Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has vowed to "overturn the rigged system" by putting power and wealth back in the hands of "the people".
In his first major general election speech, he said 8 June's poll was not a "foregone conclusion" and Labour could defy the "Establishment experts"…
Theresa May is hoping to convert the Tories' double digit poll lead into a bigger Commons majority…
The Labour leader looks set to run an anti-establishment campaign, presenting himself as a champion of the powerless against political and business elites.
He attacked the "morally bankrupt" Conservatives who he said would not stand up to tax avoiders and other members of a "gilded elite," who were extracting wealth "from the pockets of ordinary working people".
Labour would "end this racket" and "overturn the rigged system," he told an audience of Labour supporters in London.
He also said Labour was the only party that would "focus on the kind of country we want to have after Brexit" - dismissing Mrs May's election campaign as an "ego trip about her own failing leadership".
And he insisted all of Labour's policies, including an increase in corporation tax for big business and more money for carers and a £10 an hour minimum wage, were fully costed…
His message was uncompromising. Jeremy Corbyn attacked targets from what he called the ruling elite. In doing so, he was trying to recapture the energy and rhetoric which enabled him to win not one, but two, Labour leadership contests.
He said a future Labour government wouldn't play by the rules and denounced his Conservative opponents as morally bankrupt. Butthe City, the media and business people were also in his sights - it created dividing lines not just with his current political opponents but with his party's New Labour past…
Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed. Use the search box to look for country names or concept labels attached to each entry.
Just The Facts! 2nd editionis a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on May's exam.
Plagairism, Jo Tuckman reports in The Guardian, is a tradition in Mexican campaigning. The Internet exposes the tradition to a larger audience. It makes me wonder what the rest of campaigning is like.
BTW, did you know there are legislative and gubernatorial elections in Mexico next month?
Politics, so the saying goes, is show business for ugly people. But in Mexico, the current mid-term election campaign is more like the early rounds of a Saturday evening TV talent show.
Rival parties have released a string of excruciating campaign videos based on recent pop hits and golden oldies, with little apparent concern for the sensibilities of their viewers – or niceties of copyright law.
The phenomenon is not new but seems particularly pronounced in the runup to the 7 June vote to choose federal deputies, state governors and local officials – a vote which is taking place amid general gloom about the country’s extreme violence, entrenched corruption and mediocre economic performance.
One campaign features congressional candidate Antonio Tarek Abdalá awkwardly bopping along to a version of Pharrell Williams’s phenomenal global hit Happy…
Tarek is standing for the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, in the district around the town of Cosamaloapan in the state of Veracruz…
Another PRI candidate, Manuel Pozo, chose a Queen classic to back his bid to become mayor of Querétaro. The video featured the candidate pumping his fist to the tune of We Will Rock You and included lyrics such as “Peace for the children, you are the best”. Queen’s manager, Jim Beach, told the Guardian in an email that no consent was given to use the song on the video – which has now been taken down from the internet.
Xavier Domínguez, the Catalan chairman of the political advertising agency Wish & Win… [said] “Plagiarism is a tradition here, and nobody is ever sanctioned for it… In a country where human rights are violated all the time, nobody is going to bother about copyright.”
Raúl García, who is running for federal deputy in the northern city of Ciudad Júarez for the National Action Party, or PAN, has based his campaign to a raunchy track originally sung by a Colombian performer known as Mr Black. In place of the suggestive lyrics and scantily clad dancers featured in the original video, the campaign song features a wholesome young woman in jeans doing a dance routine that García told Radio Fórmula was designed to promote exercise.
Diego Leyva, a congressional candidate for the PAN in the state of Guanajuato, took the dancing component to an extreme in his version of Yo Soy Mortal (I Am Mortal) – a song from the trival dance subgenre. Leyva’s video copies the original almost shot for shot…
Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed. Use the search box to look for country names or concept labels attached to each entry.
Just The Facts!is a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on the big exam.
Amazon's customers gave this book a 5-star rating, but you can't get it from them anymore. (And I don't know why not.)
If you're extravagant or desperate, you can order The Impatience Special (Express mail, mostly next day delivery, for $32.00). Just scroll down on the ordering page.
If you're extravagant or desperate, you can order The Impatience Special (Express mail, mostly next day delivery, for $39.00). Just scroll down on the ordering page.
No party emerged from the 2010 election with a majority, so the largest, the Conservatives, had to form a coalition with the third-largest, the centrist Liberal Democrats. The result of the general election on May 7th could be even more finely balanced. The Tories and the Labour Party are neck-and-neck in polls. The Liberal Democrats have been badly burned by the compromises they have had to make as a junior coalition partner: after winning 23% of the overall vote in 2010, the party reached a new low of 5% in a YouGov poll published on March 3rd…
The Lib Dems are bracing themselves for the loss of many of their 56 seats in the House of Commons. The party’s footholds in the north of England and Scotland will probably crumble, so unpopular is its deal with the Conservatives in those left-leaning parts. But it is fighting hard in southern England, knowing there is a big difference between holding on to, say, 30 seats and salvaging half that number. The more seats the party holds, the more useful it is as a coalition partner for Labour or the Tories.
Its fate will be decided largely among the rolling hills of south-west England…
Campaigns defined by local politics will probably return Lib Dem MPs. Those defined by the choice between a Tory-led government and a Labour-led one will probably see the Conservatives prevail…
The Tories’… task is to convince voters that the battle is not entirely parochial, but is also about the government of Britain. David Cameron, much the most popular of the party leaders, will tour the region in the run-up to the election…
The Liberal Democrats are confident that they can hang on in the south-west nonetheless. Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system has long punished them for having geographically dispersed voters. But their popularity has fallen disproportionately in seats they did not win in 2010, so their support—though much smaller—is now more efficiently distributed…
Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed. Use the search box to look for country names or concept labels attached to each entry.
Just The Facts! is a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on May's exam.
Teaching (and learning) comparative government and politics is a complex and demanding task. We can all use all the help we can get. This cyber place is somewhere to facilitate helpful interactions.
Just The Facts! 2nd edition is a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on May's exam.
