The current predictions for the 2015 election place Conservatives and Labour neck and neck with projections of around 280 seats each. The most likely outcome of the general election would seem to be another…
A vote for grammar schools and no university fees for science and medical students.
Nick Ansell/PA Wire
Until now, the policies of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) have been symbolic rather than substantive. Policy statements by the party’s leader, Nigel Farage, have been designed to build a populist support…
Poll results worth drinking to.
Steve Parsons/PA Wire
At the launch of Labour’s election campaign in Manchester, Ed Miliband accused the prime minister, David Cameron, of playing “risky and irresponsible games” with the EU. Exit, he argued, would be a “dramatic…
Ed Miliband visits the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.
PA
The horrific murder of four Jewish men in a Paris supermarket has understandably provoked a debate about levels of anti-Semitism throughout Europe, including, of course, the UK. According to some campaigning…
Time to take a chance on the European model?
De rödgröna/Wikimedia Commons
Don’t tell them this, but UKIP are the most European party out there. Britain’s democracy is increasingly diverse and complex, and with the growth of UKIP on the right and the Greens on the left its political…
The British press has been accused of many things in recent years, most of them bad, but how can we measure performance in coverage of a particular subject such as immigration, and how is this changing…
Murray is offering a British moon on a British stick.
Joel Ryan/AP/Press Association Images
There is much to ponder about comedian Al Murray’s decision to run in the British general election. Murray – as his Pub Landlord character – will stand against UKIP’s Nigel Farage in the constituency of…
If you stay very still, it can’t see you.
Oli Scarff/PA Archive
Eunice Goes, Richmond American International University
Psephologists have been warning for decades now that multi-party politics is on the rise in the UK, but for most of the time they have been ignored. Everything changed in 2014 though, and the old guard…
We’ve learnt this year that if an MP defects – particularly to UKIP – people pay attention. With their high-profile defections causing two by-elections, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless sparked both…
Say it loud, say it clear.
Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire
Alan Gamlen, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
Ed Miliband has admitted that Labour is “on a journey” when it comes to immigration. He has promised that his party “will never again turn our backs on people who are worried about immigration” but also…
UKIP has not had a good week when it comes to women. Nigel Farage kicked things off by suggesting that mothers should think twice about breastfeeding in public, managing to offend a rather large proportion…
The education of children who speak more than one language is being used as part of a wider debate about immigration just months before the UK’s 2015 general election. But there is surprisingly little…
Andreas Scheuer, secretary general of the German party considering proposals for make migrants speak German at home and in public.
Sven Hoppe/EPA
A proposal in Germany to make all migrants speak German in public and at home has ignited a heated debate about immigration and language. The proposals come from the German Christlich-Soziale Union (CSU…
Have walkies policies won over the canine community?
Gareth Fuller/PA Wire
As UKIP makes parliamentary gains at every turn, it no longer seems possible to dismiss the party as a group of anti-EU obsessives that has little in common with mainstream politics. The days of the swivel-eyed…
Eunice Goes, Richmond American International University
As prime minister David Cameron works on the finishing touches of his much-awaited speech on Europe and immigration he is under considerable pressure from his backbenchers and some frontbenchers to signal…
Robert Peston, business editor at BBC news recently declared that his employer is “completely obsessed” by the agenda set by newspapers. The broadcaster, he argued, is constantly taking the content of…
A UKIP victory was far from assured at the beginning of the Rochester and Strood by-election campaign, but by polling day it was as near to a political certainty as it’s possible to get in these volatile…
Buy one get one free on UKIP MPs.
Gareth Fuller/PA Wire
Even in our always-on, wired, information-fluid age, some countries, some companies, some sectors, persist in inefficient processes because “that’s the way it’s always been done”. While some businesses…