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A watershed moment

Thursday 23rd June 2016 – somewhere in south-west London. There, I’ve done it! After forty-eight years of being eligible to vote in the British electoral system without ever having voting for anybody or anything, this morning I nipped along to my local bowls and sporting club, queued up and [...]

June 23, 2016 // 0 Comments

All over bar the shouting

Last night I watched the BBC big EU Referendum set piece The Great Debate at 8.00pm on BBC1, featuring David Dimbleby as host; a cast of about 8,000 voters in the audience at Wembley Arena; and Boris Johnson, Labour MP Gisela Stuart and Tory minister Andrea Leadsom representing ‘Leave’ and Scot [...]

June 22, 2016 // 0 Comments

And so to the final straight …

Last night, staying with my aged father on the south coast, I tuned in to watch the BBC1’s Question Time EU Referendum live ‘Special’ at 6.45pm in which Prime Minister David Cameron stood on a studio podium and faced an audience of questioners under the stewardship of veteran presenter David [...]

June 20, 2016 // 0 Comments

What’s going on? (as Marvin Gaye once sang)

The awful, tragic, events of yesterday in Birstall, West Yorkshire – when Labour MP for Batley and Spen Jo Cox was killed by a constituent in the street – quite rightly caused all other matters of state and nation to be pushed aside from public attention. Times and incidents like this, such the [...]

June 17, 2016 // 0 Comments

EU Referendum-watch (again)

With just over a week to go to the vote on the EU Referendum there is a certain inevitability about a number of aspects. Both sides are now frenetically reviewing their campaign strategies on a daily basis and accordingly deploying different spokespeople peddling different ‘stories’ in order to [...]

June 14, 2016 // 0 Comments

Same old, same old

For some reason I thought  of the European Championships in Italy  in 1980: riots in the park and England going out fecklessly. After a few tournaments which went benignly in terms of violence since 1998, when there was again trouble in Marseilles, I saw the same dismal scenes of cafes trashed, [...]

June 12, 2016 // 0 Comments

EU Referendum-watch

My overnight (Saturday into Sunday) trawl of the newspaper websites has revealed reports that Labour MP Chuka Umunna is claiming that if the Referendum outcome is a Brexit victory it will be a win for Far Right ‘dog whistle’ politics; that the latest polls show that the two opposing campaigns [...]

June 12, 2016 // 0 Comments

Rumbling on …

Regular readers of this esteemed organ will be aware that we are currently covering the UK’s EU Referendum campaign almost daily in our own quaint fashion – i.e. commenting upon developments, not reporting upon them – not least because the one ‘fact’ being asserted by politicians [...]

June 11, 2016 // 0 Comments

Not much longer to go now …

Last night at 7.30pm I tuned to BBC1 to see another of Andrew Neil’s interviews with the protagonists in the EU Referendum campaign – this time with Remain’s George Osborne. Now inside the last fortnight before 23rd June Mr Neil has taken upon himself the unenviable task of challenge the [...]

June 9, 2016 // 0 Comments

Power and democracy

Observing developments in the forthcoming US Presidential Election on top of those in Britain since 2015 (the Coalition Government, the 2015 General Election and now the EU Referendum) there certainly seems to be something in the theory that there is a growing ‘disconnect’ between ordinary [...]

June 7, 2016 // 0 Comments

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