Punters still have more faith in Zack Polanski than Kemi Badenoch – politicalbetting.com
Punters still have more faith in Zack Polanski than Kemi Badenoch – politicalbetting.com
There’s two things that continue to amaze me, firstly the Greens for most of the last month have been ahead of the Tories, secondly that Restore price, a party that has never had an MP elected under the Restore banner.
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Corbynism on steroids.
The Lib Dims, a party reminiscent of the controlled opposition in the former Eastern Europe, seems to be cosying up to them. Yet the Greens are not very liberal.
We also had a green deflection in Waveney due to the leftward drift and an appeal from the local MP for it to remain inclusive party to all.
Missed here, as not Reform I’d guess.
Good morning, everyone.
Both Labour and the Tories (the Lib Dems are a lost cause) need to wake up and start to deal with reality or reality will finish with them.
That would, of course, be exacerbated if Labour ditch Starmer in favour of Miliband or Rayner (though I'm yet to be convinced that will happen).
I don’t think a majority of the electorate really want the divisive rhetoric of Reform or the Greens but they do want things to be done differently to how they have been - and both parties promise that. They’ve been let down so much by the two main parties that they are looking for an alternative.
What we really need is someone who is unafraid of making big, bold, reforming decisions but who does not subscribe to the divisive viewpoints. I think the public will broadly accept reform of institutions like the NHS, planning and regulatory system, welfare state, asylum and immigration system, relationship with Europe, defence spending etc etc so long as they feel that the person behind it has a bold vision and a plan to make things better - on the centre right or centre left. Of course, such figures are sadly lacking from our politics at the moment. But it’s the emergence of figures like these that are what western economies really need in the next decade.
As I've pointed out before the world of personalised social media means we no longer know what news people are seeing and how much of that news reflects what is actually going on.
https://x.com/HQNewsNow/status/2037216916536729645
18 U.S. Code § 592
Whoever, being an officer of the Army or Navy, or other person in the civil, military, or naval service of the United States, orders, brings, keeps, or has under his authority or control any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held, unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both; and be disqualified from holding any office of honor, profit, or trust under the United States.
ICE would seem to fall under that statute.
Is George Osborne Okay?
Have you had an accident at work? Did you fall and perhaps snort too much cocaine? Call this number...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrsPbtPjGfI
Disgraced former Prime Ministers are going full-on bonkers to show the world what the UK endured over the last few years.
Liz Truss gave a swivel-eyed speech at CPAC saying Britain had been taken over by Islamists and the shadowy global elite.
And Boris Johnson is on GB News reciting sonnets.
Including Oxfam's dedicated books shops.
All of my books go round the loop, or just get left behind if I finish a novel on a train, plane or hotel room.
Before the war, Iran was exporting 1.1M barrels of oil at $47 a barrel
Right now they're exporting 1.5M barrels of oil at ~$120 a barrel
https://x.com/BeegJj/status/2036920832694395119?s=20
More trade does not mean selling off everything. We need to get back to actually having British industrial giants capable of building the stuff we need. Start with steel, then car, train and shipbuilding, electronics, consumer goods etc. Harnessing both whats left of the north sea fossils and the growing wind & solar capacity. With turbines built here.
It means that we need to actual educate, train and equip my kids generation to go out and compete with the world. All we equip them with today is debt that is almost impossible to repay. And don't get me started on the NHS bonfire where we can't propose to axe the endless layers of administrators because aren't our nurses marvellous? Not that we train nurses anymore.
The challenge is "where do we get the money". To which my answer remains CAPITALISM. Borrow. Invest. ROI. Today we borrow and throw it on the bonfire. Throw a little less into the flames and buy a fire hose. An increase in cost briefly to greatly decrease it longer term.
It just needs vision, to accept that we're in a mess and a change is needed. I cited 3 great reforms - Liberal, Labour, Tory. We need a 4th, and it won't be from those daft fukers in Reform or the Islamo-Commies in Green... Trade is the solution to the gulf mess, to the American mess, to the refugee mess.
Trade. Free fucking trade. Make stuff. Sell stuff. The Rest Will Flow.
I showed a Trump post to my psychologist friend and asked her to do a proper profile. This was, in retrospect, like asking a vet to look at a particularly diseased badger.
She put down her coffee, read it twice, and said: “Right. Where do you want me to start?”
The all-caps, she explained, isn’t emphasis. It’s dysregulation. A regulated adult uses punctuation to signal importance. Trump uses volume, because volume is what worked in the room he grew up in. Fred Trump’s household rewarded dominance and punished weakness. Donald learned early that the loudest person wins. He never updated that software. He never updates anything. The man is essentially Windows Vista with a spray tan.
“NATO HAS DONE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.” The word absolutely is doing a lot of work there. Psychologists call this black-and-white thinking, a cognitive pattern strongly associated with narcissistic personality structures. The world is either total loyalty or total betrayal. No middle ground. No nuance. No evidence of a functioning cerebral cortex.
“MILITARILY DECIMATED.” She paused on this one. Self-glorification dressed as fact, she said. He has no military background, never served, and has a well-documented terror of illness and physical danger. Bone spurs, famously. Four of them. One per deferment. So he compensates verbally, hard and consistently, because words are his only battlefield and even there he fights like a man wearing oven mitts.
“THE U.S.A. NEEDS NOTHING FROM NATO.” The people who most loudly declare their independence, she said, are almost always the most terrified of abandonment. Classic counterdependence. The kid who announces he doesn’t need friends. In the playground. Alone. Eating his lunch next to a bin.
The threat with no content, “NEVER FORGET THIS VERY IMPORTANT POINT IN TIME,” she found genuinely fascinating. It has the grammatical structure of consequence without any actual consequence attached. It’s what you say when you want to punish someone but lack both the means and the attention span to follow through.
And then the signature. His own name. On his own platform. As if the man might otherwise forget who he is halfway through a sentence, which, to be fair, seems increasingly plausible.
She sat back and said: “This is a man who has been pretending to be formidable for so long he can no longer locate the frightened little boy underneath. But he’s still there. He’s always there. TACO is always there. Screaming in capital letters at people who stopped listening years ago.”
I paid for the coffee. It was the least I could do. She’s going to need therapy after this.
https://x.com/Microinteracti1/status/2037131965149679656?s=20
I don't want to sound like a nun singng "count your blessings", but here and now is still a big prize in the lottery of life. To the extent that we can have multiple calamities, some of them self-inflicted, without the lights going out or 1930s style destitution.
And the choice we have consistently made as voters is to do things on the cheap, to minimum spend patch'n'mend, in order to have lower taxes. That's a legitimate choice, but it has the consequences we see around us.
https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2026/03/japan-2026-pre-qualifying.html
Bluesky works differently and the blocking function is much better at suppressing bot and troll activity.
My TikTok feed is a strange mix, but some manosphere and populist right stuff does creep in. I swipe past without engaging to keep the infestation to a minimum.
So yes, we are all looking at different news on Social Media, which is why 3rd spaces like PB are valuable.
Zero* policy, but very well done emotional appeal.
https://x.com/AaronBastani/status/2037197492631036043
*Not net zero; just zero.
On the plus side we may see the cost of pensions falling sharply but the short term consequences for the NHS are alarming. Do people really eat this stuff?
On a lighter note. 30 seconds of Jon Stewart..
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SRv2n5WTtbI
You have no poetry in your heart, and no kissing in your life.
The Romford branch limps on, and is probably has a healthier menu than you-know-who. But my daughters are creeped out by their mascot.
OTOH, my feed has also been full of horrific videos from Gaza over the just few years. I think PBers would do well to reflect on just how different the kind of bubble young-ish professionals like me live in versus pensioners or people from places like Clacton.
At current rate of progress we will be 150 years old when we finish our last book.
I hope that the fall of the American Empire allows the world to reshape itself. Europe will be less open and more focused on defence - we absolutely should be in that. The gulf will be less needy of American bases. China will continue to build its virtual empire as its soft power influence spreads everywhere via trade and investment.
Britain? An energy superpower. A defence superpower. With world-class universities and clever people inventing things. We should be fine, but we're so terrified of the mess we are in that we seem inert and incapable of acting.
A starter for 10. Set up a Skills University. Training the next generation of skilled craftsmen. Which swallows up the otherwise bankrupt and pointless universities like Sarfend and Uddersfield. With TV and social media making jobs doing actual things cool again.
Which means we will need jobs for these new graduates. Huge tax incentives to existing and new businesses to hire and develop. Extend the tax incentive to other sectors - Asda can pay the lower rate of tax if it actually trains its staff.
Understand the through the line process in making stuff. I'm addressing skills. We need industrial capacity, and we need to own it. Steel, Specialist Metals, Bricks, Cars, Ships, Planes, Trains. A sovereign investment fund our pension funds can support. We can sell stuff to Canadian Teachers pensions but not our own?
Which party can do all that for me?
There's never any figures, there's not even a simple explanation of how x has resulted in y. Just a heap of meaningless metaphors and cliches loosely held together by wounded spite. They cannot make a proper argument because there isn't one.
They aren't going to see an SSN-AUKUS this side of 2040 and recent premature withdrawal of Anson from HMAS Stirling has shown the worth of British security guarantees.
How to understand this? It is like a weird wine cellar, where the enthusiast keeps all the old bottles he has drunk.
The books collection is about where, in my head, I have travelled for 70 years; where I plan to go in the future; where I should like to go but probably never will; and just a few that are being drunk today/this week/this month.
For me CDs (what are they) are similar. Life is too short to hear Busoni's piano concerto more than once. But on a pile is the CD which tells me that I once did it and lived to tell the tale.
When the company I worked for starting using the Vitality private health insurance product from Prudential, even the most hardcore I-Never-Exercise types were walking the dog until the poor things feet were sore. For those who haven't encountered it - in addition to cut prices for gym and gym gear, it gives you rewards for doing exercise*, losing weight, having a full health check etc. Stuff like free cinema tickets.
Apparently, the cost of the scheme was more than offset by the reduction in claims on the private health insurance.
*As measure by Garmin/Apple Watch etc. Which you had purchased cheap through the scheme.
I do occasionally get the odd thing from a worthy local Lab or Con candidate. Never anything from Ref or Rest or any of that lot.
Leaving the EU was neither a ball and chain nor a huge boost - much closer to a non-event for the economy overall, no matter what the impact on individual sectors.
The real ball and chain have been the tax-waste-regulate governments we've inflicted on ourselves for the last few decades, at the national and European levels.
Part of the genius of the original Vitality scheme was that it had lots of different stuff in it - so rather than one simple way to get "points", lots of things to discuss, ponder over. Which sucks people in.
A simple, small refund for steps wouldn't have that day-to-day involvement.
Personally, I would hire the people behind the original scheme and ask them to build one for the NHS.
The Duke of Norfolk, Edward Fitzalan-Howard, and Lord Carrington won the concession after raising concerns privately about the need to keep their role in organising state occasions.
The pair hold the inherited royal titles of Earl Marshal and Lord Great Chamberlain respectively, with responsibility for organising events involving the monarch in the Palace of Westminster.
They will retain these roles when they lose the right to sit in the Lords along with dozens of other hereditary peers, under the Labour government's reforms of the upper house.'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyr554vz6no
@NickPalmer has observed in the past that people choose their vote much more via vibe than by totting up a balance sheet of policies and cooly comparing to other parties.
They ask themselves "is this a party that matches my values? Is this a party that gets my issues and will speak for me?"
That is how Polanski is doing so well. The message is a very positive one, of hope, and one unafraid to speak for pluralism and modern Britain. This is a unique approach in current politics.
Catherine Wieland, 33, claimed she suffered anxiety so crippling she was housebound but the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) found evidence of her surfing in Cancun and visiting Thorpe Park three times.
Wieland, from Goring-by-Sea, West Sussex, claimed tens of thousands of pounds in Personal Independence Payments (Pip) over more than two years, spending the money on manicures, tanning sessions and trips to a private Harley Street dentist.
On Thursday, she was given a 28-week prison sentence, suspended for 18 months, the DWP said.'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn4vmw27x13o
I won't name my bank. We've had a mortgage with them for 20 years across several houses. This time we want to pull some equity to pay for improvements. All agreed on paper. Then we go through with their advisor. Who starts setting aside income as not income. OK, its income as far as HMRC are concerned, but not with them.
Plan was decrease mortgage term and take equity. Now they tell me they must increase our term as "we can't afford it". New payment is hundreds less than current payment which we pay without issue. Hmmm. And then after a few days another email. I have included figures which are not income which misled them. Term increased again.
Erm, I've quoted the data from my tax return. And sent you the returns and calculations. How have I misled you? Anyway, he's calling this afternoon to finalise the paperwork. Term now 3 years longer than we want, and every time they increase it we just increase the overpayment (we can pay almost DOUBLE inside the early repayment cap, so that's no problem).
It's a farce. We can't repay our existing mortgage apparently because we can't afford it despite repaying. It's because we own our own businesses and take out what we need. So personal income is low even though business income is not. Yet more ways that Britain is anti-business.
Why are even the Tories anti-business these days? Its crackers.
Apparently if the UK had suffered an Oct 7th we would have fllattened wherever those responsible came from, presumably killing proportionately 500k civilians, and Blair would be just fine with it (which I wouldn't doubt for a minute).
Elvis Buñuelo
@Mr_Considerate
Tony Blair in The Free Press, is it.
https://x.com/Mr_Considerate/status/2037304369649955146?s=20
There's been talk in No 10 of offering the London mayor a Cabinet role, acc to person familiar w/ situ, tho a No 10 official says suggestion is wrong'
https://x.com/LOS_Fisher/status/2037432061821075544?s=20
It's will come down to quantifiable risk. Easy to work out risk numbers* if you take someone on PAYE, inhale their bank accounts etc.
Someone running a small business. That requires judgement from a human and a decision based on that judgement. "Discretion" is a dirty word, Blackadder. Bit like "Crevice". People get in trouble for discretion. A number you can hide behind.
*The actual risk number is probably bullshit. But the computer gives you a nice number.
It's a laudable sentiment.
They will lurch towards extremes which will turn out to be far worse than the established parties. We have been here before. It won't end well
Seem to remember it could be worth £100s in activity holiday discounts when it started.
The difference in life expectancy is another good argument for devolution, Scotland could unburden itself of the southern English living to 80+.
Not many Scottish regions break 80.
https://api-handbook.fca.org.uk/files/sourcebook/MCOB.pdf
No real penalty aside from needing to repay benefits and some minor embarrassment at the check-out if there is anyone left reading the local paper. And how will she repay benefits from no income?
Sadly there are very few Glaswegian octogenarians popping up the Arrochar Alps and suffering a catastrophic but ultimately low cost heart attack as a result.