Report on 2010 elections for positions in the House
The UK House of Commons Procedure Committee released a report on 31 October 2011, which reviewed the elections held, for the first time, in most cases, to fill various positions in the House. It is an interesting report as it provides more detailed information into how exactly these elections proceeded. In the dying months of [...]
Leaders in search of parties
Liberal Democrat party leader Nick Clegg held a Q&A session during his party’s fall conference. At times, Clegg seemed almost impatient with some of the questions party members were asking, even lecturing one of them for not listening to the answer being provided. As noted in the Guardian: The Nick Clegg 2011 model is not [...]
Some interesting links
This blog’s author is rather swamped at work these days, and so I will take this opportunity to share with you some recent links that have caught my attention. 1. Is the tide finally turning for Nick Clegg? Having gone from everyone’s darling after the first ever leaders’ debates last spring to the most despised [...]
Speaker Bercow and accusations of bias
British House of Commons Speaker John Bercow annoys many MPs. There have been a rash of articles over the course of the past year hinting at behind-the-scenes plots to get rid of him. Having regularly livestreamed proceedings from the UK House of Commons, I find it difficult to assess why there is such animosity towards [...]
Parlour games?
The Guardian’s Nicholas Watt recently wrote that the ongoing phone-hacking scandal and Prime Minister David Cameron’s closeness to central players in the Murdoch empire (e.g. Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson) leaves him vulnerable to having Nick Clegg “pull the plug” not on the coalition, but on Cameron himself: This is where the eyes of Lib [...]
Coalition Works!
Media speculation in the UK over the health of the coalition began quite literally the day the agreement between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats was announced and hasn’t ever gone away. Indeed, as the referendum campaign on AV heated up and very public spats occurred between Conservative and Lib Dem ministers, many papers and columnists [...]
Strange parallels: the threat of Tory hegemony?
A recent blog article in the New Statesman warns of a looming Tory hegemony with Labour relegated to permanent opposition. I think many Canadians might see some parallels with current trends in Canada. The author, George Eaton, identifies the following three factors that would lead to such a scenario: constituency boundary changes Scottish independence from [...]
Political perceptions
As I have frequently written on this blog, I read a variety of British media, left and right. I tend to avoid the tabloid press unless some other source directly links to an article that appeared in one of them, and so my daily reading includes the BBC, Guardian, Independent, Telegraph, New Statesmen, the Spectator [...]
People like me
Class is still a much more prominent issue in the UK than it is in Canada and the US, not because we don’t have different classes in North American society, but because it manifests itself much more obviously in the UK. You can hazard a damn good guess the minute someone opens their mouth at [...]
A call for grownup politics
I must admit that it brings me much joy when I come across a column or editorial that reflects my own sentiments much more eloquently than I possibly could. Hence my enthused, near total agreement with Julian Glover’s column in today’s Guardian, Grownup politics isn’t just about winners and losers. While Glover’s piece is arguably [...]
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On procedure and politics by Radical Centrist is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
