politics

Chris Dillow asks why politicians seem to be so hopeless today. I tend to think of this as a consequence of the great divergence, the gapping-out of inequality across the developed economies since the 1980s. Why? Consider this guy. That’s right – an eccentric billionaire, giving away fivers! This used to be a stock cartoon-strip…

This BBC Scotland story about a swimming pool in Helensburgh should probably have got much more play than it did. Perhaps it was something about the framing? It’s a pity, because the central thrust of it is really important to the future of the polity. Back in the autumn of 2015, when journalists rejoiced in…

Matthew Goodwin is probably in hiding from people demanding that he eats a book, but I can’t help but notice that he massively buries the lede in this paper on the elections. In table 1, his multivariate regression for the change in turnout, Model 3, has the following result. What leaps out at you there?…

Nick Timothy so on Conservative Home: Ironically, the Prime Minister is the one political leader who understands this division, and who has been working to address it since she became Prime Minister last July. The Conservative election campaign, however, failed to get this and Theresa’s positive plan for the future across. It also failed to…

An interesting post about populists. I think this point can be extended. Find a wound common to many, someone to blame for it and a good story to tell. Mix it all together. Tell the wounded you know how they feel. That you found the bad guys…if you’re not among the victims, you’re among the…

There’s a common argument around that claims something like this: If Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic candidate, he’d have faced a terrible monstering from the press, and would therefore have lost the election. I think it is seriously misleading. Let’s unpack the argument a bit. The point about the terrible monstering from the press…

OK, so an interesting point came up on twitter regarding former Belgian PM Guy Verhofstadt, aka Europe’s Mr Brexit Except For The Other One. Isn’t one of the problems here that British politicians are socialised into a relatively simple kind of state? Basically unitary, usually with a strong executive government, powerful party whips, and unambiguous…

It’s that time of year again! It seems quite odd that we’re actually having one, given the utterly unrecognisable swirling madness of 2016, but the public finances are one of those things that keeps going under the most unlikely of circumstances. So let’s pretend everything is normal. Here are my considered predictions for the 2016…