Introduction The latest Lord Ashcroft poll or Northern Ireland was published on the 11th September. The results agrees closely with previous polls by Lord Aschroft, Delta Poll and Lucid Talk. Support for a United Ireland (UI) remains at around 50% and for the backstop around 60%. Historically support for a UI had run at around… Read more
Category:
Ireland
Covering Ireland both North and South
A repeat of the Turmoil of 1914-1922?
The Constitutional Crisis of 1914 History, as it is taught in British schools, remembers 1914 as a the year WWI started. WWI was of course a horrific event, but less is remembered of the political turmoil at the time. As Robert Saunders writes in “Breaking the parliamentary machine”: lessons of the 1914 crisis: The crisis… Read more
Is No Deal is vastly Under Priced and will the Johnson Government Ditch the Backstop?
Introduction The Johnson premiership has begun. The tortuously negotiated Withdrawal Agreement (WA) is hated by the new government. There are contradictory signals, and it is unsure what changes could be made to make the WA acceptable to HMG. We seem to have moved from a time limit on the Backstop to no Backstop. Even if… Read more
And the New Leader of the Tory Party is: Boris Johnson
Introduction Even the most ardent Brexiters concede that things are not going very well. This however is a chronicle of a failure foretold. Once Brexit crystallized into solid form it was clear that any Brexit would leave the UK in a worse place than before. My own thinking pre-referendum was most informed by J C… Read more
The Atlas of Economic Complexity and UK and Irish Exports over the past decade
Introduction Previously the MIT based Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC) has featured in PP posts, but another resource (Harvard), the Atlas of Economic Complexity, (AEC) has not. It is a useful trade resource and well worth exploring as it seems to have more visualisation options than the OEC. Much of the underlying data is the… Read more
Lessons from the European parliament election – a Scottish border?
Britain The 2019 European Parliament election results for Britain are shown in Fig. 1. As Richard Murphy discusses in The false narrative of Brexit Party success, this superficially looks a spectacular win for the Brexit party, but essentially they have cannabalised the UKIP seats and added five more. All but one of these have… Read more
Westminster: Most Similar Country Ireland? – A new EU Regional Productivity Analysis
Introduction An interesting paper “The big European sort? The diverging fortunes of Europe’s regions” has been published by the Centre for European Reform (CER). Such papers are of great interest at PP. The paper analyses regional productivity. As a single metric productivity is one of the best, but as Charles Adams says, in order to… Read more
The European Elections: the UK Electoral Map and Parties
Introduction Previous posts discussed the UK European election voting systems and the make up of the European Parliament. Here the UK situation is discussed, in terms of constituencies and parties. Parties that have been included have a likelihood (or a decent possibility) of gaining seats in the election. The Constituencies Figure 1 from Democratic… Read more
Lessons from the Local Election results
English Results The English election results were disastrous for the Tories, loosing 1,334 seats. Expectation management was that they may loose 1000 seats, which was considered the worse case scenario. UKIP also had a terrible night, loosing 145 seats. The main beneficiaries were the Lib Dems gaining 703 seats, the Greens 194 seats and… Read more
15 : 20 Vision and Brexit- have things panned out as expected?
During the Brexit referendum, before the Progressive Pulse site was set up, many of my comments were on Prof Richard Murphy’s TRUK site. This was my thinking on the time-line and evolving predictions for the future. What I Got Right. The Referendum would result in a Leave victory. The Referendum was a horror show, with… Read more