He's political director of the union which has given Labour £11m since 2007. His union pays the salary of one of Gordon Brown's Downing Street staff. It's Westminster group of Labour MPs totals over 160. It is highly efficient at ensuring that its supporters are selected as candidates for Labour safe seats. He is Charlie Whelan. It is Unite - the union at the heart of the Brit...

I rather said this over here. Originally written for a conference of the Federal Reserve, Gary Gorton’s “The Panic of 2007″ garnered enormous attention and is considered by many to be the most convincing take on the recent economic meltdown. Now, in Slapped by the Invisible Hand , Gorton builds upon this

In March, the House of Commons voted in favour of reforming the House of Lords making it either wholly or 80% elected. In March too, Justice Secretary Jack Straw announced the a draft bill to reform the Lords would be published within weeks. Only one problem. The first March was in 2007 and the second 2010. Three

Background On December the 20th in 2007 the Dutch MoD and Schelde Marinebouw (now: Damen Schelde Naval Shipbuilding) signed a contract for the construction of 4 patrol vessels. These vessels were the result of the Marinestudie 2005 which proposed to sell 4 M-class (Karel Doorman class) frigates. With that money 4 patrol vessels should be bought, the Marine Corps should be strengthened, getting mor...

Just two last night: Adeyfield West, Dacoram BC. Con hold. Con 486 (43.5%, +2.1), Lab 429 (38.4%, -3.9), BNP 203 (18.2%, +18.2). Swing of 3% from Lab to Con since 2007. This is in Hemel Hempstead constituency, which has a notoional Tory majority of 168. Redwell West, Wellingborough BC. Con hold. Con 570 (57.2%, -1.8), Lab 186 (18.7%, +3.7), BNP 84 (8.4%, -7.3), LD 72 (7.2%, +3.7), Eng Dem 62 (6.2%...

The FSA says today it will in future monitor more and make judgements about the safety of various financial products and activities. The tripartite regulators led by the Chancellor made some very important judgements 2005-8. Between 2005 and 2007 they thought banks

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said yesterday (10 March) that a group of national science academies would review UN climate science to restore trust after a 2007 global warming report was found to have errors.

Chester City are no more: the first club I can recall to be actually liquidated, rather than being fashionably put into receivership. They did, however, seem to have fallen into dubious company: In November 2007, the fans were asked to...

With the question of how well Lord Ashcroft’s marginal seats campaign for the Conservatives really is doing back in the news, now seems a good time to remind people of this which I wrote in 2007: How good is Ashcroft? Well, here’s his own account of his record supporting target seats at the 2005 general election: The national

In a striking move, John Major will tonight accuse Gordon Brown of “using the Armed Forces as a Party Political prop.” This isn’t the first time that Major has been critical of Brown. He was one of the people who, rightly, criticised Brown’s trip to Iraq during the Tory conference in 2007 and just last month he wrote an article in the Mail on Sunday that accused Labour of m...