My 100/1 tip to be our next Prime Minister – politicalbetting.com
My 100/1 tip to be our next Prime Minister – politicalbetting.com
We should be talking about David Lammy as our next PM. As Deputy PM he might be the best placed candidate if Sir Keir Starmer falls under the proverbial bus.
1
Comments
He’s not a remotely serious candidate for even his own job
RefUK 27%(+1),
CON 17%(nc),
LAB 17%(-3),
GRN 16%(+1)
LDEM 15%(nc),
According to YouGov, the 17% for Labour is, they believe believe, the lowest we have shown them on and the Green score is their highest.
Needless to say, it's an unusual result with four parties within 2 points of each other.
https://x.com/SamCoatesSky/status/1983053821849817502
Headlights to be reviewed after drivers complain of being 'blinded' at night
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn971jlpvvro
I have unusually sensitive eyes and driving at night is becoming a highly unpleasant experience. Not only are many modern headlights far too bright (in some cases clearly illegally bright) but too few people seem to know how to use the dipper.
They’re about to get hit with a massive hurricane.
Pressure 900mb already, and winds over 300km/h measured inside the storm.
What did Epstein get these medals for?
https://x.com/bbcnewsnight/status/1982943701484687800?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
Clearly making the default safer is better - just like default speed limits in Wales which are delivering excellent results - but a significant % of vehicles are already out there with these already, so the cat is out of the bag.
Suella Braverman went full Leroooooy Jenkins on the release of Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu and ended up deleting her tweet.
https://www.thepoke.com/2025/10/27/suella-braverman-prison-self-own/
Good tip - I've had a little nibble.
I see that Farage can be laid at just over 5s.
Burnham is now the clear Prince over the water for the left of the Labour party but unlike Lammy not an MP at the moment so ineligible to stand for Labour leader and PM
Stopping UK based retailers from selling them.
Failing MOTs for cars with them in.
I think Lammy's performance yesterday was a sad reflection on our politics as he ranted and raved at the dispatch box that must have had the victims of this woeful affair watching in despair
Passing the buck, then laughing, gesticulating, and pointing is exactly the reason politics is in the gutter at present
It may delight some but I expect the public turned away in disgust
But where do people vote tactically for the Greens? They have very few seats where they are the obvious challenger but a 16%+ vote share is a lot of wasted votes if evenly distributed.
And, unlike the Lib Dems, they will mostly win seats by overturning Labour as incumbent.
I suspect they'll be lots of seats where the Labour-Green vote easily surpasses Reforms, but Reform come through the middle to win. Some with Labour second, others with Greens second.
A bit like Reform+Tory vote in many seats last time.
The $130m "anonymous" donation to pay military salaries for (if I have this right) Trump's forces invading US cities came from a Tim Mellon (yes, that one).
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/25/timothy-mellon-donor-military-pay-shutdown
The Mellon Bank was tied up in Epstein's finances, and are now subject to a legal action from victims around various financial regulations and non-disclosure.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/27/jeffrey-epstein-lawsuit-us-banks
Reform ahead clearly but only on 27% so still very vulnerable to anti Farage tactical voting
Luckily had a couple of quid on from several months ago
So I would suggest whatever Labour say does them no favours with the public anymore.
The Lib Dem vote is concentrated in 120 seats. Outside those seats, their support will remain minute. Conversely, Labour supporters in those 120 seats will continue to vote tactically for the Lib Dem’s.
In Red Wall seats, the Thames Estuary, and the West Country, I’d expect the Conservative vote to collapse, in favour of Reform. Elsewhere, their support should hold up better.
I don’t expect much tactical voting in favour of the Conservatives, to keep out Reform.
Perhaps as we get closer to the GE, and have more up to date local election results, things might become a little clearer.
Most seats where the Greens poll highest though will be inner city and university town constituencies where Labour will be their main opponents and Reform won't be contenders. In such areas you might even get a few Tories tactically voting Starmer Labour to beat the hard left Polanski led Greens
Longer walks are a good thing. Although, 'long' appears to be 15 minutes or more, which isn't a huge amount...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn0gw6p8dllo
Plenty of voters across the spectrum are happy to cut off their nose to spite their face. The usual story is "I couldn't vote for [politician], because they were insufficiently [desired attribute]. Frankly it's [politician]'s fault that [much less desirable politician] won." But how many is plenty?
Yougov have found a third of LDs, a quarter of Labour voters and even 10% of Greens would tactically vote Conservative to beat Reform.
Those numbers would be even higher if a more centrist Tory like Cleverly led the Conservatives rather than hard right-wingers Kemi and Jenrick
Of course there is a decent chance that Sultana and Corbyn and co don't get their act together.
Largest federal workers’ union is urging Democrat senators to vote for the continuing resolution so that paychecks go out at the end of the month.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/27/federal-union-government-shutdown-end.html
The biggest union representing federal workers urged Democrats in Congress to end the ongoing U.S. government shutdown.
Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, called for the passage of a stopgap funding measure that Republicans have proposed
The Tories are pretending that everything happened after they were demolished last year. All Labour. So we now have Coutinho attacking the policies she literally crowed about as SofS for Energy, Jenrick stood outside an asylum hotel he opened as SofS demanding it be closed etc etc etc.
Jenrick says there needs to be an independent enquiry of the kind he never enacted when it happened under his watch. Braverman went one further, huffing and puffing about this release until someone pointed out the Exact Same Thing happened when she was Home Secretary. Badenoch saying "the Tories have a plan to" do all the things they didn't do for 14 years.
So yeah, Lammy got angry, because your party are grifting hypocrites. And its all over social media, elected Tories and their shills posting stuff that just gets laughed at. People aren't stupid, they remember last year, the year zero strategy isn't working. And Jenrick is supposed to be next in line...
It depends on whether they worry that they will get the blame for it (Trump will of course blame them anyway, but they won't worry about him or his sycophants, it's their own supporters they will be thinking of).
But maybe Ellie Chowns and co will have built up a strong enough personal vote by being good MPs as often happens with first time incumbants.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rpve82jxvo
The doomsters and gloomsters at the OBR have plucked another number out of thin air.
In that case the two main parties could face near wipeout, with leftwing voters going Green, centrist voters going Liberal Democrat and rightwing voters going Reform
Good luck with finding a single unifying winning policy platform for that lot.
https://motester.co.uk/mot-test-of-lights/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/10/27/corbyns-your-party-will-beat-greens/?recomm_id=1ae7e4db-f6c8-4a7e-b8dc-cb0df8907176
The public are not like us as political obsessives but see a government in free fall and seem to have concluded labour are not the answer
Indeed todays poll show exactly that and even has the Lib Dems in 5th place
Lord Ashcroft's poll today just demonstrates how little day to day skirmishes cut through despite all of us thinking they are important
The country is ungovernable and I have no answer to how we can get out of this complete mess
https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2025/10/digital-id-china-the-echr-stamp-duty-net-zero-the-budget-and-who-will-be-pm-after-the-next-election/
They're still in with a chance
An excellent intervention by Lammy and it bears repeating even though some of the Conservatives on here don't want to hear it.
To be fair, the Tories were wittering on about the Winter of Discontent when Blair became Labour leader so they can't really complain about having their past failings laid bare.
YouGov is another interesting poll though what it actually tells us I'm not sure given we are probably three and a half years off an election and if we consider opinion to be volatile now, think how much can happen in that time.
This morning, it's the plight of Jamaica which is concerning. A storm of that power and magnitude has been rare but the idea of wind gusts up to 200mph and 40 inches of rain is a bit more than your average British Bank Holiday in truth. I can only hope the preparations made by the Jamaicans will be adequate but the infrastructure damage will likely be immense and they will need plenty of help to get back on their feet.
Change the spec to appease a few complainants by all means but the reality is it is not an overnight fix, there’d be an,out of compliance and validation tests and would be very hard to apply retrospectively.
I worked in vehicle lighting for a few years up in Cannock and in Brum and these lights have to meet strict criteria to be able to be used on the road including the position of the beam.
Second ballot votes helped the left and Macron's centrist block overhaul the first round lead for Le Pen's party in the French legislative election last year.
Plaid won the Caerphilly by election with Labour tactical votes to beat Reform last week too.
Jenrick and probably Kemi would back a Farage minority government on confidence and supply
A Cleverly led Conservatives likely would not
Don't have the same issue with lorries/buses, but their lights tend to be much lower down. I have no data to support this - a lived experience insight.
DICK: The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
CADE: Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable
thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should
be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled
o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings:
but I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal
once to a thing, and I was never mine own man
since.
The options are:
1 Back Reform in a coalition. Almost certain death next time.
2 Buttress Reform, either in a formal C+S arrangement or informally. Less blood on hands (see tuition fees), but also less power. And in practice, just as much of the blame for the bad stuff you didn't vote against.
3 Oppose Reform with variable degrees of organisation. Let Nigel try to run a minority government with whatever bunch of grumpy gadflies get elected. Probably safest, but that just highlights how irrelevant the Conservatives would have become. And opposing their brother right-wingers would send the bulk of the party dolally (see 2010).
Small parties often fantasise about being The Kingmaker- having the outsized power to choose between two viable governments. It hardly ever happens that way. Partly realpolitik, but mostly arithmetic.
Osborne's legacy is the CoE having to second-guess the next inaccurate forecast from the OBR before it upends their medium-term plan
https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/URUMQI/page/4A41E00C-C624-412D-8E4D-BED6198DDB9B
Or when you next get new prescription glasses, ask your optician for the right coating. Yellow for driving. Blue for computers.
Assuming that the pensioner can’t afford this increase in outgoings they can their house right?
The buyer needs to find £10k pa out of taxed income, which probably means they will take £400k off the price (£400k x 5% = 20k pre tax income = £10k post tax income).
So the pensioner’s house is sellable at £2.6m (possibly a bit more because the buyer would have lower tax on a £2.6m house).
Estate agent and legal fees and moving expenses of 3% so net proceeds of about £2.5m
Let’s say they downsize to a £2m house because they can’t afford the additional tax on a larger property.
That’s a further £150k in stamp duty.
Which means that they end up with a £2m house and £350k in cash as a result of the downsize.
An effective tax rate of 65% and, I suspect, will blow a hole in many people’s retirement plans.
Property tax is messed up in the UK. But it shouldn’t just be a pot for a populist tax raid on “the rich”. They should replace stamp duty and council tax with an annual charge on all properties including a rollover relief.
(Incidentally I'm not sure NINOs are completely random; wartime identity card numbers certainly weren't, any more than car registration alphanumerics are today.)
But frankly the risk is much higher for the cyclist in not being seen, so there's no chance they'll try to restrict the lights.
If his boss were better at making similar points in connection with other spheres of government he might be enjoying better ratings - although only slightly, as it is the incumbent that tends to get it in the neck, regardless.
https://www.cyclinguk.org/lighting-regulations
Since 2005, flashing bicycle lights are permitted to be used as sole lights, provided the light flashes between 60 and 240 times per minute (1-4Hz).
However, IF the Conservatives join an anti-Reform tactical vote, that means accepting in some constituencies Conservative voters should vote Labour if the main aim is to stop Reform. In the past, you've been, let's say, amenable to that message in Scotland as an anti-SNP tactic but at Westminster, it's different.
The second part of this is IF the arithmetic after the election means the only way to stop a Reform minority Government is to support (via C&S) a Labour or Lab-LD Government, how would Cleverly play it?
Dr Ellie Chowns (North Herefordshire) (Green)
Given that the TUC has calculated that the wealthiest 10% of households in the UK hold more wealth than everyone else in the country put together, does the Prime Minister agree with me that it is inequality, not immigration, that is a threat to our country?
The Prime Minister
We need to deal both with levels of immigration and with inequality, and that is what the Government are doing. As we get on with trying to boost our economy, may I gently point out that if we want more equality and if we want our economy to be stronger, the hon. Lady’s party needs to start voting for some of the measures that will make it necessary?
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2025-10-22/debates/7D09717C-6AE9-4E42-9A79-E0295C2C555A/Engagements
This is the sort of thing I mean when suggesting the Prime Minister's replies start well but occasionally meander into the undergrowth. It is not all or even most of the time, of course, but it is one reason I'd not be surprised were he to follow Harold Wilson in retiring early. That said, I'm surprised Hansard has not cleaned it up so maybe I've been whooshed on this one.
But what you've described there is someone ending up with £2.4 million in assets - which is what a £3 million house was worth as recently as 2016. It's difficult to generate much sympathy for someone with untaxed unearned income of £600,000 in less than 10 years purely due to house price inflation.
It can be governed if we can step back from the noise and think. Lets take this issue - how does this happen and how do we avoid it? The simple truth is that Lammy - like Jenrick before him - is not in control of a system that has been fragmented and contracted out and sub contracted below that.
We need a new system, but that kind of big picture stuff eludes most of the politicians.