Britain’s teeming but invisible average earners will decide the coming election. Neither David Cameron nor Gordon Brown seems to understand them. Read about the impact of class on the 2010 election and beyond.

A dynamic, interactive election results map from the Economist

A graph showing how a proportional representation system would have changed the general election result

A chart showing which political parties national newspapers have supported in every general election since 1945 – and who they are endorsing at the 2010 election

Bagehot offers his take on the effect that this election will have on Britons (“Farewell Free Stuff”)

A look into Labour’s Future

In “Learning How to Share” the Economist offers a comparative perspective on coalition governing.

Read on at the Guardian

Bagehot Explains

The most recent, based on interviews in 2008, was published on January 26th. It describes an increasingly jaded, increasingly liberal country, still attached to big government but dubious of official attempts to help the poor.

read on from the Economist

On November 9th all that seemed set to change, as Ed Miliband, the energy and climate-change secretary, delivered the first of the government’s “National Policy Statements” on infrastructure. These will inform the work of the Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC), an independent body set up last month. Led by Sir Michael Pitt, a veteran planner and local-authority boss, it will take over responsibility for planning nationally important projects from March 2010. Decisions that used to take years will, in theory, take just months or even weeks, with public involvement drastically curtailed.

Read on here

Read on from Bagehot

This is a rick editorial that dances across many of our APCG themes.

Here is a link to the real Question Time on Parliament

Cameron vs. Brown. Ouch (May 2007)

Mass political parties started in the 1870s as a response to the advent of mass suffrage. 50 years ago, nearly one in ten people belonged to a party; it has now declined to one in 88, yet they still have a huge role in administering power in our democracy. It is that anomaly which constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor claims lies behind the frustration and disillusionment that so many people feel towards our political system. He discusses his book, The New British Constitution, with Laurie.

Listen for more

Those subject to unlawful surveillance should be compensated while the policy of DNA retention should be rethought.

The government said CCTV and DNA were “essential crime fighting tools”.

Surveillance State?

Eight cabinet ministers, including the Home Secretary and the Justice Secretary, would be swept away in the rout as the Tories marched into Downing Street with a majority of 146, says the poll, conducted for PoliticsHome.com and exclusively revealed to The Observer. Seats that have been Labour since the First World War would fall.

Read on

To thee belongs the rural reign;
Thy cities shall with commerce shine:
All thine shall be the subject main,
And every shore it circles thine.

Rule Britannia, Britain‘s unofficial national anthem dating from 1740, celebrated not only Britain‘s military might but its commercial prowess as well. A century later Britain had fully risen to the advance praise. This was the high-water mark of its influence in the world, which coincided with the last great wave of globalisation. The first country to industrialise, Britain was soon turning out more than half the world’s coal, pig-iron and cotton textiles. In 1880 its exports of manufactured goods accounted for 40% of the global total, and by 1890 it owned more shipping tonnage than the rest of the world put together.

Less than a century on from those glory days Britain had become the “sick man of Europe”, infamous for wild swings in inflation and growth and for confrontational trade unions. Shorn of its empire and a late and reluctant arrival in the European Community, Britain was grappling with the prospect of irreversible decline.

Now its fortunes are looking up again. Steady economic expansion for the past 14 years has pushed its GDP per head above that of France and Germany. Its jobless figures are the second-lowest in the European Union. Inflation has been modest, and sterling, the Achilles heel of governments from Clement Attlee’s to John Major’s, is if anything too strong for Britain‘s good.

Read the rest of the report here

The cure of admiring the Lords is to go and look at it. (Walter Bagehot)

The House of Lords is like a glass of champagne that has stood for five days (Clement Atlee)

A Brief History of the Lords

On the Wakeham Report

On the White Paper

Implications on Democracy

Response Sheet for Lords Readings (using the four readings above)

——More on the Lords…

Blair’s Vacillating Stance(s)

ummm…the other House of Lords (I can’t say which is more nauseating)

If that is not disturbing enough, you can watch the real House of Lords here

• The New Paternalism
• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Council
• The Fulton Report on the Civil Service

Response sheet for Three Articles on Paternalism

Lecture on Paternalism of Westminister (readings summary)

What are Public Private Partnerships?

King Tony and the Barons

Private prison drive

Can Gordon fix the National Health Service?

Privatize Social Security?

An Op-Ed on Privatizing the BBC

Reading Response Sheet on UK Privatization Issues

Material is available from an on-demand archive for 28 days.

the debate over proportionate representation

NY Times on Sinn Fein

TWE is the UK still a Unitary System?

response sheet