http://blogs.independent.co.uk| Blogs from the Independent newspaper - news, views and features from the world's most free-thinking newspaper| Fri, 24 May 2013 02:00:32 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2| en hourly 1 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/23/the-dawn-of-time/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/23/the-dawn-of-time/#comments Thu, 23 May 2013 17:58:12 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=35146 My esteemed colleague Jack Riley, head of digital at the Independent and Evening Standard, is leaving to join AOL/Huffington Post. I wish him well, and want to pay tribute to him for the success of The Independent on the web, but also, more selfishly, for helping me into the digital world. I started blogging in 2007, [...]]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/23/the-dawn-of-time/feed/ 0 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/22/the-fiction-of-gatsby/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/22/the-fiction-of-gatsby/#comments Wed, 22 May 2013 14:48:07 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=35104 “In Britain and America, inequality is now back to Gatsby-esque levels.” So wrote Aditya Chakrabortty, Guardian economics leader-writer, yesterday. It is just not true. I don’t know as much about America, but it certainly isn’t true about Britain. It is a popular myth of anti-Labour propaganda: that the gap between rich and poor expanded greatly under Tony [...]]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/22/the-fiction-of-gatsby/feed/ 4 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/21/why-build-more-houses-is-not-the-answer/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/21/why-build-more-houses-is-not-the-answer/#comments Tue, 21 May 2013 21:18:03 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=35085 Fine post by Hopi Sen yesterday that deserves a wider audience. Almost every hard political problem today can be solved, too many people seem to think, by "build more houses".]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/21/why-build-more-houses-is-not-the-answer/feed/ 17 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/20/cameron-on-gay-marriage-should-make-us-proud/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/20/cameron-on-gay-marriage-should-make-us-proud/#comments Mon, 20 May 2013 08:16:46 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=35031 Apologies to Benedict Brogan, deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph, whose excellent morning briefing describes the fuss over gay marriage as “avoidable”. Avoidable how? Then we had Tim Montgomerie and Mary Ann Sieghart on the Today programme saying that David Cameron should have come out fighting for gay marriage. “That’s what Tony Blair would have done,” [...]]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/20/cameron-on-gay-marriage-should-make-us-proud/feed/ 22 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/19/what-focus-groups-say-about-ed-miliband/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/19/what-focus-groups-say-about-ed-miliband/#comments Sun, 19 May 2013 19:29:30 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=35009 If people vote in the general election on 7 May 2015 the way our ComRes opinion poll today suggests, Labour would win a majority of 74 seats. But they probably won’t. So how will public opinion change over the next two years? Here are two schools of thought: Dan Hodges, my fellow zombie Blairite, has devised [...]]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/19/what-focus-groups-say-about-ed-miliband/feed/ 6 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/19/camerons-possibly-winning-position/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/19/camerons-possibly-winning-position/#comments Sun, 19 May 2013 13:57:18 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=34987 My article in The Independent on Sunday today is part of a continuing series explaining why popular attitudes towards Europe might not be such a problem for David Cameron as might be assumed. Since May 2010, when the general election coincided with the start of the euro crisis, most opinion polls, including our ComRes today, have [...]]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/19/camerons-possibly-winning-position/feed/ 3 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/18/clearing-the-battlefield/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/18/clearing-the-battlefield/#comments Sat, 18 May 2013 20:54:48 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=35000 Matthew d’Ancona says David Cameron’s talk is of “clearing the battlefield”. Which is a nice way of saying, “everything looks like a shambles now, but just imagine what it will be like the week after next when all this bad stuff is out of the way”. D’Ancona reports what I had heard, which is that No [...]]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/18/clearing-the-battlefield/feed/ 5 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/18/ukip-surges-to-record-high/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/18/ukip-surges-to-record-high/#comments Sat, 18 May 2013 18:27:26 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=34996 The UK Independence Party is on 19 per cent, the highest share recorded by any pollster, in a ComRes poll for tomorrow's The Independent on Sunday, shared with the Sunday Mirror.]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/18/ukip-surges-to-record-high/feed/ 33 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/18/poll-alert-31/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/18/poll-alert-31/#comments Sat, 18 May 2013 09:27:50 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=34995 We have a ComRes opinion poll in The Independent on Sunday tomorrow, shared with the Sunday Mirror. The results will cause a bit of a stir. As well as asking people how they would vote, and who would be the best prime minister, we asked if people agreed or disagreed with the following: If a referendum were [...]]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/18/poll-alert-31/feed/ 0 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/17/was-an-alien-space-fish-just-filmed-outside-the-space-station/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/17/was-an-alien-space-fish-just-filmed-outside-the-space-station/#comments Fri, 17 May 2013 20:37:03 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=34901 Falling a bit behind in the series of the book, Questions To Which The Answer Is No. This is number 947, asked by Huffington Post (alien fish, pictured). Number 948 was asked by Mary Riddell: Will Ed Miliband be the Doctor Who of politics? A bit baffling, that one (unlike all the others). Will he reverse the polarity of the neutron [...]]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/17/was-an-alien-space-fish-just-filmed-outside-the-space-station/feed/ 0 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/17/economic-history-lesson/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/17/economic-history-lesson/#comments Fri, 17 May 2013 13:14:12 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=34984 Nigel Lawson, Financial Secretary to the Treasury 1979-81 (second from left in picture), told Treasury civil servants at a seminar organised by the Mile End Group two weeks ago (but online only today): There’s a reason why you today can feel confident … Based on the example of what we did in the 1980s, squeezing public [...]]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/17/economic-history-lesson/feed/ 3 http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/15/a-triumph-for-david-cameron/ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/15/a-triumph-for-david-cameron/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 11:02:43 +0000 John Rentoul http://blogs.independent.co.uk/?p=34922 That’s the blog post I would like to write – not because I am a cheerleader for the Prime Minister but because it would be a challenge. But, despite Dan Hodges’ best effort to explain why Ed Miliband has blown his chance (Times, pay wall), it doesn’t seem possible to explain how this week’s EU referendum [...]]]> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/05/15/a-triumph-for-david-cameron/feed/ 13