LabourList’s poll trends: Towards May 6th

England has a radical tradition Labour can embrace

By Billy Bragg

St George’s Day seldom goes by without some features editor asking me to compile a list of things that define Englishness. It’s a pointless task. Top of my list of would be a love of Marmite, yet such a choice would immediately rule out half the population of England. The simple truth is that nations cannot be defined by character alone. It’s those things that we possess that other nations do not that truly define us: our society, our geography, […]

Is Labour ready to appeal unashamedly to England?

By Mark Ferguson

Is Labour ready to appeal unashamedly to England? Whilst many party members feel (as I do) more British than English, that actually makes it more important to answer the question. Because whilst the Labour Party has in the past decade been more than comfortable in speaking directly to Scotland (something which is obviously in focus at the moment) and Wales (somewhere that is obviously under fire from the Tories at the moment), the same can’t be said about England. Sure, we’ve […]

Why are the Lib Dems so shy?

Regular readers will know that we’re always keeping an eye on Lib Dems leaflets. Their local propaganda sheets are always good for a questionable bar chart, or forgetting the name of the generic place their text is for – but they can also be quite shy about their party affiliation too. For example, take the “Islington Chronicle”. Sounds like a local paper, and there’s no Lib Dem logo and barely a splash of their trademark yellow. But it is, in […]

Have the Tories given up on Scotland?

This morning we noted that the Tories haven’t selected candidates in nearly half of the most marginal Labour and Lib Dem seats. But what’s particularly telling is that in over 60% of target seats in the Midlands and the North they have so far failed to select a candidate, while the Independent claims that in Scotland there are no Tory parliamentary candidates at all. However, Mark Wallace over at ConHome notes that the Tories have in fact selected a total of two […]

Labour go on UKIP offensive

Labour have gone on the attack against UKIP, following the launch of their European election campaign over the weekend. Releasing a statement from Jon Ashworth, the Shadow Cabinet Office Minister, the response focusses on how right-wing UKIP are - suggesting this change of tack is to designed to put Labour supporters off switching their vote to Farage’s party. Ashworth said: “UKIP would have us believe they stand for working people but the truth is very different – they’re even more right […]