Author: Dave Cross

Polite Discourse

So today was the day that I was called a “sack of shit” by one of the UK’s most popular political bloggers. It was all pretty silly really. I didn’t even really disagree with what he had written. I just pointed out that his blog entry had two completely unattributed quotations. It’s Iain’s blog, of… Continue reading Polite Discourse

Blog Nation 2010

Yesterday, I was at Liberal Conspiracy’s Blog Nation 2010 conference. This was a chance for left liberal bloggers to get together and discuss strategies we can adopt now that we find ourselves in opposition (or a minority partner in the coalition government). Sunny has already blogged his thoughts on how the conference went. He asked… Continue reading Blog Nation 2010

On the Intelligence of MPs

It’s easy to make cheap cracks about how stupid MPs are. The problem is that many of them seem determined to do nothing at all to counter this impression. Indeed, they often seem keen to reinforce it. David Tredinnick (Con, Bosworth) is a particularly good example. He is a proponent of “complementary and alternative” medicine.… Continue reading On the Intelligence of MPs

Iain Dale Talks Balls

Iain Dale has some new and interesting information about Labour Party leadership contender, Ed Balls. Apparently whilst he was at Oxford in the  80s, Balls was a member of the Conservative Association there. Except, of course, the news isn’t as new or interesting as Dale would have you believe. Dale quotes from an article in… Continue reading Iain Dale Talks Balls

Killing Maggie

It’s twenty years since she left office, but Tories still don’t understand the depth of the hatred that Maggie Thatcher engendered in a large proportion of the population. Amongst my group of friends we had a agreement that any of us who got within striking distance of her would do our best to do her… Continue reading Killing Maggie

BBC Radio Streams

I’ve just written this over on my BBC Radio Streams page: I’ve got email from a couple of people saying that the Real Audio radio streams were finally turned off overnight. This means that the few links left on these pages (and any links that you have saved from earlier versions of this page) will… Continue reading BBC Radio Streams

Programme for Government

Our new coalition government has released full details of its five year programme. They’ve even produced a web site that contains all of the information (although currently it seems a little broken and is just presenting a page where you can download a PDF). I thought it was worth digging into it a bit to… Continue reading Programme for Government

Unelected Prime Ministers

Over the last few days, there’s been a lot of nonsense talked about “unelected Prime Ministers”. It started off as scaremongering by the Murdoch press, but it soon started to be repeated by Tory supporters like Iain Dale. I’ve even heard people like Michael Gove and William Hague use the phrase in interviews. Of course… Continue reading Unelected Prime Ministers

Don’t Talk To Me About Football

There’s a football World Cup starting in the next few weeks. When domestic football competitions are taking place, it’s usually simple enough to avoid getting drawn into conversations about them, but for some reason the World Cup sends a large percentage of the population mad and they start to believe that everyone is interested in… Continue reading Don’t Talk To Me About Football