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In the industrial revolution Britain led the world in advances that enabled mass production: trade exchanges, transportation, factory technology and new skills needed for the new industrialised world.
For us political activists and candidates, the morning after any election is a mix of emotions – the personal and the immediate, the culmination of your own recent campaigning efforts and the fortunes of your party and the success or otherwise of what you stand for and believe in.
Team GB’s success at the Beijing Olympics can, in part, be said to have been made in Manchester. For example, all the cycling medal winners trained at Manchester’s velodrome, the National Cycling Centre.
Funding for sports (and the arts) are often the first things facing the chop in difficult times.
At its most basic the democratic contract is a simple one: the right to vote comes with a responsibility to society, through tax payments and citizenship.
What the Lib Dems have failed to do is offer any meaningful agenda for government or for power.
We need to dig deep and give people a reason to be optimistic just as Obama is doing in America. Because in the same way that outcome of the U.S. elections will change the course of events there and around the world, so too do politics here in Britain.
Being out and about talking to residents and representing their views is, in my view, as important to politics as the grandstanding that takes place in Westminster.
In politics, the number of women in the cabinet has fallen and, if current poll trends continue and Labour loses a number of marginal seats, the number of female MPs is likely to drop significantly.
The Labour party has done more than any other to address gender inequalities, through legislation and other means, and to increase women’s representation in politics, which has led to recent increases in the number of female politicians.