Forgive me for a moment: for the first time I can think of in this blog I’m going to be political. I’ll try to be brief.
It’s not especially a secret that I’m a leftie. I’ve not talked about it much here, but I suspect you could decode it from my posts, and especially via Twitter. So it won’t come as much of a surprise that in the upcoming general election I’m backing Labour.
As the election looms it’s looking increasingly likely from the opinion polls that the UK will get a hung parliament on Thursday. Accordingly the Queen would invite Gordon Brown, as the incumbent Prime Minister, to form the next government. It’s likely that Mr Brown would then approach the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg in an attempt to form some kind of anti-Tory coalition government. For a moment I’m going to assume this happens — that the Liberal Democrats would rather form a coalition with the Labour Party than the Conservative party.
It struck me the other day while listening to Andrew Pierce and Kevin Maguire talking about the Labour leadership on the radi0, that there’s still a way the Labour Party can come out of this election (for a definition of “this” see below) with a strong mandate to run the country for another 5 years. Let me explain. [read more]