Here are some predictions that I make with a fair degree of certainty. An indifferent British electorate will shrug its collective shoulders and award Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party the second highest vote total in this May’s European elections. Buoyed by this win, Farage will force his way onto the stage for the party leader debates in 2015. And in the subsequent general election, for the first time in history, four parties will each take more than 10% of the vote nationwide. After trialling an alternative arrangement between 2010 and 2015, the era of big-party government will be over. Continue reading “Nick, Nigel, and the Neapolity: The Fragmented Future of British Party Politics”
Tag: David Cameron
Fahrenheit 401: Digital Deletion Is Incompatible with Democracy

Quite understandably, book burning has a bad reputation. It is a scout badge for history’s nastiest antagonists – Nazis, Stalinists and the Taleban have indulged in it – and biblioclasm also provides the central motif for Ray Bradbury’s dystopian masterpiece Fahrenheit 451 (the temperature at which book paper burns), in which perversely named ‘firemen’ are tasked with obliterating burning outlawed books and occasionally the bookish. Continue reading “Fahrenheit 401: Digital Deletion Is Incompatible with Democracy”
Master Statesman or An Idiot Abroad?
DEPENDING on your political perspective, for good or ill the first six months of the coalition government have been defined by economic issues. The Great Recession may have been global in scope, but it has forced countries to turn inward, to focus on deficits and levels of
unemployment.