Five Most Popular Posts in April

The year is now four months old. But what new additions to the blog attracted most attention in April?

1. One Abysmal Year of Keir
2. Why Political Commentary is Useless
3. Whither the Northern Independence Party?
4. Explaining the Hartlepool Poll
5. Radical Theory and the Crisis of the Present

A miserable anniversary came and went, with the occasion marked by a clutch of miserable polls and evidence Labour's new core vote is switching off. Not a way to celebrate a year in the party's top job, but this is where the geniuses around Keir Starmer and the snore master general himself is taking us. Their only hope is the allegations of Tory corruption, the fall out from the flat decorating furore, and the frightful revelation that Carrie Symonds is no fan of John Lewis are deux ex machina enough to dent the Tory numbers. Handily, Survation on Friday evening may have offered salvation.

Takes filed under hot by you, le audience, also comprised my moan at Andrew Rawnsley and the commentariat's inability to see politics for what it is. Then came a consideration on the prospects of the Northern Independence Party. Some folks reading this might be sold, but the separatist character of the project will cause it big problems in the long run - assuming the electoral system doesn't strangle it first. April was also the month Survation (them again) dropped a poll on Hartlepool showing Labour were on course to lose. Typical of the idiots littering the parliamentary party, they chose to attack the CWU for funding the exercise instead of taking heed. And lastly, and gratifyingly, a theory post snook into the top five. Check it out.

Two for the second chance tip this month. And they're sort of related. As some folks know, I'm finally reading Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus at the moment, so apologies in advance if a few fragments (partial objects?) of their infamous work crop up on the blog. One such detachment was this on D+G against BuzzFeed, truly an abominable and entirely unwarranted connection. The other is this brief think through of the partial, lopsided and stunted subject positioning of 'the taxpayer'- a designation the left would do well to avoid.