Tag Archives: hopi sen

Stephen Tall

ICM has Labour ahead, Ukip moving into 3rd place, Lib Dems on 11%

By Stephen Tall | Wed 15th October 2014 - 4:30 pm

The Guardian published its latest ICM poll — commonly regarded as the ‘gold standard’ — this week. The top-line (with changes on the previous months) was: Labour 35% (=), Conservatives 31% (-2), Ukip 14% (+5), Lib Dems 11% (+1) and Others 10% (-3).

icm poll - oct 2014

Polling in September/October tends to fluctuate, as the noise of conference season often leads to spikes in support for each party in turn which soon fade. There have been two additional events which may have further confused matters: the Scottish independence referendum and last week’s Clacton by-election.

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Stephen Tall

Your essential weekend reader — my personal pick of the week’s must-reads

By Stephen Tall | Sat 12th January 2013 - 9:23 pm

It’s Saturday evening, so here are twelve thought-provoking articles to stimulate your thinking juices culled from all those I’ve linked to this last week. You can follow me on Delicious here.

What will make banks care about their customers? – Diana Coyle says don’t increase banking regulation, instead open up the oligopolistic banking industry to true competition: ‘more competitive banking systems are more stable – the banks tend to be smaller so the “too big to fail” problem is less acute, and smaller banks …

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The Voice

The political year reviewed by Stephen Tall, Tim Montgomerie and Hopi Sen

By The Voice | Mon 24th December 2012 - 3:53 pm

LibDemVoice co-editor Stephen Tall guested alongside ConservativeHome‘s Tim Montgomerie and Labour blogger Hopi Sen on BBC Radio 4’s The Westminster Hour last night, reviewing the political year with presenter Carolyn Quinn through the rear-view mirror. Issues dissected in the 20-minute discussion included Andrew ‘Gate-gate’ Mitchell, Coalition differentiation, Nick Clegg’s future, welfare reforms and secret courts. You can listen here:

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Stephen Tall

Your essential weekend reader — 8 must-read articles you may have missed

By Stephen Tall | Sat 27th October 2012 - 8:15 am

It’s Saturday morning, so here are eight thought-provoking articles to stimulate your thinking juices…

Why don’t we trust politicians? – The BBC’s Nick Robinson takes politicians to task, doesn’t let the media off the hook either… while Labour’s Rachel Reeves mouths platitudes.

The BBC regains its honour – Nick Cohen links the Beeb’s problems with Newsnight and Jimmy Savile to the wider question of institutional trust: ‘We ought to be extending anti-managerialism into every private and public hierarchy.’

The Savile inquiries: giving truth a …

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Stephen Tall

Your Saturday morning reader – 8 must-read articles

By Stephen Tall | Sat 6th October 2012 - 8:15 am

It’s Saturday morning, so here are eight thought-provoking articles to stimulate your thinking juices…

5 Years On: The Election That Never Was – Damian McBride, Gordon Brown’s former spinner-in-chief whose must-read blog is essentially a memoir-by-instalments, recalls the week in 2007 that turned the new Prime Minister from hero to zero.

Jimmy Savile: The birth of a paedophile hoax on “Have I Got News For You” – John Fleming recounts the curious tale of how some invented, ‘censored’ scenes achieved such wide currency on the internet, eerily anticipating the past week’s revelations.

A speech that, thankfully, will not be made …

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Stephen Tall

‘Could a Lib Dem / Labour agreement happen before 2015?’ asks Hopi Sen

By Stephen Tall | Wed 18th July 2012 - 4:05 pm

I realise the headline may well pre-destine this post for John Rentoul’s ever-expanding #QTWTAIN category. But Hopi Sen, an influential Labour blogger, is always worth listening to, and this week he put forward a scenario in which “a LibDem-Labour realignment could foil the Tories”:

Could this happen?

For the first time, it seems at least plausible. Senior LibDems feel let down by the Conservatives over Lords reform and the AV referendum. They feel they have delivered painful changes to their policy programme for the sake of national unity and this generosity has not been reciprocated. They see the Tory backbenches unafraid

…

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Posted in Op-eds | 18 Comments
Stephen Tall

Labours of Letters: the Alex Hilton & Hopi Sen correspondence

By Stephen Tall | Sat 18th February 2012 - 5:38 pm

At the risk of intruding on private grief, I feel I should draw the attention of Voice readers to an excoriating broadside against Ed Miliband’s leadership published on LabourList last night.

Entitled ‘Losing faith’, it is an open letter from Alex Hilton, twice a Labour parliamentary candidate and founder of the Labour Home website, to ‘Dear Ed’. It weighs in at 1,457 words — here are just a few of them:

I no longer have any faith that the Labour Party will make a better society – or even

…

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Mark Pack

Ed Balls has a new take on having your cake and eating it

By Mark Pack | Mon 26th September 2011 - 9:19 pm

There are two problems with a Liberal Democrat like myself blogging about Labour Party conference. First, as I’ve so often seen from the other side of the fence, an outside blogging about another party’s conference frequently misreads what is really happening. And second, no blogger can compete with Hopi Sen and his cat.

So caveats deployed and on to the confusion that Ed Balls’s speech today left me in. For he had two messages: first, that Labour can’t promise to undo the government’s cuts and, second, that many of the cuts are wrong. Either on its own would be a …

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Mark Pack

Three-quarters of Lib Dem manifesto becoming government policy – independent research

By Mark Pack | Mon 2nd May 2011 - 5:53 pm

Sunday’s Politics Show featured the results of research by independent academics into how each party in the Coalition Government is doing at getting its polices enacted.

The conclusion? Three-quarters (75%) of the Liberal Democrat manifesto is being turned into government policy, compared to noticeably less (60%) of the Conservative manifesto, as illustrated in this screenshot:

Politics Show screenshot

(For a sample of those Lib Dem policies being put into action see the excellent site What The Hell Have The Lib Dems Done?)

Conservative blogger Tim Montgomerie and Lib Dem blogger and Federal Policy Committee (FPC) member Linda Jack were both interviewed to discuss these results and other aspects of the coalition’s future:

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Mark Pack

Why budget maths makes me thinks of Escher

By Mark Pack | Fri 2nd July 2010 - 12:50 pm

A small state is smaller than a big state, right?

But now bear with me.

Take a glance at the heated rhetoric coming from Labour ranks about how the coalition government is hell bent on a right wing crusade to slash the size of the state.

Then consider this. The coalition’s spending plans will see public spending in 2015-16 at a fraction under 40% of GDP.

And you know what? That’s higher than it was under Labour in 1997-98 and in all the intervening years through to, and including, 2003-04. (See the graph here from Peter Hoskin.)

So the horrible dreadful right-wing small state still …

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