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Dec 31, 2024 | 
bigissue.com | Tim Bale
2024 showed the UK is no longer a truly two-party state, writes Queen Mary politics professor Tim Bale. 2025 could be Nigel Farage's chance by: Tim Bale If the 2024 election proved anything – aside from the fact that the majority of people who bothered to vote rid of a government that had run things for 14 long years – it reminded us that the UK is no longer a country conveniently carved up between Labour and Conservatives.
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Dec 18, 2024 | 
conservativehome.com | Tim Bale
Tim Bale is Professor of Politics, at Queen Mary University of London, and this article is adapted from a piece that appeared in the December 2024 edition of the Political Studies Association’s magazine, Political Insight. Our understanding of what constitutes a good and bad leader is cultural and even, perhaps, psychological.
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Oct 21, 2024 | 
theconversation.com | Laura Hood |Daniel Evans |Gillian Prior |John Curtice |Oliver Heath |Paula Surridge | +1 more
Social class continues to influence British people’s opportunities and the way they think about them, even if the boundaries between those classes have shifted. In the third part of Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics, a podcast series from The Conversation Documentaries, we explore how class is defined and measured, and how the UK’s changing class identity interacts with identity politics.
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Oct 14, 2024 | 
theconversation.com | Laura Hood |Mark Garnett |Martin Farr |Tim Bale
When Tony Blair came to power in 1997 as the first Labour prime minister in a generation, his government became associated with the phrase “we’re all middle class now”. In the second part of Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics, a podcast series from The Conversation Documentaries, we look back at a century of class in British politics to understand why Blair’s decision to move Labour away from the working class was such a watershed moment.
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Oct 7, 2024 | 
theconversation.com | Laura Hood |Geoffrey Evans |John Curtice |Paula Surridge |Tim Bale
In the first episode of Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics, a new podcast series from The Conversation Documentaries, we explore when the relationship between class and voting broke down and why. In 1967, legendary political scientist Peter Pulzer wrote: “Class is the basis of British party politics; all else is embellishment and detail.” His assertion reflected a long period in political history in which class identity mapped fairly neatly onto our voting habits.
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Oct 5, 2024 | 
msn.com | Tim Bale
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Oct 5, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Tim Bale
The Conservative party is more than just 121 MPs. It’s also tens of thousands of ordinary members. The £39 a year they pay to belong might not entitle them to any real say on the party’s policies, but it does give them the right to help select its candidates and, even better, its leader. Quite how many individual blades make up the Tory grassroots these days, we won’t know until we learn the result of the membership ballot, which starts on 31 October.
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
politicshome.com | Tali Fraser |Tim Bale
7 min read
Tory members’ views on what makes a good leader differ in some crucial regards from those of the wider electorate, not least on the candidates’ honesty, finds Tim Bale
Whether the Hansard Society’s Audit of Political Engagement, published in the spring of 2019, helped persuade Boris Johnson to get Brexit done “by any means necessary”, we shall never know.
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Sep 27, 2024 | 
theconversation.com | Tim Bale |Paul Webb |Stavroula Chrona
It’s party conference season in Britain, a chance for members to meet and talk through their successes and failures from the election campaign – and start talking strategy for the next. Perhaps inevitably after it suffered such a crushing defeat and the resignation of its leader, the Conservative party conference in Birmingham risks taking on the air of a wake.
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Sep 26, 2024 | 
conservativehome.com | Tim Bale
Tim Bale is Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London and is currently working on a revised, paperback edition of his latest book The Conservative Party after Brexit. Not for the first time, it was Focaldata’s James Kanagasooriam – the analyst who initially drew attention to the Red Wall’s potential to turn blue in 2019 – who put his finger on it before anyone else.
