tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90079551045156251442011-07-08T20:41:42.987+01:00York Department of Politicshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16199604189330120762noreply@blogger.comBlogger291100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9007955104515625144.post-42724574946644167522010-05-18T10:54:00.015+01:002010-05-18T12:17:34.314+01:00

On Saturday afternoon (16 May) over 150 people gathered to hear local MP Hugh Bayley, Dr Simon Parker and Professor the Baroness Haleh Afshar (from the University of York Politics Department), Liberal Democrat Councillor Christian Vassie, Green Councillor Dave Taylor, and a speaker from the University of York branch of People & Planet make the case for a reform of the electoral system and for the

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Posted by Dr Rajesh Venugopal1. The Tories Ambushed the Lib Dems: The Tories cleverly lured the Lib Dems into a trap, offering them everything on paper, but little in practice. In reality, Clegg and Cable control nothing, and remain under the thumb of Cameron and Osborne respectively. Worse, the Tory offer on electoral reform (a referendum) is a trick designed to fail. Clegg cravenly sacrified

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Haleh will be discussing the new coalition government on BBC Radio York at 12noon today:http://www.bbc.co.uk/york/programmes

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Posted by Dr Andrew ConnellLook at how the Cabinet seats have been distributed between the parties. All the big and totemic spending departments- Health, Education, Defence, Home Office, Communities and Local Government, Work and Pensions, and Transport- are in Conservative hands. This government is going to have to make big spending cuts and this will give the Conservatives the maximum of

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Posted by Dr Simon ParkerIf back around the time of my birth Harold Wilson could claim that ‘a week is a long time in politics’ we have just seen that yardstick disappear into the black hole of the space-time continuum that is 24 Hour Rolling News (or in the case of Sky News -Fight Club).As recently as Tuesday lunchtime the Rainbow Coalition looked like it was heading for the Emerald City

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Posted by Dr Andrew ConnellGordon Brown’s announcement that he will resign the Labour leadership really comes as no great surprise. Whatever your interpretation of the outcome of the general election, his authority had been badly damaged by the result, and it would be hard to imagine Labour springing back under his leadership in another election at any time in the near future. There may, too, be

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Posted By Dr Rajesh VenugopalFor those (such as myself) who are more used to following elections and newly crafted election systems in post-conflict countries, the British electoral system often seems like a blast from the past. Westminster's first past-the-post, winner-takes-all system had many takers in the 1950s and 1960s, when the 'mother of all parliaments' was cloned in numerous

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Posted by Dr Andrew ConnellWell, I suppose one of the joys of electoral punditry is being proved comprehensively wrong. The other day I was confidently saying that, yes, of course if there was going to be a coalition it was likely to be Labour/ Lib Dem, the Lib Dems were closer to labour than to the Conservatives even after any Cameronite repositioning, they’d worked together in Scotland and

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Posted by Prof Neil CarterAlthough the final tranche of polls show little change from other recent polls, there is a slight firming up of support for the Conservatives. The majority of the polls are within 1 point of CON 36%, LAB 28%, LDEM 27%. What does this mean in terms of seats? On a uniform swing those percentages would translate into a seat distribution of Conservatives 297, Labour 245 and

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Posted by Prof Neil CarterThis campaign has seen more turbulence in the polls than at any previous election. Just two weeks ago, before the first prime ministerial debate, the Liberal Democrats were running a distant third. Then came Cleggmania and they jumped, briefly, into first place, turning the contest into a genuine three horse race. Clegg and his party’s policies have since been subjected

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Posted by Dr Simon ParkerThe final prime ministerial debate took place in the impressive surroundings of Birmingham University’s Great Hall—although the carefully chosen local audience did not appear to contain any students or lecturing staff. Was this a portend of what the next government had in store for UK higher education I wondered? Certainly the message from all three of the party leaders

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Posted by Dr Rob AitkenThe Conservative party political broadcast portrays a hung parliament as producing an endless round of self-serving politicians haggling over the spoils and failing to govern effectively. This is undoubtedly Tory scaremongering as they are afraid they will not achieve an overall majority that they took for granted. However, it also reflects a lack of experience in

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Posted by Tom Flynn, Politics PhD studentSo much of the election debate (particularly in the main stream media) has been around the issue of a hung parliament, and the subsequent coalition that would be required to form a Government. Nick Clegg’s recent revelation, that he’d refuse to prop up a Labour Prime Minister if the Labour Party finishes third in the popular vote, therefore throws up a

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Posted by Kirstyn Radford, Politics Librarian, J.B Morrell Library The University of York Library already subscribes to legal databases from this host, but we haven’t previously had access to the Parliament service. Follow the instructions on the website below to register for a personal account for the duration of the promotion. The Justis Parliament database provides a single

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Posted by Dr John ParkinsonIn the wake of the expenses scandal, every political party is trying to pitch itself as the solution, not the cause, of our allegedly-broken politics. Each party is proposing constitutional reforms. How do the ideas of ‘the Big Three’ measure up?Much of the detail in the proposals is like shuffling the deck-chairs on the Titanic. Take the Labour proposal of the

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Haleh was on the debating panel alongside the three prospective parliamentary candidates for the York Outer constituency. This was a live programme in front of an audience invited by the BBC from around North Yorkshire. You can listen to the debate at:http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p007jxb5#synopsis

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Posted by Dr Simon ParkerIf the theme of the first prime ministerial debate had been ‘I agree with Nick’, the story of Thursday night’s encounter in Bristol and indeed the entire week’s campaigning since Clegg’s first triumphant performance in Manchester was ‘Let’s Get Clegg!’. That morning’s Daily Telegraph claimed that payments to support a research assistant when Nick Clegg was Home Affairs

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Posted by Mr Steven A ZyckThursday night's debate, half of which was intended to focus on international affairs, did a surprisingly good job of avoiding the role that Britain has played and will play abroad. In between questions about what personal steps the prime ministerial candidates had taken to "green" up their travel habits and what they thought about an impending visit by the Holy Father,

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Posted by Dr Tom HarrisonThere was not that much on international affairs in yesterday’s ‘international affairs’/‘foreign policy’ debate, so it is not particularly surprising that there was no direct focus on the parties’ policies on international development, but several of the issues covered (such as policies on climate change and immigration) have major implications for developing countries.In

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Posted by Dr Andrew Connell Interesting to see today’s Guardian reporting Ed Balls- always seen as Gordon Brown’s ‘mini me’ – as saying that ‘coalition politics is not the British way of doing government’. True enough at Westminster, perhaps, but Scottish and Welsh politicians have come, over the last 12 years, to accept (if not always embrace) the politics of coalitions and minority government -

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Posted by Dr Jim BullerTomorrow sees the second leadership debate which will be held on the subject of international affairs. What role will international affairs play in the forthcoming election and what should we expect from the leadership debate tomorrow night?Historically, international affairs have rarely played a prominent or important role in British election campaigns. It is true that

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Posted by Dr Roger Mac Ginty, University of St AndrewsThe election in Northern Ireland matters greatly to the people of Northern Ireland – some constituencies there regularly produce the highest turnouts. In the rest of the UK, the election in the Northern Ireland is usually confined to a few words at the end of the news bulletin. But if this election produces a hung parliament, then one of the

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Posted by Dr Andrew Connell There are things about this election that remind me quite strongly of 1992: a tired government, a Prime Minister who took office in mid-term seeking to win his own popular mandate, and a feeling that people are wanting a change - but with an Opposition still trying to establish their credibility as a government-in-waiting, and none of the sense of sea-change (as Jim

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http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=110649962303561&ref=nf

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Posted by Prof David HowellExpectation of a hung parliament and Liberal optimism call up memories of February 1974. A few weeks ago the BBC ran the complete night-next day coverage of that election in order to make the point. The parallel was made to me in much more earthy terms by Dennis Skinner as the election was about to be called. Yet 1974 was a different political planet, the miners' strike

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Posted by Prof Neil CarterIf you’d said to me a week ago that the Liberal Democrats would lead in two opinion polls over the weekend, I would have just laughed. Yet here we are in uncharted territory following the remarkable shift in the polls over the last few days. Previously, the first week of the campaign had seen very little movement in the polls. Yes, some individual polls were giving the

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Posted by Neil CarterDon't let yourself be disenfranchised!Tomorrow is the last day that you can register to vote in the election. If you aren't registered, or you want to find out how to check that you are registered, you can do so on this website: http://www.aboutmyvote.co.uk/

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Posted by Dr Simon ParkerOne thing that every social network savvy commentator appears to agree on is that the Britain’s first series of prime ministerial TV debates is also likely to be its last in this format. The 1970s stage set, the appalling lighting, dodgy camerawork and the wooden dialogue made me wonder if I had accidentally switched to an episode of ‘Life on Mars’. An impression that was

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Posted by Prof Neil CarterMost people living in or around York will be voting in one of two constituencies: York Central or York Outer. Since the last general election the Boundary Commission has redrawn the electoral map to create something akin to a doughnut : York Central corresponds to the inner city of York, whilst York Outer completely encircles York Central by linking up all the

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