A few weeks ago Tom Harris stepped down from the Shadow DEFRA team, saying:
“I know where my priorities lie; the task of juggling front bench responsibilities and being a husband and father to a young family located 400 miles away is simply beyond me.”
Today the party have confirmed that Brent North MP Barry Gardiner has been appointed to replace Harris as Labour’s Shadow Natural Environment and Fisheries Minister.
Labour plan to step up their media monitoring process in the run up to the 2015 general election, according to The Independent. A team will be in charge of rebutting negative media to avoid a re-run of the 1992 election, where an onslaught of attacks from the press played their part in a unexpected Conservative victory. Michael Dugher, the MP in charge of Labour’s communications, is this week in the US discussing strategy with new appointment David Axelrod and other political […]
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Happy St. George’s Day! You might ask, what does that even mean? – if I said that to you. And my response to that would be: “exactly.” But you know what? I’m proud to be English. Yes, I said it. I like living in England (well, London). I like our sense of humour, many of our institutions, the constant march of secularism, atheism and tolerance (occasional hiccups aside), the over-the-top drinking culture, and our utter mediocrity at most sports. Its […]
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Labour tends to view UKIP like Nelson viewed the signal at the Battle of Copenhagen. He held the telescope to his blind eye and said, ‘I really do not see the signal’. Our image of UKIP is a protest vehicle for disaffected, older, right wing Tories in the South. But UKIP represents more significant trends than this caricature suggests. UKIP is a symptom of the deep social and economic changes that have taken place over the last thirty years. Its […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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