On procedure and politics

Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined

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 [...]

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 [...]

STV is not the problem

Liberal Democrat Voice carried an op-ed piece by Anthony Butcher arguing that the Liberal Democrats need to drop their support for the Single Transferable Vote because “the perceived complexity of AV was a significant factor in its rejection by the public. The whole concept of preferential voting has now been tainted for a generation as [...]

A tale of two parties

I’ve come across a few blog posts and comments on Twitter and elsewhere comparing the fate of Canada’s Liberal party and the UK’s Liberal Democrats – both parties having suffered rather catastrophic election defeats last week – and wondering if there are lessons to be learned for both/either party. Some ponder that the losses both [...]

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 [...]

Fall Guy

In the slew of opinion pieces and analysis that followed the by-election in Oldham East and Saddleworth, two in particular caught my eye, but not because of their analysis of the by-election results. In “What really won Oldham East and Saddleworth for Labour“, the Telegraph’s John McTernan notes: Nick Clegg may draw some crumbs of [...]

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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