Just one term after the Ardern landslide in 2020, it has caught New Zealand leftists off guard. But history suggests they should have expected it.
If the Party obtained the councillors in those areas where their vote merited it, it would mean more Tory representatives on the ground, and voters seeing them serving their communities.
The Government’s failure to do anything about London’s housing crisis means the capital is now starting to export voters into its wide commuter belt.
The upside of a new cross-party appointments process would be distance from the government of the day. The downside is the danger of boiling it down to a lowest common denominator.
Sunak will hope he is spared a crisis, even if the electoral politics of it could be advantageous.
He scores better than Starmer in the best Prime Minister stakes, and Labour’s position looks less entrenched than during the mid-1990s – but other good news is very hard to find.
With 16 years of opposition experience on the Council, I have some idea of how to hold an administration to account and I will continue to do this over this council term.
The ability to put politics aside and deprioritise it is fundamentally good. Not caring about politics is a luxury usually reserved for people in well-run democracies.
“We are talking about a hypothetical situation that may or may not happen in a couple of years time,” says Cooper.
After nine years in government and three prime ministers, the right gave up on making a positive case – and paid the price at the ballot box.
As Labor and the Coalition struggle to land blows on each other, disenchanted voters are hungry for an alternative.
There could be constituencies where the majority is smaller than the numbers turned away.
The police in Tower Hamlets insist they are failing to prevent the practice, due to advice from… the Electoral Commission.
Local associations want to be able to select parliamentary candidates as early as possible. I completely agree. Therefore, I am delighted to announce that the first tranche of constituencies is being advertised today.