Best Of

Imagine if Keir Starmer set the legal dogs on Andrew Bailey for not slashing interest rates. If that didn't lead to his departure (Starmer, I mean) it'd indicate we were well down the path from liberal democracy to authoritarianism, wouldn't it?

Is the Bank of England's role in setting interest rates actually codified in statute, or is it simply a decision Gordon Brown took that everyone has stuck with since?

I think the difference in Britain is that the Executive in Britain has much more freedom to act, in law, than in the US, because the Executive in Britain is constrained by the ability of the Commons to replace it at will - as happened twice during the last Parliament - more than by a Constitution or law.

So a comparison between the powers and actions of the Executive in the US and the UK doesn't really make any sense, because they operate so very differently.

Yes, different systems. Our particular sour spot would be a PM of bad despotic character with a big majority and a supine 'one man band' party. Food for thought given current polling.

"The Prime Minister loses the election. When he arrives at Buckingham Palace, King Charles III assumes he will do the usual thing: resign, and advise the King to send for the leader of the biggest party in Parliament. But this is no ordinary Prime Minister.

This is Max Moore, charismatic leader of the Britons First Party, and he has no more intention of resigning just because the voters rejected him than Donald Trump did in 2016. Can Max Moore get away with it?

Written by Francis Beckett (Tom Lehrer is Teaching Math...), the nail-biting satire, It Couldn’t Happen Here, comes to the OSO Barnes from Thursday 15 to Sunday 18 January."

I've booked my seat.

Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.

Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!

We're just finalising the questions.

We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.

There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.

This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election

Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.

They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway

US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.

Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.

I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.

Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.

The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.

Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.

Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.

Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.

Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.

We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.

I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?

Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.

It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.

Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.

STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.

No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.

More correctly the number of seats a party wins is influenced by how the voters react to the number of candidates the party fields, and the qualities of those candidates.

No other electoral system gives the voters as much power to select the party affiliation and individual qualities of the politician they wish to represent them.

Short of banning political parties I can't think of an electoral system that more effectively minimises the power of political parties. Whereas party list PR puts the party bureaucracy even more in control than with FPTP.

The 2 downsides of STV are the time it takes to count and the fact parties can game the system by just standing the number of candidates they expect to win as candidates.

Which means that a political party who does unexpectedly well (say Sinn Fein in the last set of Irish elections) end up winning only the seats they've put candidates up for when they could have won another 10-20 seats.

I don't think time taken to count the vote is a downside if it leads to a more representative/better result.

It is true you optimally want to stand the number of candidates that you might win on a good day, but not more than that. I would count that as an undesirable quirk of the STV method - ideally you wouldn't be penalised for providing more candidates - but no-one's gaming the system. Everyone understands the calculation. In general you want to stand as many candidates as you might win. Sinn Fein miscalculated. It was their fault.

@adilray.bsky.social‬

Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.

Given his record in government and other stuff I believe he would sell his granny if offered.

Sadly malc, some of us no longer have grannies to sell.

I'm more than eight years a grandorphan.

Selling your granny is stupid, anyway. It would incur immediate Capital Gains Tax liability.

What you should do is create a derivative of your Granny - Elderly Relative Debt Obligations - with physical delivery in a no-tax location. And sell that, on an OTC market in ERDOs

All fine until the consequent bubble in granny valuations bursts and it plunges us into a steep and prolonged recession.

{John Tuld mode}

When the market goes south, we dump grannies on anyone stupid enough to buy.

Buy again at the bottom. We lose on the crash, but make a fortune on the rebound.

Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.

Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!

We're just finalising the questions.

We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.

There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.

This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election

Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.

They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway

US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.

Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.

I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.

Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.

The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.

Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.

Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.

Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.

Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.

We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.

I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?

Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.

It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.

Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.

STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.

No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.

More correctly the number of seats a party wins is influenced by how the voters react to the number of candidates the party fields, and the qualities of those candidates.

No other electoral system gives the voters as much power to select the party affiliation and individual qualities of the politician they wish to represent them.

Short of banning political parties I can't think of an electoral system that more effectively minimises the power of political parties. Whereas party list PR puts the party bureaucracy even more in control than with FPTP.

The 2 downsides of STV are the time it takes to count and the fact parties can game the system by just standing the number of candidates they expect to win as candidates.

Which means that a political party who does unexpectedly well (say Sinn Fein in the last set of Irish elections) end up winning only the seats they've put candidates up for when they could have won another 10-20 seats.

I don't see the time taken to count the votes as a downside. Think of it as a sort of jury verdict - we don't object when juries take their time.

@adilray.bsky.social‬

Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.

I am shocked and very disappointed in Zahawi.

Shows him to be an opportunist and chancer but without any sense of loyalty, He got his Stratford on Avon seat in the first place over a loyal hardworking Tory councillor because he made a showy speech, they should have selected the decent but dull councillor not the flashy Nadim.

Farage is welcome to him!

He behaved very badly when there was investigation of his tax affairs. To be honest I think he's lucky (of course its not luck is it?) not to have been prosecuted.

Imagine if Keir Starmer set the legal dogs on Andrew Bailey for not slashing interest rates. If that didn't lead to his departure (Starmer, I mean) it'd indicate we were well down the path from liberal democracy to authoritarianism, wouldn't it?

Is the Bank of England's role in setting interest rates actually codified in statute, or is it simply a decision Gordon Brown took that everyone has stuck with since?

I think the difference in Britain is that the Executive in Britain has much more freedom to act, in law, than in the US, because the Executive in Britain is constrained by the ability of the Commons to replace it at will - as happened twice during the last Parliament - more than by a Constitution or law.

So a comparison between the powers and actions of the Executive in the US and the UK doesn't really make any sense, because they operate so very differently.

Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.

Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!

We're just finalising the questions.

We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.

There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.

This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election

Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.

They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway

US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.

Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.

I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.

Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.

The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.

Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.

Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.

Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.

Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.

We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.

I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?

Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.

It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.

Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.

STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.

No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.

"D'Hondt" was a Belgian civil servant who gave his name to a particular formula often used to calculate the number of seats according to the propoortion of votes cast. The D'Hondt Formula is the one used to calculate the seats in an STV election. STV is the D'Hondt process in action.

STV is a bastardised version.

One vote for one party. Party lists. Happy days.

I rather like STV because it gives you as a
voter a real say over the candidates as well as the party. Say party X will definitely win one member and maybe two in a five member seat and puts up three candidates. Those candidates will put more effort into being the first ranked candidate within the party slate than competing with candidates from other parties.

Plus election nights would be full of fun for all us election anoraks, and what's not to like about a system that has multiple rounds of counting, extending our excitement still further?

Thanks for this, Ben, and "Ho, hum" for my predictions.

Does anyone get the impression that there seemed to be very little reviewing of 2025 both on PB and across the wider media? If ever a year slipped into history unloved and unmarked, 2025 was it, and perhaps it is a wider malaise than simply Starmer or Trump or any one of the news stories this year.

And yet, and this is true for most years, and is an important corollary to the go and vote / politics is vital brigade: how often does politics directly turn the course of somebody's life on here? Despite Trump, despite Labour, despite war and refugees and all, most years and last year, the effects of politics on my life were very much at the margins and I think most people can say the same. So, however mad it gets out there, remember it remains a niche and peripheral interest.

Perhaps politics will come for me this year, and perhaps it is naive to be complacent about it, but more likely "They'll burn down the synagogues at 6 o'clock, and we'll all carry on like before".

A perceptive post. I do sometimes wonder if it makes a blind bit of difference to my life which party / politicians are elected but on the macro scale I fear it does - the world feels much less safe with Trump in the White House.

Indeed. To echo TSE’s comments, I think a US invasion of Greenland would have a huge impact on all of us in the UK.

73% of Americans oppose invading Greenland, just 8% in favour, even a majority of Republican voters are opposed. It is not happening.

A purchase offer is more likely but still only 28% in favour

https://www.stripes.com/theaters/europe/2026-01-08/greenland-military-poll-20339489.html

Like a lot of things in the American democracy/opposition to Trump category, the views of the American public only matter if they matter.

Is there any sign at all that they do? In the Good Place, "congressmen and senators want to be re-elected" is a good answer, but it's not obvious that we are in the Good Place.

73% opposition is enough to ensure even Congress impeaches and convicts Trump if he invaded Greenland (which he won't). The fact less than half of even Republican voters back such an invasion means most Republican Senators would vote to convict Trump rather than face losing their seats in that eventuality, which is again why Trump won't.

He will try and buy Greenland which over half of Republicans at least back but that is it

This argument is predicated on there being a continuing future of free and fair elections in the USA. I don't think we can begin assessing that until after the November election time.

No, given almost half of Republican Senators and a few GOP House Reps have joined all the Democrats to tell Trump not to invade Greenland he would be impeached if he did so by the House and likely convicted by the required 2/3 margin in the Senate even now if he invaded Greenland.

If Democrats as polls predict take the House in November they will almost certainly impeach again Trump even if he doesn't invade Greenland.

As I said, US midterms are run by State governments NOT the Federal government

Personally I think Trump SOP is to suggest an ultra-extreme policy opyion in order to reduce opposition to a slightly less extreme one. I can't see a US invasion of Greenald, but a buy-out or similar might well be offered. It's an interesting question how open voters are to buyouts. {Patriotism per se is unfashionable, and most countries have unpopular governments and oppositions specialising in cashing in on Government unpopularity. Is there a price that Greenlanders (who aren't thrilled by Danish support, but at present even less thrilled by becoming American) wou,d accept? $100K doesn't seem enough, but $1 billionK per head? Come to that, would British voters resist any offer?

I expect the break-even would be around $1m per head. So that’s 50-60bn for the US to spend.

I was wondering, is there any precedent for a country to bribe inhabitants of another country to sell their sovereignty? Not the rulers (as the US effectively did multiple times at both local and state level) but the inhabitants?

The political issue in the 50 states would not necessarily be the total cost, though that’s still material, but the fairness point. “Why are those lazy workshy Greenlanders sitting in clover on the expense account of Uncle Sam while I, a patriotic hard working American, struggle to pay the grocery bills each week?”

Denmark provides about $700 million subsidy a year; the EU around $100 million on top. So I guess 30 years subsidy as a lump sum comes to a $24 billion figure, if you don't care USA or Denmark. Any hostile takeover needs a premium, so your numbers look right. Although we are not including a who-in their-right-mind-would-trust-a-Trump-contract premium.

The US could on the other hand save their money and still get all the bases they want

Greenland is not about US bases. It's about America carving up Arctic mineral rights with Russia and China. Ditto making Canada the 51st state.

Probably. Complicated by the Greenlandic government cancelling several mining projects on environmental grounds. ie local people didn't want them despite promised economic benefits.

A recent poll said that a whole 6% of Greenlanders wanted to join the US.

@adilray.bsky.social‬

Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.

Given his record in government and other stuff I believe he would sell his granny if offered.

Sadly malc, some of us no longer have grannies to sell.

I'm more than eight years a grandorphan.

Selling your granny is stupid, anyway. It would incur immediate Capital Gains Tax liability.

What you should do is create a derivative of your Granny - Elderly Relative Debt Obligations - with physical delivery in a no-tax location. And sell that, on an OTC market in ERDOs

All fine until the consequent bubble in granny valuations bursts and it plunges us into a steep and prolonged recession.