When, a little over eighteen months ago, I moved from Brighton to Cardiff, I decided that I wouldn’t comment on Brighton and Hove politics any more; for all the attachements and friendships formed in my time as a Labour activist and council candidate in the city, the time had come to move on. However, I […]
Tag Archives: Brighton
Like, I would imagine, every single other Labour Party member, I have just received an email containing a Christmas message from Jeremy Corbyn. It is difficult to imagine a more complacent document; it almost appears to have issued from a parallel universe. Corbyn writes about how the Labour Party has signed more new members in […]
Faced with an unprecedented assault on local government finances, the Lewisham branch of Momentum is reported to have called on the Labour council in the borough to set a “no-cuts” – i.e. an illegal – budget. It’s an issue that was bound to come to the surface after Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in Labour leadership election […]
You could be forgiven for regarding Brighton’s northern suburbs as prime UKIP territory. In Patcham, with its neat 1930s semis, you’re a world away from the city centre where the Festival is in full swing. It’s a suburb whose apparent prosperity hides the fact that it has been hit hard by austerity: many of its […]
The decision of Brighton and Hove’s ruling Green administration to hold a referendum on a 4.75% Council Tax increase is being hailed by many – most of all outside Brighton – as a bold blow against austerity. It is nothing of the sort. By failing in its duty to seat a budget and instead to […]
Working as a transport policy-maker in Whitehall and Brussels over many years, I saw some calamitous transport policy decisions. However, it is difficult to think of any – with the possible exception of HS2 – that, in terms of counter-productivity, irrationality and sheer political perverseness, tick quite as many boxes as last night’s vote by […]
I blogged a piece earlier today about the report in the Brighton Argus that the Brighton and Hove Green Group of councillors has called in mediators to resolve differences between Group members – and I argued that this was an essentially political failure, brought about by trying to operate without rigid structures; and that the […]
For someone of my generation – I voted for the first time in 1979, having turned eighteen a few weeks before the election – there is no more potent sign of political failure than rubbish piling in the streets. Not just because of the immediate issue – a political structure failing to deliver the essentials […]
Twice in the last 24 hours I have been involved in an incident while cycling from my home in Patcham in the Brighton suburbs to the town centre. In both cases I could have been seriously injured – the first time I got away unscathed, the second time I came off the bike but somehow […]
The newly selected Conservative candidate for Brighton Pavilion, Clarence Mitchell, has not got off to the most auspicious of starts. This afternoon he tweeted a picture a photo of Brighton beach, taken from his hotel window at the Grand Hotel: It’s a curious tweet, and suggests a certain lack of knowledge of the city’s politics: […]
Notes from a Broken Society 