House of Comments

23: The Chaotic Election

This week’s we chatted with blogger Charlotte Gore and Political Betting’s Greg Callus, aka Morus.

We talked about the continuing election campaigns, what a hung parliament could mean for the country, whether a change in voting system will be needed after this election – and if David Cameron could be the one to bring it in – and about the way the leaders debates have dominated this election campaign.

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22: The Lib Dem Surge

This week Conor Pope of the Audacity of Pope, and Chris Mounsey of the reborn Devil’s Knife join regulars Mark Thompson and Stuart Sharpe to talk about this week’s political events through the prism of the UK political blogosphere.

Download the MP3 file, Subscribe using iTunes or listen using the player below.

We chatted about:

• Following Nick Clegg’s performance at the Leaders Debates, the Liberal Democrats have broken past Labour in the polls, and some polls are even putting them ahead of the Tories. Is this ‘surge’ a flash-in-the-pan that will be gone by next week, or could it be sustained all the way up to election day?
• Electoral mathematics make it unlikely the Lib Dems could win an election outright, but the political system is being given a shake up. With predictions that Labour could end up the party with the most seats but the smallest number of votes, will we soon be seeing electoral reforms come to pass?
• The other parties seem unable to figure out a good line of attack against this third party uprising. We discussed some of the tactics they appear to be trying, and whether any of these have worked at all.
• Chris was interviewed by Andrew Neil for The Daily Politics recently in his capacity as leader of the UK Libertarian Party, but by most accounts did not come off very well from the interview. We asked for his side of the story, and whether writing a blog under such an aggressive persona as Devil’s Kitchen is compatible with holding ambitions in the ‘respectable’ world of politics?

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21: The Election Begins

This week Jessica Asato, Editor of Progress Online and Duncan Stott of Split Horizons joined regulars Mark Thompson and Stuart Sharpe to talk about the events of the week in politics.

Download the MP3 file, Subscribe using iTunes or listen using the player below.

Some of the topics we talked about:

• Last Tuesday Gordon Brown called a general election for May 6th. We discuss how the campaign has gone so far, whether there have been any surprises and what we all think of the performance of the parties.
• The Labour and Tory manifestos had been launched just prior to recording. We discuss some of the content and also ask whether there is any point to manifestos anyway and debate how many occasions there are when the promises within are not implemented.
• One of the Tory proposals is to allow local referenda to for example determine if a council tax rise should be allowed. Is this a positive step forward for local democracy, or could it just lead to confusion and muddle?
• Labour blogger Ellie Gellard was splashed across the front cover of two national newspapers this week because of comments she made two years ago about wanting Gordon Brown to quit. Is this really news?
• Labour’s manifesto includes a section title “Immigration and Crime”, a conflation which Duncan was not impressed about. Is this ‘dog-whistle politics’, or just a consequence of “departmental compartmentalisation” after 13 years in office?
• Finally, both Stuart and Mark have things coming up they’d like to plug: Stuart has written an iPhone app called Election 2010 which provides information about all the constituencies and candidates for the election, which on election night will give live results and updates. Mark is running live chats on his blog during the leaders debates over the next three weeks, which are open for anyone to join in while watching.

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