On procedure and politics

Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined

On responsible media

In the lead-up to the May 2010 United Kingdom general election, opinion polls showed that in all likelihood, the election would result in a hung, or minority parliament, that is, a parliament in which no single party would have a majority of the seats in the House of Commons. The last hung parliament in the [...]

Minority assumptions

At the outset of the most recent Canadian federal election campaign in March of this year, I wrote a post addressing how the concept of coalition government had become almost toxic in Canada. This phenomenon didn’t start this year – it dates back, as the posts states, to events in 2008. The Canadian media has [...]

Reactions to e-petitions

The reaction to the UK Government’s introduction of a new e-petitions initiative has been quite interesting. You can read my original post about the e-petitions initiative here. Government House Leader Sir George Young wrote in this piece in the Daily Mail that: The site has been widely welcomed as a realistic way to revitalise public [...]

Some interesting links

1. Time to salute the post-2010 election Parliament BBC parliamentary correspondent Mark D’Arcy has a good column providing an interesting overview of the current UK Parliament and an assessment of some of the many reforms introduced in the dying days of the previous Parliament and at the outset of this one: “So I’m afraid, as [...]

The media and oral questions

Contemporary mediated democracies may have enlightenment trappings, but in the Twenty-first century Question Time is essentially a media event. Especially if you’re, say, helping to turn it into a collective viewing experience on the #qt stream, there’s not much point complaining about that. (source) It was a shocking experience – the first nice prime minister’s [...]

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 [...]

Nicked – the musical (revisited)

Back in February, I wrote about a musical being produced in the UK based on the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition. Entitled Nicked, it was staged in Suffolk on 30 April, as part of the HighTide Festival. You can read a review of it here. And even better, you can see a performance of one of the [...]

Do looks matter, Part 2

In an earlier post, I discussed a study conducted by Swedish and Finnish economists which  found that political candidates on the right-wing side of the spectrum were considered more physically attractive, and people were more likely to vote for them at the ballot box. Today, I read about a new website which allows people to [...]

Privilege, the press, the law and the Internet

A recent Guardian editorial on the matter of balancing parliamentary privilege and responsible behaviour concluded thusly: When parliament last examined the question of privilege, the internet was still in its infancy. Social media were embryonic. And the ink on the Human Rights Act was barely dry. The possibility that parliamentary privilege might intersect with the [...]

On super- and hyper-injunctions

The other day on Twitter, a user posted half a dozen tweets in quick succession, each naming  a celebrity and implying that each of these celebrities was the subject of a super-injunction. This has caused nothing short of a legal crisis in the UK as this single user “has brought the culture of the super-injunction [...]

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