CentreRight

Re: Five liberal myths

Here's my suggestion:

"Clamping down on [something unpleasant] will only drive it underground"

The myth is in the implication that driving unpleasantness underground is necessarily a bad thing

Re: Extra Daylight Savings is a no-brainer

Alan is certainly right to say this is a good idea, but one word of warning:

I have come across some people – really quite clever people – who think this would create an additional hour of daylight, as opposed to its mere reallocation.

This might seem hard to believe, but we wouldn't want politicians making promises they can't deliver!

Michigan matters on Tuesday

On to South Carolina!

Or so say the winners and losers of the New Hampshire primary. But this year's a little different.

In Michigan, local Republicans and Democrats have moved their primaries forward in order to steal a march on the Palmetto State. National party HQs were not impressed, penalising the Michiganders by cutting the state delegation to the respective party conventions: by half in the case of the Republicans; to zero in the case of the Democrats.

As a result the Democrat primary is a non-contest, with all the main candidates (apart from Hillary Clinton) taking their names off the ballot. The Republican race still matters, with Mitt Romney, John McCain and Mike Huckabee all in contention (in that order).

McCain and Huckabee can afford to lose, but not Romney. This is his native state and he's spent a lot of money there. If he doesn't win, he might as well save his cash and pull out out the race. That would be a good result for the GOP which has a surfeit of candidates. With any luck, Saturday's South Carolina primary will also thin out the field by seeing off Fred Thompson who needs a good result to remain viable.

Oh, the excitement!

*Posted by Tim on behalf of Peter Franklin*

For the most part, this blog ought to be about British politics -- but who cares about all that when we’ve got the gripping daily drama of the US primaries? Obviously, it helps if like me you’re a political anorak, but even so who can resist the twists and turns of the Presidential race?

It makes you wish we had something similar on this side of the pond. Just imagine: “…and now we go over to Truro for the results of the Cornish caucus.”

Obviously we’d need to arrange things so as not to give the early-voting areas undue influence over the whole process. We certainly wouldn’t want the British equivalents of Iowa and New Hampshire effectively picking our party leaders.

Incidentally, what are the British equivalents of Iowa and New Hampshire? For the former, somewhere flat and agricultural – Norfolk perhaps. As for New Hampshire, old Hampshire doesn’t seem to fit.