A cordial Trans-Atlantic welcome from Manhattan. I’m a Brit currently exiled in New York City and I blog at Third Avenue. I haven’t been here all that long, so am still non-plussed by such news as that the Mets have beaten the Knicks by 29 innings and a touch-down. My interests remain deeply rooted in UK politics, an area in which until recently I was reasonably gainfully employed.

As a starter, I will consider from my left-of-centre perspective the future prospects of the Tory party. The party’s in deep trouble, able to win some seats because of local swings, but unable to increase its share of the national vote.

So here’s my memo to Conservative Central Office. I’m no Tory, and would be unlikely to vote for them even if they took my advice. Much of the following, however, is actually sincerely meant:
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Blimpish describes Blair’s Third Way as “Majorism with Marketing“. If you needed any further proof that Blair is the same kind of whinnying little prig as his predecessor, you only had to listen to his self-serving but ultimately hollow homily on anti-social behaviour at his monthly press conference today.

He may speak like a Media Studies graduate in a Marketing department trying to impress his team leader over a lunchtime pint, put his rhetoric is as old as the hills. At any moment I thought he was going to promise to eradicate the Teddy Boy Menace.

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Question of the day: Labour Party or Donner Party? Read More

Or: Tony Blair and our relation to his unconscious.

Old German joke, as retold by Sigmund Freud. A man borrows a kettle from his neighbour. When he returns it, the neighbour complains that it’s got a hole in it. Don’t look at me, says our man, I never borrowed your kettle. Besides, it was fine when I gave it back to you. I wish I’d never borrowed it anyway – it’s useless, it’s got a great big hole in it.

In other words, Don’t blame me, I wasn’t there. Well, OK, I was there, but nothing went wrong. Well, maybe something did go wrong, but it was nothing to do with me…

In three words: deny, deny, deny. It wasn’t me.

Martin Kettle Read More

Law and order have broken down. The nation’s youth is running amok, unchecked and uncontrollable. In response to the perceived escalating public order crisis the Government has passed the Millennium Education Reform Act.

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It’s an odd curiosity that the two main political parties are going through a similar period of internecine warfare. It’s covert, with incursions and exchanges being made through the media, rather than using the more traditional armaments of quiet whispers in the right ears.

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36% of 61%, that’s all it took. 22% of voters have chosen a government to rule untrammelled over the rest of us for the next 5 years. I guess that right after an unfair election probably isn’t the time to start talking about electoral reform. No, it was time to start talking about it thirty years ago, when three-party politics returned and the ability of our decrepit electoral system to translate votes into representation began to derail. The benefits of some form of PR are obvious: the will of the people translated into a form more manageable than referendum-based democracy. There is no criterion for a just electoral system that takes precedence over that.

Sure, there are one or two problems. There is no perfect electoral system — and plenty of non-starters to replace FPTP (first-past-the-post). But most of the objections are myth and mischief.
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It seems a bit sad to say this, as it’s been an integral part of the way we think about elections for so long, but is it time to get rid of the swingometer?

One of the features of last Thursday night was lots of people saying ‘just what the hell is going on out there?’ As Andrew Marr put it on the BBC, the election campaign itself may have been boring, and it was the voters who delivered the excitement. Every time a result came through, we all struggled to work out how it fit into the national picture, what the swing in Loamshire South West would tell us about the projected result in Borsetshire North East, but each time we missed the real message they were telling us: there was no national picture. It seemed almost appropriate that this should be the election where the exit polls were right, just when they’d stopped meaning anything.
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I know you’ve all been waiting on tenterhooks with baited breath for this, my first post on The Sharpener – how could you not, eh? I hope it meets or even surpasses your expectations, and you tell your friends to read it. It is, as with most things now, a reflection on the implications of Thursday’s General Election. (Be warned, it’s a very long reflection.)

As you might guess from my oh-so-subtle nom de blog, I’m a conservative. For that reason, this piece is a bit of navel-gazing because we Tories have now a brief opportunity to do that, and an urgent need to do so. In what follows, I’ll make some observations on how it all went for my lot, and then where we go next, before closing with my own reckless suggestions on what that should mean. Read More

While the Liberal democrats overall gained seats (up from 51 to 62 now), they also lost 5 seats to the Tories. Was this because of “tactical unwind”?
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