Category: Politics
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Election 2019 – Northern Ireland seats
Some pointers on the key parties and seats in Northern Ireland, where the 2019 elections raise a number of key questions: Will unionist voters stick with the DUP in the wake of Boris Johnson's Brexit deal, or punish its MPs for sustaining Johnson's Government? Can the UUP benefit from their rivals discomfiture, or are they…
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Is Johnny Mercer actually a non-exec at Crucial Academy?
The Conservative MP for Plymouth Moor View has been in the news a lot lately as a key backbench hold-out on Theresa May's Withdrawal Agreement, one who has accused the Tory whips of seeking to dig up dirt on him in order to secure his vote. However, a BBC story on Wednesday suggests that he…
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Tory MP declarations and the outlook for tonight’s no confidence vote in Theresa May
Election Maps UK has a crowdsourced list of declarations by Tory MPs of how they will vote in tonight’s vote of confidence on Theresa May’s leadership of the Party. This should be taken with a pinch of salt, as the vote itself with a secret ballot. It’s currently running 170-80 in May’s favour. This would…
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Corbyn and the Czechs
This morning's Sun leads with a rather odd front page splash claiming Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn met Czech intelligence agents in the mid-1980s. Professor Anthony Glees told the paper that "These files show there was contact between Corbyn and a Czech intelligence official, even if he did not know it." Yet this would have been…
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Ian Paisley Jr facing a test of Werrity
Ian Paisley Jr is one of ten DUP MPs one whom the survival of Theresa May’s Government now depends, so it is not surprising he is coming under increasing media scrutiny in the new Parliament. On Friday, the Daily Telegraph reported that he had failed to declare £100,000 in holiday expenses paid for by the…
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Brexit Terms and the Commons – The Numbers for Round Two
Back in October, I looked at the likely voting numbers in the Commons ahead of Labour’s motion for a parliamentary debate on Brexit strategy. Despite a notional Government majority of 16, the Government elected to accept Keir Starmer’s opposition motion on 12 October, suggesting that they feared defeat. I have updated the figures below ahead…
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The problem with the Quilliam Foundation
This post originally appeared on openDemocracyUK on 7 November 2016. The Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) has a long history of fighting racism, extending back to roots in the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, so its Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists published last month, attracted widespread interest from those involved in combatting Islamophobia. Unfortunately, this latest…
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The Brexit bonanza for border smugglers
As Theresa May meets with representatives of the devolved governments of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales today, one key issue she will have to consider is the status of the Irish border after Brexit. Despite Westminster’s focus on controlling the movement of people, the movement of goods way be an equally thorny problem
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Parliament should accept the Brexit mandate, but test its limits
It was pointed out before the EU referendum that having a popular vote to defend parliamentary sovereignty was something of a quixotic exercise.
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Labour’s future: The case for a progressive alliance
The debate over Labour's future has seen a number of interesting contributions in the last day or two, looking beyond the immediate struggle between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith. This is perhaps related to the fact that the faultline over the leadership runs straight through the soft left, from which this spate of contributions has…