British Politics

‘As a result of industrial action this exit is closed.’ The unwelcome tiding is stuck across two massive doors in King’s Cross underground station with what appears to be yellow-and-black crime scene tape. It is not what London’s put-upon commuters want to see.

It is the first week of December and a freezing London is enduring its fourth tube strike in three months, as unions fight plans to cut jobs. Students have staged rallies and campus occupations to protest planned university tuition fee increases. The police have taken to holding protesters in cordoned-off areas for hours on end. This being Britain, the tactic is called ‘kettling’.

And cuts to the defense budget mean Britain’s flagship aircraft carrier will be axed, together with the fighter jets that took off from it. But Britain will be allowed to use a French aircraft carrier, in a deal one commentator dubbed the ‘entente frugale’. The French vessel in question – the Charles de Gaulle – recently broke down.

Continue reading "Betrayal: Why young Brits now hate the Lib Dems" »

As a contemporary British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was always a bit of a misfit. The dour Scot always looked a little awkward in the place of his immaculately presented and well-spoken predecessors in Tony Blair, John Major and Margaret Thatcher.

Can changing the leader somehow make a government legitimate when it has been so comprehensively beaten at the polls? Former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown may have said, “The people have spoken, we just don’t know what they’ve said,” but in handing the Conservatives more seats than Labour, the only discernable message from British voters seems to be that the government’s time is up.

Brown’s surprise announcement that he will resign by September is a win-at-all-costs strategy. He’s willing to sacrifice himself to keep the Tories out of office. What’s unfolding now in Britain is an increasingly unseemly bidding war for power. The end result, if Labour manages to form a government, will be Britain having a Prime Minister it didn’t vote for.

Continue reading "People sometimes get the leaders they didn’t vote for" »