Politics

By Nathan Lee, TLE Correspondent  Police targeted, stores looted and havoc wreaked across the streets of Baltimore. The past week has been a mass of ugly pictures in Maryland as footage emerge from riots that broke out after the funeral of Freddie Gray, 25, who died after suffering a spinal injury in police custody. Like the London riots, citizen journalism has played a prominent role in conveying the events which seems to have humanised the uprising. Subsequent media responses have been...

By Ivan McKeever, CEO SwitchMyBusiness.com It is a political cliché that if every one of Britain’s 5.2 million small and micro firms were each helped to create one job, we would wipe out our unemployment problem. But what do those parties seeking our votes offer beyond tempting rhetoric at election time? A survey for SwitchMyBusiness.com, an energy compare and switch service for small businesses, revealed 93 per cent of small business owners want drastic change from the next Government. And...

By Pieter Cranenbroek As Owen Jones has noted, the Tory election campaign has proved far from a Machiavellian plan to win the election. The Conservatives’ personal attacks on Labour leader Ed Miliband have backfired and they are openly mocked for making silly blank cheque promises. Good news for Labour, except there is one problem: Labour is still more or less tied with the Tories. Many blame Miliband’s persona for this but Labour’s real problem is its inability to influence the...

By Nathan Lee, TLE Correspondent  The NUS is set to reveal a national advertising campaign targeted at MPs who voted to increase student fees, with billboards across Sheffield, Manchester and London from Thursday 23rd April. Dubbed 'the 2010 pledge breakers' the advertisement attacks MPs who pledged to scrap tuition fees before voting for the increase. Prominent locations in London Victoria, Sheffield Central and Manchester Piccadilly have been selected with the billboards being erected overnight tonight to be up for the...

By James Emslie We're off. Another scramble to be Britain's most powerful man. This time round, we are faced with quite a choice, largely because we haven't got one. A power sharing deal between the Conservatives and UKIP? An 11th hour Lib/Lab covenant? Labour buoyed up by Alex and his band of Scottish Nationals with help from what remains of Cleggmania? The potential combinations, mergers and alliances is all MP's, pollsters and theorists can think about these days. Cabinet ministers,...

By Nathan Lee, TLE Correspondent  If the outcome of the 2015 General Election was left up to social media to decide, Facebook users would vote for a right-wing coalition and Twitter a left-wing coalition. That is according to new research by 72Point which calculates the outcome of the election based on Facebook likes and Twitter followers. The study found that if Facebook likes were votes in this year’s General Election the result would be a Conservative/ UKIP coalition, but if votes...

By Jacob Flannery Questions over why young people don't vote have become a customary part of the run-up to the General Election. "People fought and died to get the right to vote and I would encourage anyone at the age of voting to use their vote" says Emma McClarkin, Conservative MEP for the East Midlands region. Yet with less than half of those between the ages of 18 and 24 turning out to vote in the last General Election, it is a plea that...

“Spain is different” was a slogan composed by Spanish minister Manuel Fraga in the 1960s to persuade the first planeloads of tourists to visit the sun-kissed nation. Spain at the time was under the rule Franco, a former ally of Hitler and Mussolini who won power with their help in a bloody civil war and cemented his grip on it for the next four decades through brutal repression of political opponents. While Britain enjoyed the swinging sixties and French students...

By Jack Peat, Editor of The London Economic I'm not a betting man, but if I were I'd put half my mortgage on a Tory minority in this year’s General Election. I'd put the other half on a Tory majority hoping that a party I despise might turn my modest flat into a mansion with 5/1 returns. It’ll never happen. The bookies, like the pollsters, are adamant that ‘No Overall Majority’ is the most likely outcome come May, with a...