With election results, it is tempting to find an easy story to tell. The inevitable ambiguity and complexity that accompany them create a demand for narratives to join up the dots. Such narratives crave heroes and villains, exulting winners and humiliated losers. On that account, the winners in the local elections on Thursday were the Liberal Democrats and Greens, who respectively doubled…
On May 8th, South Africans will go to the polls. Virtually all pundits predict that the incumbent African National Congress will win its sixth consecutive mandate to govern the country nationally. While the party’s margin of victory remains an open question, it seems inconceivable that anyone other than Cyril Ramaphosa will be President. This threatens catastrophe for the left. To understand where…
Much of the transphobic (and specifically transmisogynistic) rhetoric which is currently so prevalent, both on Twitter and the wider media, centres around the idea that trans women are inherently violent. It is claimed that trans women, along with cis men – even more so than cis men, some imply –are perpetrators of male violence. It is these claims which are frequently used…
The East of England is a region close to my heart – I’ve lived in Norfolk more or less all my life, and I’ll be voting here in a few weeks since I go to university in the constituency as well. This pretty much sums up the problem with any coherent analysis of the region as a whole; what, exactly, does true-blue…
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 III: Is two party politics back again or dead again? The effect of social media on general and local election campaigns, and the future for Change UK and the Lib Dems The first part of our interview with New Statesman political editor Stephen Bush on how social media has changed the political landscape covered the effects it had on the Labour…
The Uber flotation and the power of imagined futures Entrepreneurial TV shows like The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den are littered with awful clichés. These apparent statements of common sense float about, ready to be called into action to rebuke those who don’t show quite enough acumen. One of those clichés, “revenues are vanity, profit is sanity”, came to mind with the news…
Part II: Arguing from values: what Labour’s centre-left can learn from the new social media landscape The first part of our interview with New Statesman political editor Stephen Bush on how social media has changed the political landscape covered the effects it had on the last two Labour leadership elections and the last general election. In part two, we discuss what the…
