Ballots & Bullets

Image by Ben Fisher/GAVI Alliance

Conservatives clearly care an awful lot – some would say too much – about Europe. But most of them care even more about winning elections. Naturally the Tory EUphoria occasioned by David Cameron’s referendum pledge owes something to his appearing to promise better-off-outters a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put their case directly to the British people. …

This is the twenty-first in a series of posts that report on the state of the parties as measured by opinion polls. By pooling together all the available polling evidence we can reduce the impact of the random variation each individual survey inevitably produces. Most of the short term advances and setbacks in party polling fortunes are nothing more than …

It was clear even before the 2010 election that there was the potential for clashes between the Conservative leadership and their MPs on issues such as same-sex marriage.  An article published in 2009 noted that ‘David Cameron, and especially George Osborne are much more socially liberal than much of their parliamentary party, and that split will need to be handled …

Source: Mike Smithson, Politicalbetting.com 

The Second Reading of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill – the Bill to introduce civil marriage for same sex couples – comes before the House of Commons today. Here are five things to think about:

1. If things go as expected, the vote will be one of the rare occasions when the split in the …

‘Prediction is very difficult’, said Niels Bohr, ‘especially if it’s about the future’ – and it’s always potentially embarrassing when you revisit things you wrote and in which you had confidently predicted what was to come.

Take, for example, this 2009 article, looking at the likely state of the Conservative Parliamentary Party after the election.

It argued the party …