Offbeat

Sometimes it can be bloody difficult to make your point. It’s a daily problem for politicians, but the stakes change on the election campaign trail; and as the stakes change, so does the speech.

There are more than 1m people with learning disabilities in the UK and the number is expected to increase. These are people who face exclusion from society more than ever – particularly when it comes to voting. Not enough is done to enable their participation in the most basic democratic right available to British citizens.

Following the political surprises of 2015 and 2016, there has been much reflection and debate on the accuracy of the polls in the run-up to the impending snap-election of 2017.

The 2015 general election left the Liberal Democrats on a precipice. The party was reduced to just eight MPs, a much shrunken local government base, and had been dethroned from its traditional position as the third party of British politics.

An article on The Independent is being widely shared on social media suggesting that a 30% increase in turnout among 18 to 24-year-olds would make the election of a majority Conservative government on June 8 rather unlikely. It followed a tweet by Alan Firth, a linguist at Newcastle University, commenting on an article by the vice president of the National Union of Students, Shelly Asquith. When contacted by The Conversation, Firth said that the calculations made in The Independent article reflected his own.

Labour’s election manifesto launch was overshadowed by fresh questions over how it would pay for a string ambitious promises costing billions of pounds.

Vox pops made up over one-third of all election news sources on the UK’s nightly television bulletins in the first week of the 2017 election campaign, our study has found. While politicians made up the majority of appearances, 36.4% of sources were members of the public expressing their views about the election.

“We wanted to see more competition. We wanted to see more people able to switch between energy users [sic], that, over the last three or four years has not happened. This is a market that is not working perfectly and therefore we are intervening to make markets work better.”

It was a good day for Theresa May whose reported row with Philip Hammond was completely overshadowed by Labour’s leaked manifesto.

The Tories will renew a pledge to hold a free vote on overturning the ban on fox hunting, Theresa May told voters last night.

The campaign for the French presidency revealed a stark fault line on Europe. The openly pro-European Emmanuel Macron called for the EU to be strengthened while the staunchly anti-EU Marine Le Pen promised a referendum on Frexit. Victory for the former therefore raises interesting questions about what his stance will be on negotiating the UK’s exit from the union.

Political opinion polls have taken a bit of a battering in the past few years. There was wide agreement on the eve of the last UK general election that the outcome would be a hung parliament. Few pollsters saw Donald Trump winning the 2015 presidential election in the US. And almost everyone agreed that Brexit would not happen. So are opinion polls worth the paper they’re written on any more?

This article originally appeared in The Conversation

The Conservatives will bring back one of their most successful election poster campaigns as they claim Jeremy Corbyn would inflict a tax “bombshell” on families today. It will launch a new poster with the slogan “Corbyn: No Bombs for our Army, One big bombshell for your family”.

Halloween holds no fear for hundreds of families across the borough who have flocked to a Doncaster farm to pick their own pumpkins.

Accrington Stanley's 4-1 win over Chesterfield in the much-derided Checkatrade Trophy may have been watched by just TWO away supporters, according to figures.

Almost everyone knows what LOL means. The text acronym for laugh out loud has become so ubiquitous that it has entered popular parlance and even the Oxford dictionary.

In a time of weird food fads, we just have to ask - would you try this?