Mike Holden - Politics blogs

There is a constitutional and legal crisis about to break in the US any day now, and one of several stories breaking yesterday will appear in future history books as a pivotal moment that changed America forever. We just don't know yet which one it will be. Manoeuvres are underway by Donald Trump and his political and media allies to systematically dismantle the norms of US politics. It's very likely that the US political landscape will look dramatically different in one of two ways in coming weeks or months - either Special Investigator Robert Mueller will begin legal proceedings against the President of the United States for colluding with Russia to rig the Presidential election, or Donald Trump and congress will succeed in removing Mueller from the investigation, along with any trace of checks and balances preventing the US from becoming a de facto dictatorship. Neither of these outcomes can do anything other than hugely harm the UK/US "special relationship" a...

You may have noticed there’s been a lot of news in 2017. But UK news headlines have been swamped by Brexit and Trump, two stories straddling the news landscape like the Petronas Twin Towers. But like Kuala Lumpur itself, tucked away beneath the behemoths there are plenty of smaller and more interesting places to be found.  So journalist Michael Moran (@TheMichaelMoran) plus myself and a few like-minded souls have focussed on the quirkier side of the news this year, in a competitive search for #HeadineOfTheDay material which we exchange on Twitter (Michael acts as chief gatekeeper and distributor). Clickbait is a staple of online news but a good headline has always been used to grab a reader’s interest. There’s little point in carefully crafting an elegant and revealing article, then putting “ Man Does Thing ” in 100pt bold letters at the top – the attention (and more importantly the quantity) of readers depends on a good headline.  Sometimes the story turns out...

In a little over 24 hours we will discover if the Good People of Alabama will vote into senate Roy Moor, a man who by his own admission dated girls as young as 14, was reportedly banned from the local mall for “badgering” young girls, thinks Muslims should be banned from public office, and thinks the US was a better place for the American family when that family could keep slaves. Or whether they’ll support Doug Jones, a man who can list among his achievements prosecuting two members of the Ku Klux Klan for their involvement in bombing a church. The fact that there is even something to discuss about this choice says much about the place to which Donald Trump’s election and time in office have dragged political opinion among some of the American voting public. When the many allegations surfaced of his affairs with young girls, the news initially hurt Roy Moore’s chances of victory severely. But his supporters in Alabama, the GOP, and the White House, fought back, to the point where...

Some commentators are saying the deal* signed today with the EU about sufficient progress should be viewed as a victory for Leavers. In fact I think it’s the opposite. (*It's not a deal in the usual sense, it's merely a series of commitments the UK has made in return for the EU saying we can move on to next stage talks. The EU agreed to nothing concrete except to allow the next stage to happen. But anyway…) David Davis produced this hilarious tweet early this morning: - "Been a lot of work". First time for everything, eh Dave? The red lines which Boris banged the desk about, as recently as yesterday and, incredibly, again today – money, borders, laws, control - all of these red lines have faded not to pink as Jacob Rees-Mogg suggests, but have vanished like the spray foam lines after a free-kick. We are committing to paying the full EU budget payments up to at least the end of 2020 – current spending, future spending and ongoing commitments...

Twitter is no stranger to a hashtag or a meme – many know the hashtag was invented  on Twitter, and anyone who has had Twitter “conversations” with the Trump fanbase soon realises that memes (plus profanity and #MAGA of course) are literally all the language they have. Twitter, certainly Pre Trump/Brexit, was to quite a large extent cat videos, short jokes (don’t get me started on 280 characters – RUINED it they have, I tell you) and memes. But in the last few weeks, Twitter has gained a new meme - the hashtag #FBPE. When this one popped up in my feed, it was a curious thing. Firstly, hashtags are usually things like #MakeAMiserableFilm or #WallpaperWednedsay so their meaning is obvious(ish). They’re also often fairly short lived, being of their time, serve their purpose and quietly disappear from Twitter trends. But this one didn’t immediately make sense to me, it lasted more than a day or two – and, unusually, it was being added to Twitter users’ display names as well as twe...

This morning, before the absolute flood of news and Twitter activity concerning David Davis lying to Parliament, the Cambridge News put out their morning edition – with a hint about another kind of flood. Maybe because there's just so much news around right now they may have overlooked a couple of minor errors on the front page. Maybe… The eagle-eyed among us spotted this: - Cambridge News (1st Edition) Now I’m no expert in journalism (you can tell, right?) but this doesn’t look quite, well, right. But then I got to thinking – what could this major headline mean? It could be an oversight – but what if it wasn’t? In true Dan Brown style I immediately scanned other news of the day to see what they could be referring to. And after literally minutes of in-depth research, I found it.  Unfortunately, my tweet to the Cambridge News resulted in a hasty attempted cover-up by them, with them announcing a different headline in their sister paper (to avoid the ob...

The US and UK elected political hierarchy are currently doing everything in their power to dismantle the institutions which they inhabit, for their own reasons. We have opened our houses to vandals. Donald Trump is doing it because he didn’t realise that the Office of President of the United States didn’t just mean the actual office with the nice chairs & stuff – it meant having responsibilities to care for and steer your country, and behave in a statesmanlike and sensible way. Sadly the words “responsibilities”, “statesmanlike” and “care” (unlike “bigly”, “covfefe” and “unpresidented”) have never been in Trump’s vocabulary. Donald Trump is Al Czervik in Caddyshack – a brash, rich, rude golf-player who doesn’t give a toss about the niceties of polite society. Except in this remake he’s also racist, mean-spirited, not at all funny and can’t dance. When a President refers to a senator as “Pocahontas” at a ceremony honouring Navajo veterans, you know it’s all gone ...