Flying Again Now the planes are once again in the air, questions are being asked about whether they should have been grounded in the first place. I am not qualified to comment on the science. I do know that there was little experince of this type of ash cloud, but there was some. In the […]
Political Earthquakes These are rare in the UK but they happen. They are not to be confused with upsets (Heath 1970) or landslides (Blair 1997). There have been two in the last 104 years. The first one to look at, the better known today, is 1945. The country and the world expected Churchill to win. […]
Will the Bubble Burst? No I do not think it will. I know that Labour, the Tories and a good few partisan newspapers and commentators hope it will, but not this time. This is not 1983. Then I was very active in politics as a founder memeber of the SDP, its constituency Chairman, first for […]
Tory Agony The Tory party is in a place that nobody within its leadership expected to be. If the Lib Dem surge sustains and it most likely will, Cameron cannot win outright and may end up excluded from Government altogether. A fourth defeat in a row. How has this happened? For it is so little time […]
Ash Cloud Over the last 100 years there have been very few great climatic events sufficient to disrupt travel and nothing on the scale of the present closing of north European air space. Yet in the history of the world, such events are common. Having gone through a quiet period, we can expect more are […]
Lib Dem Surge Regular readers will know this Blog predicted a Lib Dem surge more than once. Sometimes it was illustrated with a comparison with the Prussians charging fresh out of the woods at Waterloo, when Wellington and Napoleon had fought each other to a near standstill. Well the Lib Dems have certainly charged out […]
Nuclear Deterrent One of the biggest policy blunders made in the past was the cancellation of Blue Streak, the U.K Military Rocket project. Cancelled because of vulnerability to a pre-emptive strike and soaring costs, the technology became part of the European Space effort and the prototype for Stage I of the Arianne missile launcher for […]
Some Election Numbers The big question now is whether Nick Clegg’s success in the first TV debate starts a surge towards the third party. This may not be a disaster for Brown, although it would be if all the seats gained by Lib Dems came from Labour. It is as likely that a Lib Dem surge […]
Marginals Poll There is a new poll of the 100 top marginals which the Tories must win. This shows a 12% swing which the Telegraph, who publish the poll, says puts Cameron on track for a convincing win. It is true that the Tory lead is slightly better in most polls since the launch of their […]