Silly me for thinking about the next election.
"A whopping majority" that derives not from love of Labour, but from hatred of the Tories and SNP. And from massive vote-splitting on the Right. It's a majority built on a foundation of sand. And might well get knocked away in 2029.
The problem: Biden falling out of the contest at this point would cause multiple people to try for the nomination. Which would turn the Democratic Party convention in August into a brokered convention, rather than a showpiece for the candidate. In short, ...
As always, Northern Ireland is a case of letting sleeping dogs lie. Reunification will eventually happen sometime this century, but it benefits no-one for Starmer to go there, so long as the situation is peaceful.
Spain will block Scottish entry.
It's fairly safe to suggest that a giant section of the Tory base has run off to the right-wing nutters at Reform. One imagines that the Tories are frantically trying to lure those people back.
Thinking back twenty years or more... no-one back then went around asserting that Georgina Beyer was a man. Her existence was quite happily tolerated.
From 1950 to 1997, the only British Labour leader to win an election was Harold Wilson. So what?
An English Parliament would be a rival House of Commons - England is 84 percent of the UK population.
"Mixed feelings"? The 1984-1993 economic reforms were evil. No mixed feelings about that. Quite apart from the obvious point: Hipkins has no values.
A world where all List MPs live in Wellington is a world where half of Parliament is made up of Wellingtonians. That's not exactly a representative Parliament, is it? A List MP from outside Wellington ought to get the allowance too.
National's Michael Woodhouse was a Dunedin-based List MP for years. Katherine Rich before him. He'd never win the electorate, of course, but him being a list MP based out of Dunedin provided the city with extra representation that wasn't just Labour. List ...
North Otago is not as conservative as Rural Southland. Rural Southland is hard-right conservative. North Otago, assuming you include Oamaru, is actually pretty close to a national bellwether. Taking out Oamaru still leaves North Otago as moderately blue - ...
The President has veto power.
Couldn't care less about liberalism. Social democracy, or (god forbid) democratic socialism is the reason the New Zealand Labour Party exists.
Winston Peters could have legitimately opted for Bill English in 2017, but he didn't. He could not have legitimately opted for Chris Hipkins in 2023.
They got 35% in 1993 and 34% in 1996.
National has nothing against the Maori language. They simply find it a handy tool to inflict culture war on the country, as a distraction from class war.
National and ACT are supremely effective representatives of class interest (New Zealand First doesn't care). Of course they'd repeal the FPAs ASAP. If Labour were as effective at representing class interest, they wouldn't have waited until the last year of...
We're happy enough to help defend Australia - but that's largely moot, since Australia is not under any threat whatsoever. The real threat to be avoided is Australia dragging us into one of Washington's imperial projects.
I despise the incoming government as much as anyone... but can we please criticise them without the classist nonsense about Workingmen's Clubs? Not least because, you know, the sort of employment law or tax policy envisaged by a 1970s Workingmen's Club ...
First thought on the new cabinet: there's only one South Islander (Doocey) in the entire bunch (Simmonds and Patterson are outside cabinet, making it 3/28 across the entire ministry). 1/20 is rather shitty representation when you make up a quarter of the ...
I voted Labour, and I can assure you that that would be signing the party's electoral death warrant in 2026 (seriously, it would make 2023 look like 2020). If there's no deal, there will have to be another election in 2024.
I remember the (justified) pushing of David Cunliffe in 2014. 2023 was worse, in electorate terms, than 2014, and yet people are still willing to tolerate Mr Captains Call. The fact that Hipkins is not being held accountable for this disaster - and the ...
The other example is 1912, a change of government from Liberal to Reform in the middle of a term, without an election. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1911_New_Zealand_general_election
Dunedin is an interesting one. The Dunedin electorate saw vast numbers of Green voters party voting Green and electorate voting Labour. So Rachel Brooking emerged with a comfortable majority. In fact, National's result was so poor that it actually looks ...
Once a Labour electorate goes Green, it's damned hard for Labour to get it back - Wellington Central is probably gone for good, so far as Labour is concerned, though they might have a shot at Rongotai in future. This also creates an interesting issue for ...
Taieri improving now that South Dunedin is coming in. A bit depressing in that the National candidate did not actually campaign.
It's actually more that the markets do not actually believe the libertarian nonsense that cutting taxes will increase revenue. What happened with Liz Truss is roughly as follows: Surprise announcement of giant tax cuts. Markets realise this will create a ...
A couple of fundamental differences: Muldoon ran the best election campaign ever seen in New Zealand, capped by his vast superannuation bribe. National is not running an amazing campaign, and rather than a flagship policy, literally runs on not being ...
This is not the NZ First of 2017. This is Winston running as a full conspiracy theorist. National being held hostage by both Seymour and Winston would be an utterly terrifying sight.
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