"By restricting jury trials, removing protest rights and expanding surveillance, Labour is entrenching an authoritarian legal infrastructure that a far-right government will not hesitate to exploit."Karl Hansen says Labour is building Farage's state for him. Phoebe Weston reports on the French ski resorts that are closing as the snow line in the Alps edges higher: "In France, there are today 113 ski lifts totalling nearly 40 miles (63km) in length that have been abandoned, nearly three-quarters of them in protected areas." Catherine Rampell says Trump is misusing Norman Rockwell's art to promote Gestapo tactics and nativist ideas: "The works have ...
Huge thanks to all my guests and listeners for my podcast, Never Mind The Bar Charts, through the last year. The most popular episodes this year were: In second place: Local elections 2025: the Lib Dem verdict with the Lib Dem Pod team. And topping the charts: Liberal trends, populist politics: who is going to win out? with podcast regular guest Rob Ford, who has a new book out. As well as being available in all the usual podcast feeds, the episodes also go up on YouTube, such as that Rob Ford one: Now, let's see what 2026 brings... Previous ...
The Guardian reports that survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire have called on the government to stop companies implicated in the disaster from receiving public contracts, after it was revealed several were still in receipt of multimillion-pound deals. The paper says that new analysis by Labour MP, Joe Powell found that at least 87 contracts across the public sector in the government's own database involve companies criticised in the phase 2 report into the Grenfell fire, published in September 2024, though some contracts may have since expired: Two large companies linked to the disaster - Saint-Gobain and Rydon Maintenance - ...
Embed from Getty ImagesThe judges, still in their special Christmas wigs, have given our Headline of the Day Award to the Guardian.
For an aborted book project about Parliamentary by-elections, I wrote an introduction, setting the scene for their presence in British politics and their relevance to the Liberal Democrats. Although that book is unlikely to ever appear, I hope my piece is still of interest, especially given how often I otherwise mention by-elections. Although the rules for triggering a Parliamentary by-election have changed little in the centuries since some form of elections were first allowed by monarchs for Parliament, their meaning in British politics has been through several phases. By-elections have always had a role as a way of filling a ...
Augustus Carp finds the Conservatives are losing local councillors, but not as fast as Labour are losing them, and Reform UK are gaining. Back in January we were solemnly assured by the nation's leading political commentators that 2025 was going to be a tough year for the Conservatives, and a good one for Reform UK. That's pretty much how it panned out, but why didn't anyone predict that, when it comes to political defections, the biggest losers were going to be the Labour Party? The figures are stark. The Conservatives lost a net 212 councillors in 2025, but the Labour ...
I've written another post for Lion & Unicorn. To celebrate its 10th year, the blog asked me to write about what the last decade has been like for the Liberal Democrats: Swinson saw her party's vote increase from 7.4 per cent of 2017 to 11.5 per cent, but its number of seats dropped from twelve to eleven, with none of the recent star recruits from Labour and the Conservatives (such as Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger and Sam Gyimah) managing to get re-elected in Lib Dem colours. And Swinson's own East Dunbartonshire seat was one of the ones that were lost. ...
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My prediction for 2016? The good people of the world will begin to prevail against racism, greed, an...
As Jimmy Kimmel said in his alternative Christmas address, 2025 has been a good year for fascism in America. It has been in the UK as well with a Reform surge at the May elections and subsequently in a range of local council by elections. However, all the signs are that people are waking up to the threats and are fighting back not only in the USA and UK but in countries across the world. The problems for Farage and Trump and all their mini-me copy cats around the world is that being angry and finding scapegoats only takes you ...
The Guardian contains a detailed account of a letter sent by Chloë Deakin, a young English teacher, in 1981 to Farage's headteacher objecting to the future Reform leader being made a prefect. Ms Deakin raised her concerns after hearing reports of him bullying other pupils. She says that she conferred with colleagues in the staff room who corroborated accounts of harassment of fellow pupils and of Farage's apparent fascination with the far right, including claims that he had been "goose-stepping" on combined cadet force marches: Despite the chatter in the playground and staffroom, Farage was put on a draft list ...
I spotted the following council by-election results on Election Maps (https://electionmaps.uk/): contests since the local elections in May up to the end of the year. Pity Labour and Conservative by-election candidates. They are getting hammered. But the shares of the vote give us a good indication of how the parties are faring generally. There have been plenty of contests (nearly 200) so the