The latest edition of my weekly political polling round-up, The Week in Polls, is out. As it says: This edition welcomes reality to centre stage as we have a set of election results against which to compare traditional polls, an MRP survey and other models and projections. Whose is ordering in the brass bands and who is applying egg to their face? Let's see... Find out more by reading this edition of The Week in Polls here, and you can sign up below to receive future editions direct to your email inbox:
Yesterday was sunny, so I went to Foxton Locks for the umpteenth time. Yet I still noticed something new in the village. This outbuilding has mud walls, parts of which were later replaced with brick. Its roof would presumably once have been thatched. There are more examples of such walls on this blog's mud walls label.
The final results of the 2024 local elections are in and we had a fantastic result on ALDC's doorstep in Salford. Cllr Jonathan Moore took a seat in Salford Quays. The result was: Jonathan Moore: 39.2% (+13.1) Lab: 37.4% (-9.8) Green: 15.4% (-3.1) Conservative: 8.0% (-0.3) We finally have a brilliant piece of media coverage that I suspect we will be sharing far and wide between now and the General Election. Someone at HQ has crunched a lot of numbers and discovered that we have gained more Councillors than anyone else over the past five years. From the Guardian: The ...
He may be writing for Conservative Home, but William Atkinson has no comfort or advice for the party in the wake of Thursday's defeats: "Well, perhaps one small suggestion. Have you tried sticking underpants on your head and pencils up your nose?" Andrew Cockburn argues that the media has failed Julian Assange: "WikiLeaks took away the filters through which we are normally directed to view the world. Without it, we would have little idea of the number of civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan during the American invasion, or of the United States' war crimes, such as the execution of ...
A new Guardian article suggests the Liberal Democrats' strong performance in the local elections means its strategy of concentrating campaigning on key seats may deliver gains from the Conservatives at the coming general election. It quotes the party's leader, Ed Davey, on a visit to Dorset, where we took control of the council after gaining 13 wards from the Tories: "This victory in Dorset is an historic and stunning result for the Liberal Democrats," he said. "People here in Dorset and right across the country are fed up with this chaotic and out-of-touch Conservative government and they're voting for change ...
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Space Medicine Expert and Oxford Visiting Professor in Ageing Research join Ex-MPs $101 million XPri...
Space Medicine Expert Dr Rawan Al Shammari has joined the "Biohacking to improve everyone's health" XPrize healthspan team headed up by John Hemming who was previously a Member of Parliament, in the UK. Dr Siow has also joined the team as the academic advisor. XPrize healthspan is a USD $ 101 Million contest organised by the XPrize foundation as a global contest to see which teams can improve
The UK local elections of 2024 have not been an especially exciting set. In many ways they reflected expectations and the general zeitgeist of the year, that of the Conservatives having entirely run out of steam and having votes sapped by Reform on their right, but voters being at least somewhat reticent to fully endorse [...]
It took Laura Kuenssberg 52 minutes to get round to talking about the Lib Dem success on her show this morning. And the fact that we got more councillors than the Conservatives for the first time in 28 years got the most perfunctory of mentions. To add insult to injury, there were 3 Conservatives and 2 Labour people in the studio and nothing at all from us. And it wasn't from lack of effort on our part, given that Tim Farron was, rightly, complaining on Twitter: Errrr... @BBCPolitics Why are you interviewing 2 people from the party that came 3rd ...
When Paul Weller released his second solo album, Wild Wood, in 1993, two quips did the rounds. The first was that it had taken Weller 15 years to go from being a mod to being a hippy, when in the Sixties people managed it in 15 months. The second was that it owed so much to Traffic that it should have been called Winwood. Never mind. I was pleased Weller was back and connecting with the ruralist strain in English culture. And, more than 30 years on, it still sounds good. A recent Mojo article describes how Weller and his ...
Thursday's elections are significant for one very important factor, they show that the polls are right and that Rishi Sunak is heading towards a big defeat whenever he calls the general election. The results were also encouraging to the Liberal Democrats, who, with one council still to declare, have moved to second place in the number of councillors elected on the night. But this was not a vote for the opposition parties, it was one designed to get the Tories out, in which electors cast their ballot for the opposition party most likely to achieve that goal. The Guardian reflects ...
Germany Germany's far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party has problem in Thuringia. The East German Lander is an AfD stronghold, but their main candidate, MEP Maximilian Krah, has become a non-person. The reason for his disappearance from the campaign for the European Parliament is the arrest of his aide Jian Guo on charges of spying for China. Krah himself, may not be above suspicion. He is known as one of the Asian giant's biggest backers in the European Parliament. The case of Jian Guo is only one of several scandals affecting AfD candidates for June's European parliament elections. There have ...
From the Curator of Museum Services at the University of Dundee : The ideas and collections of D'Arcy Thompson, the University's first Professor of Biology, have profoundly influenced many artists and writers who re-interpret natural history, projecting it through the lens of evolution, fantasy, consumption, fear or desire. This unique exhibition features site-specific prints and video work in the Tower Foyer Gallery with additional interventions in the D'Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum. "Seeing Through" proposes tours of Thompson's collection visualised as if through the lenses of futurist author J G Ballard and pop-artist Richard Hamilton. We visit the collection through dizzying ...
