Tag: politics

  • End of the line

    The Conservative Party is, famously, the most successful political party in history. — The party is a shape-shifting cockroach that’s survived the whole industrial era, the expansion of the franchise,…

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  • Defending the indefensible

    This is a guest post from the nice people at Radlett Wire, a local blog that, having spent ten years providing, let’s face it, mostly quite boring information about the…

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  • From the other end of the modern

    Italo Svevo and Adam Tooze (and Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng) — So, this post originally started with a bit about how I’d read about Svevo in Franco Moretti’s The…

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  • Monarchy: to be bothered or not to be bothered?

    Less than half of gen-z in Britain thinks we should keep the monarchy but mainstream politicians can’t get enough of it. — What do lefties and republicans think about the…

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  • Ten times the Labour party stood behind workers in Britain

    Actually, there aren’t any. Sorry. — The conventional wisdom is that Labour is the only major socialist party in the world that emerged directly from organised labour—every other important party—in…

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  • Who is Trump?

    A little Benito Mussolini, some John Gotti and some George Wallace. Plenty of Charles Lindbergh too, of course. But mainly he’s Rufus T. Firefly.

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  • You may think you want the death penalty but you don’t have the stomach for it

    Surveys suggest that a majority of ordinary Britons want a return to the death penalty for the most heinous crimes (this online poll on The Sun’s web site has 80%…

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  • Oops…

    Thought I ought to be first to acknowledge the howler in the previous post. Turns out the debates were irrelevant. Made no difference. Caused not a ripple in the electoral…

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  • Shiny floor democracy

    I expected little of the debates. I thought they’d slot into the campaign like all the other more-or-less artificial election media gewgaws and gimmicks: like party leaders going on kids…

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  • I don’t want a right to see my MP’s expenses

    UPDATE April 2022: I wrote this in January 2009, right at the beginning of the expenses scandal and several months before the Telegraph began the week-by-week disclosure of hideous abuse…

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