Category: Politics

This month, dogs were all the rage at your local polling station. Are teenagers next? The new prime minister promises to lower the voting age to 16; however, 51 per cent of Britons oppose such a move, with just 24 per cent in support – that’s all Britons whose opinion is relevant (those over 18 […]

The 2024 general election, in which the Labour party secured a 174 seat majority with just 34 per cent of the popular vote, has boosted interest in different electoral systems. Famously, our British First Past The Post (FPTP) system is shunned by almost all of our European neighbours (with Belarus as the one exception). But […]

Why, in God’s name, do we have to go through this prolonged, painful amateur pantomime of attempting a dignified adjustment to Brexit? The clown’s pants have fallen down. His car is in pieces. The tent has collapsed. Why don’t we just face up to it and stop trying to give dignity to our psychotic break […]

For the first time this year, Dorset for Europe was offered the opportunity to run a stall at the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival. Along with the stall comes the invitation to deliver a short speech to explain why we’re there and what we hope to achieve. This prompted me to gush forth an anguished tirade, wholly […]

Dear Editor, In the July 2024 UK General Election, the limited company known as Reform UK ended up with five MPs, having received 14 per cent of the votes cast, some 4 million votes. Under proportional representation they would have gained about 94 MPs. This is a problem, because Reform UK has a political ideology […]

Dear Sadik First of all, congratulations on a historic election result. You and your team have invested huge effort in capturing one of the more firmly entrenched Conservative seats and enabled Sir Liam Fox to spend more time with his family. Winning an election is, of course, just the beginning of the story. Sir Keir […]

I was shocked to see that Nigel Farage’s ‘Reform UK’ party came second in 120 constituencies. They got the third-highest vote share on 12.6 per cent of the votes, and even got an MP. All of this against a backdrop of the winning party gaining a vote-share only in the 30’s.  Oh no, wait a […]

Dear —, I can’t tell you how grateful I am for a seamless transition of power after the general election here in the UK. Outgoing prime minister Rishi Sunak gave the best, most statesmanlike speech of his life when he resigned. If only he’d governed in that tone! Over the past 6 weeks, the Tories […]

It’s not just our roads which are potholed… the whole country shows similar symptoms of neglect. My article on the disgraceful state of so many British roads, riddled with potholes and crumbling surfaces, leads us to use the pothole theme to evaluate some aspects of our neglected services and faltering social cohesion. From crumbing surfaces […]

It’s hard to focus on anything beyond July 4 and the results on July 5, but if you can get to Dartington Hall on Saturday 6 or Sunday 7, or both, you can still get tickets to attend the sessions that West Country Voices are hosting – and they are absolute bangers and wholly in […]

Four years on from Brexit and I’m taking a look at how various industries have been affected by the realities of our decision to leave the European Union (EU). I’ve already looked at How fishing was gutted by Brexit, and how Brexit has impacted farming. In this article I want to look at how Brexit […]

With some polls suggesting that the Lib Dems could push the Conservatives out if (a distant) second place, I asked Phil Moorhouse of popular YouTube channel ‘A Different Bias’ for his views on the matter. Could the Tories come third? PM: “Current polling suggests it’s unlikely…but only just. They are predicted to retain about 100 […]

No doubt there are many Conservative MPs who were complacently confident about the safety of their seats only a few months ago. And no doubt many of those are now realising that that complacency was misplaced. The growing Conservative fury and desperation manifests itself in many ways, from the tetchy belligerence of Sunak, to the […]

Award-winning film-maker David Wilkinson discovered very recently that he had stage 4 bowel cancer. He has been sharing his experience on Facebook with his friends and admirers, of whom there are very many, including the team here at WCV. We asked if we could publish this post. We believe it’s especially important as we approach […]

How the far-right may lose the battle, but still hope to win the war As many centre-right politicians and commentators have warned us, what used to be the Conservative Party has become a vehicle for the far-right. Philip Hammond wrote:  “the Conservative party has been taken over by unelected advisers, entryists and usurpers who are trying to turn […]

Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist who created a model of the hierarchy of human needs, from the most basic upwards. It is always represented as a pyramid and has been adapted several times, but the basics are unchanged. What if Maslow were alive today, what if he were to be our next prime minister? […]

There has never been a general election like this one. The Conservative and Unionist (Tory) Party has made gaffe after blunder after miscalculation after error after outrage. Keir Starmer could sit at home and do nothing for the next three weeks and still find himself prime minister on Friday, July 5th, so amateur and awful […]

The Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for South Devon, Caroline Voaden, has thrown down the gauntlet to her Conservative rival, Anthony Mangnall, asking him whether he condemns the lying and the breaches of the ministerial code by Sunak, Coutinho and others. We think that all Conservative candidates should be prepared to answer this same question: Are […]

An open letter to Sir Liam Fox MP Dear Sir Liam, Thank you for the North Somerset Residents Survey form, which you kindly sent me. It is a rather tasteful shade of green – an interesting change in Conservative branding. The party has, I think, traditionally used blue ever since my grandfather was a Conservative […]

We are aware that Labour has announced a candidate for South Devon. Some are implying on social media that he intends to run a serious campaign. But we would be very surprised if that’s his plan, after being dropped in by national HQ just weeks from the election. It would be a tragedy if a […]

Nobody who was serious about winning the general election and forming the next government could possibly campaign like Rishi Sunak and the Tories have done in these first few days of the general election… could they? It was called on Wednesday, May 22, 2024: the day the government launched its resilience initiative and told us […]

A continuation of the list of horrors perpetrated on this country by the Conservatives. Environment Human effluent flowing merrily through our waterways. Failure to regulate and curb energy price rises, leading to massive provider profits and pressure on consumers. Multiple failures to meet climate targets and backtracking on environmental commitments. The loss of EU funding […]

On May 22, 2024, Sunak finally announced the date of the next General Election: July 4. As the polls show, he has quite a challenge to win – or even to prevent Labour from securing an outright majority. But the Conservative Party is traditionally one of the world’s most effective election-winning machines, and it would be complacent not to assume […]

Welcome to the 25 per cent increase in defence spending, announced by the Prime Minister, for whom the penny has just dropped that we live in dangerous times. First of all, let us make some (possibly rash) assumptions. Let us assume that the percentage increase will not be cancelled by a reduction in GDP, which […]

When it was clear Johnson was on the way out, his allies launched Operation Save Big Dog. This article explores what we might call Operation Save Little Dog – the equivalent for Sunak, in the wake of the worse-than-expected results in the Council elections. The factions on the right are now quite complex: there are the extreme-right backers of the […]

Dear Editor, “I so hate this f*cking government!”: my all-too-familiar comment on political events of the day  to Anna over morning tea and toast. The Today programme on Radio 4 announced that Sunak had emphatically rejected the EC’s tentative suggestion that a post-Brexit Youth Mobility Scheme should be put to member states. And Labour had […]

Dear Editor, We are drawing close to the first local election since Dorset Council became a unitary authority in 2019, which the Financial Times (FT) recently dubbed as: “… the most keenly watched ‘blue wall’ battle in a crucial set of local elections on May 2.” Under the headline “Dorset Tories tell Sunak’s MPs to […]

The wealthy market fundamentalists who fund the right-wing think tanks have different objectives from the UK population as a whole. These think tanks propose such policies as abolishing the NHS, allowing slums with substandard housing to ‘solve’ the housing crisis, slashing benefits to pensioners in order to reduce taxes and letting the climate crisis go unchecked. The UK population as […]

It has recently been revealed that when the government told us that we the taxpayers had been made to foot the £15,000 bill for Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan’s libel case, they lied. The cost of the investigation plus the legal fees plus the settlement amount minus the VAT rebate on the legal fees, was more […]