Conference, Today, Europe celebrates the 10th Annual European Day of Languages, a European Union initiative to appreciate linguistic diversity in Europe and promote language learning. You might think it a bit of an anorak subject, and perhaps it is, but as a trainee interpreter of French and Spanish, it’s my anorak subject. Britain cannot afford [...]
From the Guardian, January 3rd, 2011: [Ed Miliband] immediately instituted a language change that grumpy Labour backbenchers were impressed by. It was to be referred to as a “Tory-led government” not the more cuddly “coalition”. From this site, July 29th, 2010: It is this appropriate to treat the Coalition not as something strange but as [...]
I think the positioning of people in the shadow cabinet shows that Ed Miliband is off to a rocky start. By losing brother David, he has immediately lost a key ally in the cabinet, but I don’t want to comment on family matters. What caught my eye is where the “top jobs” went. Shadow Chancellor: [...]
Ed Balls, one of the Labour Leadership contenders, has published an article on his website (here) in which he talks about a few traps the Labour Party should avoid. A week is a long time in politics, apparently long enough to forget my Countering the Coalition series. Obviously, I’m not claiming to have a monopoly [...]
This is without doubt a new era in politics. The end of a Labour decade, the Liberals are back in government, and of course the start of a coalition. The Education Secretary’s disastrous mishandling over the Building Schools for the Future program posed the question of how long the government’s honeymoon will last and there [...]
In the days following the General Election, the Liberal Democrat Party changed drastically. In Part Four, I looked at how Labour should treat the Lib Dems in a temporary coalition, now in Part five I intend to look at the party in the longer term. In a Politics Show debate between the three prospective chancellors, [...]
In the previous one, two and three parts, I have covered various opportunities that have arisen from the peculiarity of a Coalition government, argued that the Coalition will remain intact until the end of the parliament and why Labour should not try to drive a wedge between the two parties. The first trilogy was about [...]
In parts one and two of Countering the Coalition, I outlined how the current political terrain has changed and argued that the coalition will hold together for the duration of the parliament. Now I will explain how Labour can take advantage of the situation and discuss the role of leadership. Given my previous points, Labour [...]
At the start of the hung parliament, our instincts told us that the coalition would be unstable and probably break down within a year or two. Be it out of No Confidence from parliament or confidence that the Tories could win a majority alone, as Harold Wilson did in 1964. On the contrary, everything we [...]
I have written a series of six articles under the theme “Countering the Coalition.” Having discussed the issue with everyone from grassroots members to civil servants to parliamentarians, I hope that my proposals and conclusions we be of use to the Labour Party, as we learn to adjust to our new role in Opposition against an unknown enemy.
