Posted by Chris Lowe on 31 March 2010
Everyone expects Gordon Brown to visit the Queen on Tuesday 6 April to ask her to dissolve Parliament so that a General Election can be held on Thursday 6 May.
Once Parliament is dissolved, there are no longer any MPs, merely Parliamentary Candidates, but because government must continue, Ministers remain in place. This period is known [...]
Posted by Warwick Smith on 22 March 2010
Just emerging from a series of radio and TV interviews on the weekend’s lobbying scandal … except it wasn’t. There was no lobbyist to be seen. Rather a few MPs willing to be paid to do things which most right-minded people would think were just plain wrong. As Nick Clegg said yesterday (I paraphrase), what [...]
Posted by Logan Ashcraft on 11 March 2010
After attending this afternoon’s talk , hosted by the Henry Jackson Society and held in the House of Commons by invitation of Derek Twigg MP, I have been pondering what Japan’s next strategic move will be. Professor Kenneth B. Pyle offered his commentary on Japan’s past and present foreign policy. He first rightly focused [...]
Posted by Warwick Smith on 9 March 2010
I spent the afternoon with 20 other people sitting in a Defra meeting room debating how to make the collection and recycling of small household items work. Which got me to wondering whether we haven’t lost the way with this sort of environmental legislation.
We were in the domain of “producer responsibility” where manufacturers pay independent [...]
Posted by Marco Di Benedetto on 3 March 2010
Every time we talk about the EU’s Foreign Policy, Henry Kissinger’s fateful question comes to mind: “Whom do I call if I want to talk to Europe?” and yet it seems this quote is still quite pertinent of today’s enhanced European foreign affairs framework.
What came first, the chicken or the egg? the structure or the [...]
Posted by Katharina Derschewsky on
The BBC’s success in convincing the three Parties’ leaders to appear in a TV debate prior to the General Election may have heralded a change in the way we will be discussing the impact of new media on politics in the future.
We always knew that new media would not win elections but did have the [...]