Author Archives: Paul Evans

Paul is a London-based blogger with a mixed track-record over at Never Trust a Hippy and a few other places. He usually writes about representative democracy and decentralisation. Follow him at www.twitter.com/paul0evans if you usually do that kind of thing.

Proud of Labour. Er …. sort of…

08Jun09 – 09:03

One thread that keeps popping up in the context of Labour's trashing last night is the disappointment a lot of Labour's voters feel with the party.
There is no question that Labour MPs - while not being alone in the petty (and sometimes, not-so-petty) chiselling that has gone on, are taking a disproportionately high share of [...]

Posted in Labour | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Join the debate on Debategraph

07Jun09 – 13:08

It'll take you about ten minutes to get your head around this one - well worth a try:

Posted in Labour | Tagged | Comments (5)

How Labour can get out of this mess and do everyone else a favour

07Jun09 – 03:37

Picking up the optimistic theme of the previous post here by Dave Cole, I think that there is...

a cross-party consensus in support of political decentralisation;
an opportunity to challenge and largely replace the political caste that have stood by and allowed the power of Parliament to wither;
a widespread view that politics needs to be renewed, that [...]

Posted in Democracy, Political parties | Tagged | Comments (0)

Wholesale reselections are needed …. if the public really want them

20May09 – 08:01

Today, I've set up a website called Reselect.org with advice and support from the Spectator's Martin Bright and Slugger O'Toole's Mick Fealty and Sunny at Liberal Conspiracy among others. I'd like to get some Tory and Lib-Dem bloggers involved as well because I think this is an issue that effects all of the parties.
This site [...]

Posted in Political parties | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Hypocrisy of the highest order

19May09 – 11:18

That would be from the Taxpayers' Alliance. After all, no pressure group expends more energy (and expensive resources) demanding transparency from others.
In order to legitimise their ludicrous claim to somehow represent taxpayers, the Taxpayers' Alliance takes all steps to cover up it's donor list and ensure that we have little idea of where they get [...]

Posted in Libertarians | Tagged | Comments (0)

Under our noses

15May09 – 09:24

One of the lessons of Mancur Olson's 'Logic of Collective Action' is that of 'forgotten groups' - the fate of those that don't have the resources to get stuck into a battle of wills over a particular area of public policy.
You can have a policy area in which there are a number of options. At [...]

Posted in Public Service Broadcasting, Trades unionism | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Andrew Gilligan – sockpuppeteer

30Apr09 – 10:37

Andrew Gilligan in OCTOPUPPET: a short film about sock-puppets from Tim Ireland on Vimeo.
There's a fair bit of background to this on Tim's site.

Posted in Fact-checking, Newspapers | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Feck! Etc

29Apr09 – 19:46

Ireland is thinking of draconian blasphemy laws.

Posted in God botherers | Tagged , | Comments (0)