Recent content by RobinCarmody

You do get Blairites who say the Tories might have won had John Smith lived or even if Gordon Brown had replaced him. I have never, ever believed any of them for one second, but it's amazing how strong that idea remains in certain circles.

SpanishSpy's post made me think of that entry from Stuff White People Like, "Black Music Black People Don't Listen To Anymore" (though that also extended it to a white middle-class fetishisation of 1980s/early 1990s hip-hop of which I myself was once guilty). Also of the way a lot of Right-wing...

Utterly trivial compared to the other stuff, much as I wish we had a better and more integrated railway system today, but re. AndyF's post - all the problems with two electrification systems could have been prevented had the merged Southern Railway gone with the LBSCR's overhead system over the...

Heseltine's verdict being buried because it was too One Nation / "aristocratic social conscience" for Thatcher's liking is redolent of the interim Taylor report on Hillsborough being buried because it so unequivocally blamed the police - Douglas Hurd wanted her to support it but she wouldn't...

One thing that strikes me about the disappearance of the Tories in Liverpool is that you can define the change from post-war One Nation politics to 1980s Two Nations politics in terms of the two biggest bands of the 1960s. When those two bands were growing up, there were multiple Conservative...

Probably should have cited the Morse/Poirot/Wexford/Dalgliesh/Wycliffe axis above - the entire ITV "cerebral detective" subgenre was specifically designed to increase the network's appeal among the more affluent southern audience who disliked Corrie & Cilla and were highly attractive to...

One of the most chilling things about Savile is that he got a full, non-honorary knighthood (as distinct from Bob Geldof's honorary KBE, and even that didn't happen as soon as some had wanted) before anyone else who had built his career on pop music - he was five years ahead of even Cliff...

Miniscule and tiny butterfly effect compared to the UK joining the euro, of course, but with Redwood in '97 and Clarke succeeding him Labour almost certainly would have won my seat (South Dorset) in '97 but conceivably lost it in the later Blair era, rather than the other way round. Obviously...

Maybe Greater London expanding more into OTL Surrey gives the Tories a bigger share at the GLC and GLA? Obviously it was the expansion of Greater London anyway which made London government politically competitive again, the LCC's having been controlled by Labour for three decades without...

Lot of movement from the part of the country where Tolpuddle happened - where it has tended to be less widely commemorated than elsewhere precisely because of that movement - into South Wales in the subsequent era, as well. (Admittedly, this doesn't really add to the thread but I still feel...

apropos Slough in 1992, it should be noted that an expelled member of the local Labour Party standing as "Labour Candidate" got more votes than the Tory majority over Labour - another example of the "Literal Democrat" syndrome which the laws were subsequently tightened to prevent.

apropos the mention on the first page of Guildford City not being elected to the Third Division South after they won the Southern League, might football as a whole have gained a greater middle-class appeal sooner if they had, and been successful on a par with Ipswich in OTL? Just thought of...

In 2007 Neil Clark - most of whose opinions I strongly disagree with, btw - was commissioned by the Guardian (actually, probably his mate Seumas Milne) to write one of the perennial "if there had been a 1978 election" pieces when it looked like Gordon Brown would call the first election off the...

Tempting to wonder whether the Clarkson phenomenon can be linked to Brexit. He is certainly the ultimate 'Rock Right' figure, and Brexit is in my view essentially a product of the Rock Right, the Elgarisation of Rock, Little Anglospherism rather than traditional Little Englanderism. (Marcello...