two member constituency, they both won, making it one Conservative hold and one Conservative gain from Liberal. According to Parliamentary election expense records, Curling spent £16 and 6 shillings on his campaign. A report of his death records that His great ambition was ...
Sat, 10:36: This morning's vital question: Are you the Nicholas Whyte who wrote I'm not that Nicholas Whyte. I don't know a great deal about トマス・ジェファソン, or Thomas Jefferson to his friends, let alone his philosophical views. Sat, 10:45: RT @DavidOAtkins: Mastodon....but without the stupid separate instances/servers. How hard can this be? https://t.co/fM6YvxfkOe https://t.co/87dsixUWCa Sat, 16:10: The World Cup (and�Worldcons) https://t.co/PkmFdsgmzH Sat, 18:21: Saturday reading https://t.co/Vr0oSDLr58 Sat, 19:37: Millie Gibson was born in June 2004, and therefore was not yet able to walk when New Who started in March 2005. https://t.co/7vXqT5Mykl Sat, 19:50: Daily #279 0️⃣5️⃣⬛1️⃣6️⃣ 0️⃣6️⃣⬛0️⃣4️⃣ 0️⃣7️⃣⬛1️⃣8️⃣ 0️⃣8️⃣⬛0️⃣9️⃣ ...
The message from COP 27 I am writing this on Friday afternoon, a few hours before the COP 27 in Sharm el-Sheikh is due to produce its final communique. The outlook is bad. Yesterday the EU Climate Policy Chief, Frans Timmerman, said the first draft "left a lot to be desired." The same day a joint delegation from Canada, the EU and UK went to see COP president Sameh Shankry to tell him to "fill the gaps." The two main sticking points are a renewed commitment to the 1.5 degree rise in global temperature which was agreed at Glasgow, and ...
Welcome to my summary of the latest national voting intention poll from each pollster currently operating in Britain. Below the table, you'll find the option to sign up to email updates about new polls and also a set of answers to frequently asked questions about political polling. Or, if you'd like to find out more about how polls work, how reliable they are and how to make sense of them: Check out my book, Polling UnPacked: the History, Uses and Abuses of Political Opinion Polls, and Sign up for my weekly analysis of the latest political polling: The Week in ...
Next week, we'll be highlighting a lot of the forthcoming West End Christmas Fortnight events with Christmas Fortnight starting next Saturday - 26th November. In advance of that, we'd like to highlight this excellent initiative as part of the fortnight, with thanks to Antonia Burnett who writes : "I have an interior design business based in the West End of Dundee and I have teamed up with another interior designer to organise a cushion sale to raise money for Dundee & Angus Foodbank. We will hold the sale at Logie & St John's (Cross) Church Hall on Saturday 10thDecember from ...
Embed from Getty ImagesLeicester's Freemans Meadow power station opened in 1922. All coal-fired operations ceased there in 1976, when a gas turbine station opened. That operated until at least 1989, but the Freemans Meadow site later became home to Leicester City's King Power Stadium The power station was still using industrial steam locomotives internally in 1971, when this photograph was taken.
