Tag: Labour
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What’s up with the Sunday Times MRP projection?
All over Twitter today has been discussion of a Sunday Times MRP model which reportedly showed that if an election were held today, Boris Johnson would lose his majority and his seat. It’s a striking result but not totally inconsistent with recent national polls which have shown Labour making gains. It caught my attention, though,…
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Peterloo led eventually to electoral democracy – but there’s one big bit of unfinished business
New evidence shows that it’s the Right that tend to benefit from the UK’s unequal electoral system. The Left is gradually embracing Proportional Representation, but it needs to move faster. This was originally posted as an article for OpenDemocracy: Peterloo led eventually to electoral democracy – but there’s one big bit of unfinished business Today marks…
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Peterloo 200: the path to Proportional Representation
16 August 2019 marks the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre. To commemorate the massacre, I have been working on a report for Make Votes Matter, co-authored with the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform. From the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, through the Chartist and suffrage campaigns, to the rise of the Labour Party, working people have…
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What if UK European Elections were held under the 1994 FPTP system?
The European Elections are the only nationwide UK elections held under a form of Proportional Representation. Admittedly, due to the D’Hondt counting system and small regions, the system isn’t perfectly proportional, but it is a vast improvement on the previous FPTP system, used until 1999. The last European Election to be held under First Past…
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Tactical voting on the basis of the 2014 European Elections
Disclaimer: I am a Labour Party member and will be voting for Labour in May’s European Elections. This blog is not intended to encourage tactical voting but to explore from an academic perspective whether various parties’ claims to be “the main Remain party” in the upcoming European Elections stand up to scrutiny. One of the biggest…
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The Impact of Electoral Systems on Economic Democracy in Developed Democracies
This essay was written for the quantitative methods component of my comparative politics module. A PDF of the essay is available here, R code is available here, and replication data is available here. With the challenges of climate change, globalisation and a backlash against established political and economic institutions, many political commentators have pointed to…
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Labour Should Put Post-16 Education at the Heart of its National Education Service
This article was originally published in Look Left – Oxford University Labour Club‘s termly journal. Education funding has been a hot political issue in recent years, with schools facing a funding crisis and controversial tuition fees being introduced in higher education. Until recently, however, further education has been largely missing from the conversation. Despite bearing…
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How Labour Can Seize The Initiative From The Independent Group
This was originally posted as a HuffPost article: How Labour Can Seize The Initiative From The Independent Group As of Thursday at 4pm, eleven MPs – eight Labour and three Conservative – had left their respective parties to join ‘The Independent Group’, sparking a political crisis for both main parties. I say sparking, but in…
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Why Trade Unions Need to Make Votes Matter
The trade union case for Proportional Representation.
Owen Winter 