The European Elections are upon us, and of all the UK regions, the one that could give us the best idea about the prospects of each of the major parties could well be the South West. We didn’t expect these elections, and so, much like the snap election two years ago they will be a test of how well parties can switch…
Part One: Wales Part Two: England It is impossible to discuss Scottish politics without mentioning the I word. Scotland has been part of the United Kingdom since 1707, but the rise of the independence movement over the last decade has called that into question. An occasionally fractious referendum in 2014, won by a comfortable though not crushing margin by the No campaign,…
As students around the country took to the streets to protest against climate change, one of the biggest issues we face globally, politicians and commentators took to Twitter. Not to commend young people for getting involved in politics, but to disparage, mock and belittle their efforts. Andrea Leadsom labelled them truants, apparently not thinking climate change an important enough issue to miss…
Part One: Wales Looking For A New England The political narrative of the 2010s has been dominated by threats to the United Kingdom’s multinational union. The moderate SDLP has been supplanted by Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, independence dominates the agenda in Scotland, and the looming weight of Brexit could still place an unbearable strain on the ties that bind the union…
Wales is the least interesting of the UK’s four constituent nations. No hegemony of population and class as in England, no surging separatist tide as in Scotland, no threat of reigniting an age-old tinderbox as in Northern Ireland. In Wales, there’s just one party. A single centre-left party that has managed Wales for nearly a hundred years, a fate that would surely…
Amidst the surfeit of hot takes tearing into the gilets jaunes, one point is worth stressing: this was, it must be said, a long time coming. Macron’s moniker of ‘President of the Rich’ is nothing new. His approval ratings have been dismal – and dropping – for months. Little time has passed since an aide was filmed donning riot gear and beating…
Credit: CC0 Public Domain Whether a newspaper or television network strives to be “objective” or whether it wears its opinions on its sleeve, it remains a common misconception that all points of view receive an equal share of air-time, and that mass media has a wide and balanced variety of sources to call upon. Nowhere is this fiction more obvious than in…
