Think Caerphilly before betting on this by-election – politicalbetting.com
Think Caerphilly before betting on this by-election – politicalbetting.com
Today sees the Caerphilly by-election and these are the latest odds from Ladbrokes and I think the value might be on backing Reform to poll 45% to 50% at 4/1.
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Comments
Gilbert de Clare was Norman French.
And it was mostly restored by John Crichton-Stuart, who was Scottish.
"Ex-MP ran bogus Covid testing firm, court hears"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0kpg2n37n7o
But don't you give the Welsh any credit? They must have done the hard labour, after all.
The Welsh spent most of their time in the 1260s trying to stop Caerphilly from being built, although they did the hard graft in the 1930s restoration (and the 1950s additional work).
Bad enough to affect the result, and if so- who benefits?
What cheese do you use to encourage a tardy Paddington?
Come on, bear.....
What cheese do you use to hide an equine?
Mask a pony....
It shows the total absence of due diligence by the government in awarding these contracts.
(Guido takes no liability for any ear injuries sustained by watching the video with audio enabled)
order-order.com/2025/10/21/wat…
https://x.com/guidofawkes/status/1980671395400216786?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
Labour: "We have solved the small boats crisis by implementing a one in, one out policy."
Reform: "Er...."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clykzx43v0po
- a British Passport may help but isn’t 100% solid. Why?
- The Home Sec. can withdraw citizenship from any “dual national”
- From the Begum case, a dual national is someone who *is eligible* for another passport
- Renouncing another nationality might well not be enough. Most countries that allow renunciation allow reacquiring citizenship.
- So a future Home Sec. issues an order cancelling the citizenship of x hundred thousand people in one go.
In Ancient Athens, the Thirty Tyrants used the cancellation of citizenship to get round a law on trials for citizens.
It’s all been done before
Somehow he looks like he’s smoking even without a cigarette in his hand, but surely everything you know about life is screaming at you: this case is officially screwed!
To solve it, we need an unshaven, overweight, washed-out detective who's in the middle of divorce. A functioning alcoholic who the rest of the department hates.
Never gonna crack it with a detective who wears an actual fedora unironically.
https://x.com/msmelchen/status/1981022488722047463?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
Especially at the Conservatives and Labour.
Don’t know any Welsh Reform types - but I wouldn’t be surprised if they include Plaid in their “The existing parties are a conspiracy against The People” schtick.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqDPuJbU2qU
Seems like value
BBC Breakfast
@BBCBreakfast
1h
'It's not since 1534 that a British monarch will have prayed next to a Catholic Pope'
Mark Lowen spoke to #BBCBreakfast from Vatican City where King Charles will take part in a service with Pope Leo, the first time this will have happened since the Church of England split from the Catholic Church
https://bbc.co.uk/news/articles/
Reform > Plaid > Labour
Newly elected fuker becomes locally very unpopular very quickly when people realise they are not getting a moon on a stick. Fukers turn nasty.
Use the unpopularity of elected fukers as the political weather vane. They're making an embarrassment of themselves in places like Kent, and there is a lot more to come.
Zack Polanski was a Lib Dem but so was Lizzie Truss...the first line of a classic song if there ever was one.
The cynic might say that will be two parties infiltrated and ruined by Lib Dem agents - we'll activate the Labour and Reform agents if and when needed.
Welsh politics and cheese - two topics with which I could well do without on a bleak Thursday morning in London Town. Never mind.
A positive story from the City to start the day:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq50z91z6q4o
Plaid are still peripheral and no one has noticed they have been propping Labour up in the Senedd for years. They might do OK from the anyone but Labour vote.
In a Welsh context the LDs and Conservatives don't really trouble the electorate any more.
Ref 43.0%
PC 42.0%
Lab 9.5%
Con 2.5%
LD 1.5%
Grn 1.0%
Gwlad 0.3%
UKIP 0.2%
https://vote-2012.proboards.com/thread/19743/caerphilly-senedd-election-october-2025
“Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
Two Kings of Scots - Macbeth and James VIII. Admittedly debated at the time.
One of my favourite contra facts is that William of Orange was supported by Pope Innocent.
Musk is a moron. He is All In on AI and autonomy. To be fair to xAI (which is X, not Tesla) they went from Zero to leading edge in a couple of years. But on vehicles? Even their CFO said that fleetwide takeup of Full Self Driving is 12%. That isn't helped by Tesla selling a lot of vehicles incapable of FSD - Europe, Japan, older vehicles. But even with cars capable of running it takeup is c. 20%. Why? Because people like to drive.
So what is the big plan? A fleet of wheeled robots which will put Uber et al out of business. And then Optimus robots which supposedly can replace surgeons and Elon describes as a "robot army"
Elon Musk - the man calling for the violent overthrow of governments like here in the UK - thinks these governments will license him to sell a "robot army". Which will utterly destroy jobs and crash economies. If the likes of him want to start talking about UBI then maybe, but they never do.
Just build cars man. The best selling car in the world which is also the safest car ever tested. Which makes a GM profit. Why on earth would you not want to out-think and out-compete legacy dinosaur manufacturers who make serious negative GM on their EVs and keep going bankrupt?
Clearly a hip pun.
Possibly the worst general election result will be
- Reform largest party
- A coalition of Everyone Else to keep them out
- Reform can snipe at the resulting chaos without needing to take responsibility.
https://www.survation.com/reform-uk-and-plaid-cymru-neck-and-neck-in-caerphilly-senedd-by-election-labour-pushed-into-third/
Self-driving where the liability is on the driver to stay alert and take over when it goes bong, is the worst of all worlds.
It’s probably a couple of years away, but it’s been a couple of years away for the best part of a decade so far.
Tesla Q3 revenue up from $25.2bn to $28.1bn year-on-year is a pretty good effort in today’s car market.
Who knew Luton was like Gaza?
And if* a viable robot surgeon causes wait times and costs to crater then it's going to be hard for any government to resist. I'd expect any first world resistance to cause a charitable deployment in the third world.
*Strong 'if' here.
Buying your own self driving car is just the next step.
The LDs were, in their time, the repository of protest votes from the disillusioned, frustrated and angry but of course disappointed when they got to power and were comprehensively rejected in 2015.
The Conservatives got their come uppance in 2024 (and 1997) while Labour have lost power in 1979 and 2010.
Yet none of them has gone - all are still here.
If Reform win in 2028/9 and disappoint and lose power in 2033/4, will they fold up their tents and disappear back into obscurity? I suspect not - their brand of nationalist, anti-immigrant, socially conservative politics has a niche which I suspect none of the other parties can fully replace.
It may well be we are entering a prolonged period of political instability and electoral volatility.
And the "robot army" (and he used those exact words to describe scaled production of Optimus). Which can take jobs in vast numbers. The same - why would you license it?
This is the reverse industrial revolution. People complained then that the machines would take their jobs, but for much of the time the expansion in economic output meant more jobs. AI and Robotics means the literal decimation of jobs, likely many times over. Unless governments are prepared to give money to the newly unemployed the rollout of these technologies will be a socioeconomic disaster...
Compare with Royal or Presidential Pardons. In the UK we have typically had from zero to a few for each decade. Similar numbers apply in other European countries afaics. *
Compare to the USA where Presidential Pardons are a wired-in part of political corruption, and part of the mechanism for wealthy people to carry out organised crime without consequences. Plus are used as a sticky plaster on a broken system for those who can get attention or have powerful friends.
The important feature is to have it firewalled away from daily politics. That's a problem - MAYBE - with the decision still being with the Home Secretary. But OTOH we have the Conservatives saying they will abolish the Sentencing Council, which is a structure it has taken us half a century to develop to get such decisions away from day to day politics.
* Though there is a risk of this becoming an expected rubber stamp for success of tabloid media campaigns around "historical injustices" which need no intervention eg in the current witch trial campaigns, in the same way
1) Reform aren't a coherent political group. Most of their supporters seem unaware that Reforms policies will fuck them harder than the failed politics they are protesting against. The disconnect between the flag shaggers and the capitalist screw the workers subsets will become evident as and when Reform actually gain power in places. Labour and the Tories have both been on the receiving end of voter rage when they fail. Reform will try and deflect but so dod Labour and the Tories...
2) Reform are the cult of Farage. He ejects and expels anyone who forgets their place and that process is already ongoing. We already have the Advance UK schism and there inevitably will be more before the election. With the hard right engaged in a race to the bottom on policy, the schisms only force ever harder policies which creates more tension and more schisms.
What is needed is for a mainstream party to actually accept the country is broken and engage in political rebuilding. We need the new Beveridge Report.
Unless (taking a more new Labour type tactical regulation angle) there are hardware blocks on on-the-fly changes to how the vehicles operate.
With Musk we need to learn lessons from what happened with other (Russian etc) oligarchs.
As you say one Reform member is not going to change anything, but what should worry labour is that it is very likely many Reform candidates will be elected to the Senedd next May, as well as Plaid, posing the problem of who actually governs Wales in the next Senedd
Do have to laugh though at your description of him as having a "crude authenticity". I know exactly what you mean! But there is nothing at all authentic about the "Tommy Robinson" persona.
It's one of those papal factoids that don't stand up to scrutiny. Like the last one was the first non-European pope. Er, no he wasn't, and indeed the man usually regarded as the first pope was fairly obviously born in Asia.
No help to those of you placing bets, but it is on topic.
Good morning, everybody.
Melania (motivated, he has said, by Trump) threatened Michael Wolff (Trump biographer, Epstein biographer with a lot of research material still to come out) with a $1bn lawsuit if he doesn't withdraw and apologise yadda yadda yadda.
He's moved first by asking for a Declaratory Judgement that any case would be baseless, which could pull all the relevant people into testifying on oath if called into court. He's using anti-SLAPP law.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNQJJszPxV8
"Melania Trump BLINDSIDED by NEW LAWSUIT over EPSTEIN?!?"
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/michael-wolff-melania-trump-epstein-lawsuit-b2850417.html
I can have an S-Class and a driver for the same money.
But yes each iteration gets better and cheaper. It’s coming, just not quite there yet.
Remember though he isnt the same demographic pitch as Reform. When he has stood for election, even under PR he got derisory votes, despite his band wagon popping up in many places.
If it is a hung parliament due to the LibDems or Greens getting a few then, again, it's going to be a Plaid FM and Labour DFM. Inconceivable that LibDems or Greens would touch Reform.
Then again, my knowledge of Welsh politics is less than profound.
But lets focus on the illegals. There are millions. Deport every last one of them. Ignore the whingers, just do it. And as mentioned before, most people wont be horrified about deporting illegals, but more so that we werent deporting them anyway.
Not deporting people who have no right to be here is the extreme position.
I think it unlikely that over a number of private meetings between about 1950 and 2020 QEII did not pray with the Pope - though it may have been a doxology or "grace", or a Blessing, or similar.
If the government really wants to help people keep working, it should keep them in jobs, by say reducing payroll taxes and taxes on corporate profits, rather than increasing them. It should also cut benefits that subsidise idleness, from fake incapacity to bullshit university courses or preventing asylum seekers from working. That will reduce the artificial incentive to automate. If we do that, we'd have a labour market that'd be robust for years or decades to come.
Blaming natural technological progress for a decimation of jobs lets the true culprit, who sits in Number 11 Downing Street, off the hook much too easily.