Mark Pack has a very good post up on how the Lib Dems’ distinctive approach to campaigning evolved, and what that meant for the party. Essentially, since the 1980s, the party was reshaped entirely around one particular technique: direct mail. I didn’t know that the LDs’ identification of target seats isn’t, or isn’t just, based…
Read More stuffing envelopes and getting stuffedSwinging off something I discussed in another place, the Wikipedia list of culture-bound syndromes is fascinatingly odd, although several of them seem to reduce to depression and several more to sexism. I wonder if different Wikipedias have different ones? But what interests me is this: what with globalisation an’ all, will these get smoothed out…
Read More Culture-bound syndromesAm I right in thinking that Moazzam Begg’s political role is getting more complicated, more important, and more impressive? Here’s a story. It kicks off with: British jihadi fighters desperate to return home from Syria and Iraq are being issued with death threats by the leadership of Islamic State (Isis), the Observer has learned. A…
Read More Moazzam Begg, always in the paper, rarely reported.The Observer is a strange newspaper. Here’s a bit from its business page today: Disturbed by the lack of similar action in Brussels and in Frankfurt – home of the European Central Bank – investors fear that the eurozone is sliding ever closer to recession. They are also worried about a sharp slowdown in China,…
Read More China changes government. Exclusive in the Observer.