Eagle Eye
Sunday reading
To try to impress the new editor I have three articles in The Independent on Sunday today.
In the political column I suggest that the local election results on Thursday were not good enough to give Labour any confidence of winning a majority at the next general election.
This is partly on the grounds that the UKIP [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Sunday, 5 May 2013 at 8:03 pm
Adonis on UKIP, Clegg and Heathrow
Andrew Adonis has been interviewed by The Times today (pay wall). Full of good stuff, as ever, including:
You deal with UKIP not by abusing its leaders but by tackling the causes of its protest vote: too few good jobs, a crisis of youth inactivity and a weak, remote government with no plans, which can’t get [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Saturday, 4 May 2013 at 6:03 pm
Labour lost more votes than Tories as UKIP surged
Mark Pack, the excellent Lib Dem blogger, pointed this out yesterday, but it took a while for me to make sense of the figures. He compared the BBC’s Projected National Share of the vote for this week’s local elections with last year’s local elections.*
_________ 2012 2013 Change
Conservative 31% 25% -6
Labour [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Saturday, 4 May 2013 at 4:23 pm
An open letter to Melanie Phillips
The Daily Mail columnist feels that conservative thinkers are being stifled by a deadening left-wing consensus. I beg to differ…
By C J Schuler | Battle of Ideas, Eagle Eye | Saturday, 4 May 2013 at 1:11 pm
Leadership, New York Times style
It has slowly dawned on Americans that their system of government has a blocking minority in the Senate, in that a three-fifths majority is needed to overcome a filibuster (talking until time runs out and a bill falls). This has produced a lot of displacement commentary, in the form of criticisms of Barack Obama for [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Friday, 3 May 2013 at 10:44 pm
Local elections: Labour didn’t do enough to win in 2015
What we do not know about yesterday’s local elections is how many UKIP voters will go, or go back, to the Conservatives when they are warned that a vote for Nigel Farage will let Ed Miliband into Downing Street.
But we can say this much. The early BBC estimates for the change in vote share in [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Friday, 3 May 2013 at 2:14 pm
“Machines for rushing to judgement”
Ben Broadbent, member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England and former Goldman Sachs economist, gave a fine talk on “forecast errors” at the Mile End Group at Queen Mary, University of London, last night. The text has lots of great graphs in it, including this one of difference between the MPC’s [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Thursday, 2 May 2013 at 2:28 pm
The hedge fund con explained
In 2008 the hedge fund industry lost more money than all the profits it had generated during the prior 10 years. If you don’t think that’s a con, by all means ring up your pension manager and tell him to divert more of your nest egg to these great value money managers
By Ben Chu | Eagle Eye, Econoblog | Thursday, 2 May 2013 at 1:46 pm
“Did MI6 plot against UKIP?”
Number 938 in my series of Questions To Which The Answer Is No (only £6.14 to download the e-book) was asked yesterday by Douglas Murray at Spectator blogs. I particularly enjoyed Murray’s decorative touch: “Important to stress that it is not conspiracy theory.”
The question was originally asked by Norman Tebbit in 2001, in the form, [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Wednesday, 1 May 2013 at 4:17 pm
The Definition of Blairism
I fear that, in my article for The Independent on Sunday, I broke a rule that I expect my students to observe: first, define your terms. I said that most MPs were Blairites, but my definition of Blairism was inadequate:
The Blairite party’s policies, as well as choice-driven public service reform, include being on the side [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Tuesday, 30 April 2013 at 6:01 pm
Most viewed
|
|
Latest from Independent journalists on Twitter