Tag Archives: new politics

Mark Valladares

Is being purist consistent with building majorities for change?

By Mark Valladares | Mon 18th February 2019 - 8:09 pm

I’ve been vaguely following the debate triggered by today’s launch of The Independent Group, and I have to admit to a tinge of despair. The competing stances of “we look forward to working with them” and “they’re not proper liberals and we shouldn’t touch them with a bargepole” are hardly unexpected, and there are people that I respect on both sides.

But, of course, I’m a bureaucrat, inherently cautious, and I’m older and wiser than I once was. So I find myself wondering, what is it we want, and how can this help us to get it?

Think of it as being …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 27 Comments
Ewan Hoyle

Desperate times call for despairing PR measures

By Ewan Hoyle | Mon 24th September 2018 - 12:30 pm

As the UK stares down the barrel of Brexit, and after a Liberal Democrat conference which didn’t inspire any anticipation of an impending poll surge, the Liberal Democrats need to present a truly radical offering.

The state of UK politics is desperate. The Conservatives are incompetently led, and with eccentric right-wingers lying in wait to add their own special layers of incompetence when May eventually falls.

The Labour party are likewise incompetently led, with no immediate prospect of that situation being resolved either.

What should fill us all with foreboding is that these parties’ internal democracies have evolved to a point where they …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 130 Comments
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  • David S
    The goal of a representative electoral system is not to ensure that this or that party gets elected. The goal should to be to ensure that every voter, or as clo...
  • Paul R
    Jana - There is no mention of any form of “political union” anywhere in the EU Treaties. Indeed, this was explicitly clarified by the other leaders in t...
  • Daniel Walker
    @theakes "first past the post was a winner for us in 2024. Suggest we keep our heads down and live with it." If your opinion on an electoral system—...
  • Paul Holmes
    Rob, you also say that we can't be the party of the NHS or the Environment because Labour and the Greens have those. Surely it is a mistake to abandon whole are...
  • Paul Holmes
    Rob, you offer two possible groups of key target supporters for the Liberal Democrats. However, both are, as you note, just subsets of the affluent middle class...