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Well this is unexpected...

UK borrowing costs are expected to fall further next year, according to the average forecast from nine big investment banks, as investors increasingly price in interest rate cuts from the Bank of England (BoE) after a prolonged period of restrictive monetary policy.

Britain's 10-year bond yield, which hit a 16-year high of 4.95% at the start of 2025 — due to worries about near-record debt issuance and a global bond sell-off — is expected to come down to 4.32% by the end of 2026.

Investment bankers expect UK gilts to be the best performers amongst peer countries. They are impressed by the brilliance of Rachel Reeves budget.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/bond-market-2026-060013107.html

Somewhat belatedly, it is time to go and get the Christmas tree. Then put some decs up. Our son is coming home in the early hours for Christmas. Looking forward to that.

This has been a very unhappy hear for me in politics. I feel an orphan. I have nothing but contempt for the SNP government in Scotland and I am in despair about the Labour government in London. My enthusiasm and even interest has waned sharply. I may have a break from PB for a while.

We're in a dull phase right now.

That's certainly part of the problem. Sometimes, as with the bug going round at the moment, the only answer is to hunker down and wait for nature to do its thing. The current personnel aren't ideal casting, sure. But if the alternatives are worse, what are we to do?

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Besides, how did we get here and then get out? Part of the problem, I'm sure, is that we're demanding leadership qualities that go well beyond what we have any right to demand. Since Blair, we've had seven PMs, all of whom failed fairly unambiguously and fairly quickly. What was the sliding door moment where we could have avoided all this?

Unfair on Cameron. PM for seven years, led the best government of the last twenty years. Made one tiny miscalculation…

Cameron's “best government of the last twenty years” flatlined the economy, gerrymandered our electoral process (which arguably resulted in losing the referendum), broke the NHS (which is why there was no support for Lansley over plebgate), almost lost Scotland and did lose Europe.

Lansley wasn’t plebgate, surely? I think the coalition set the national finances on the road to recovery. If you look around, most western governments have flatlined since 2007. What Gerrymandering are you refering too?

Good point. Two people with the same first name. Deliberate mistake. AI slop. Autocorrect.

Until Osborne, we'd been largely tracking America's economy. Ours was recovering by the time of the election.

Gerrymandering. Cameron, Osborne and CCHQ generally had become convinced Labour had an unfair advantage, partly because they did not understand the notion of efficient vote spread, so needed to put their own thumb on the scale. Mainly this was done, in a ruse copied by the Republicans in America, by purging the electoral rolls and making registration harder, and then redrawing boundaries based on the new rolls, so that more seats were created in traditional Conservative areas than Labour ones. By also reducing the number of seats, they ensured every boundary had to be reconsidered. There was more to it than that but you get the gist.

So you believe that the electoral commission is biased? Because surely they are responsible for boundaries etc?
And as for making registration harder? I get a letter that I have to log on and confirm or make changes. Pretty sure there are other ways too. It’s not rocket science.

No, the Conservatives rolled the pitch so the unbiased EC would create a biased result.