Make your suggestions – politicalbetting.com
Make your suggestions – politicalbetting.com
Any requests please for 2026 politics specials?Number of by-elections?Number of Prime Ministers?Number of Reform defections?
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Any requests please for 2026 politics specials?Number of by-elections?Number of Prime Ministers?Number of Reform defections?
Comments
Insert your favourite ‘the law is an ass’ here.
Not sure where to put X for maximum entertainment. Fifteen and twenty-five would be rather different questions.
https://x.com/meidastouch/status/1994273599344050523?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
If the Tories can resist the idiocy of replacing with Jenrick if results in May aren’t perfect and she gets the chance to really build her profile with the electorate then I think she has a chance of beating reform.
I think by the next election people will like the no nonsense attitude and I think her attacks on Reform in the clip are the approach to take.
Other opinions are of course available.
‘We had six MPs and four factions’: inside Your Party’s toxic power struggles
At an early meeting to set the path for what would become Your Party, participants quickly agreed on one thing: given the cliches about leftwingers forever falling out, at all costs they must avoid a descent into factionalism.
Six months on and the Liverpool venue hosting this weekend’s inaugural Your Party conference has been warned to expect potential disruption, including stage invasions by disgruntled members representing particular wings. Extra security guards have been hired.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/28/your-party-rifts-power-struggles-jeremy-corbyn-zarah-sultana
https://x.com/bohuslavskakate/status/1994182059959452091
(Mine, apart from hating SKS not being a solid foundation for any party, is that tech makes it too easy to arrange the surface features of a movement when there's nothing underneath.)
Word is money is so tight that their troops aren't being paid. That is really going to piss off the senior officers, if they can't extort money from their troops.
As a brand new outfit, there is 'everything to fight for' in terms of both its platform and who gets what job and hence where the organisational power lies. And it isn't being formed because of a strong, single imperative (for example the SDP originated from counter-reaction to Labour's opposition to Europe), so they don't have much to unite around other than Gaza.
At some point the LBGTQIA+- are going to fall out with the Islamists.
Not. My. Party.
This will suit Labour so long as the revival is in helpful locations where they face a Reform threat. It needs a neatly divided right.
That in turn helps the Greens. They’re an indulgent choice for many voters who don’t think there’s a real risk of the right getting back in. Plaid perhaps, too.
It will not suit the Lib Dems. Lib Dem seat count is essentially the inverse product of Tory vote share. And Farage is the ultimate bogeyman for Lib Dems supporters.
It’s a fiasco. Corbyn is a dithered and Sultana a liability.
They lost so many soldiers trying to get to Pokrovsk, said to be over 100,000, that when they arrived they barely had time to put a flag in the town square before they were chased out again by the defenders.
UKIP and its successors are the exception, because there wasn’t an established party the populist right could inhabit at the time they first surged (the Conservatives were still officially a pro-EU party).
(From our perspective if you rule out late spring 29 doesn’t that push an election to autumn 28)? I can’t see them wanting to do an election in the face of upcoming tax rises so not March 29.
Oh wait, I am thinking about the Krankies, I still cannot get over them being swingers.
Number of times Greens > Lib Dem
Date of first Green > Labour cross over
Date of first Tory > Reform cross over
Number of Cabinet resignations
1) The number of times I mention I tipped Ed Milliband at 100/1 to succeed Starmer in PB headers
and
2) The number of times I mention I tipped Pierre Poilievre to lose his seat at 14/1 in PB headers
The OBR are quite weak on this imo - though they don't have much choice but to take the government's word. They do have the famous fuel duty graph which demonstrates that promised increases never materialise, even though their forecasts depend on that happening.
That most of the time they are asked to mark the answer to a silly question is the fault of the question setter, not the marker.
Reform easy gain from Labour in Sunderland, Tories and independents being squeezed further.
Hetton (Sunderland) Council By-Election Result:
➡️ RFM: 45.2% (+34.3)
🙋 Ind: 25.6% (-3.6)
🌹 LAB: 22.7% (-23.9)
🔶 LDM: 4.2% (+1.7)
🌳 CON: 2.3% (-3.6)
No GRN (-5.0) as previous.
Reform GAIN from Labour.
Changes w/ 2024.
https://x.com/electionmapsuk/status/1994194411941474636?s=46
Comfortable Lib Dem hold in Pendle, increasing share despite Reform surging.
Barnoldswick (Pendle) Council By-Election Result:
🔶 LDM: 59.8% (+1.5)
➡️ RFM: 26.2% (New)
🌳 CON: 10.1% (-11.7)
🌹 LAB: 3.9% (-11.1)
No GRN (-4.9) as previous.
Liberal Democrat HOLD.
Changes w/ 2024.
https://x.com/electionmapsuk/status/1994195157814489218?s=46
Whether it is to pull Santa's sleigh or to eat isn't clear.
Rumours are that if Slot goes we're going for Eddie Howe and he wants to come, he's very good friends with Richard Hughes and Michael Edwards.
I generally visit bars in hotels.
The budget response seems to have broken through and given her airtime - it seems to be circulating well on social media. If I were advising her I think I’d tell her to keep up the attacking style in Parliament - it gets people talking if nothing else. In another era, Blair often was very combative in his PMQs performances against Major - nothing like as savage as Badenoch was on Wednesday, mind, but times have changed and short clips on social media are the order of the day now.
She then needs to spend the first quarter of the year going heavy on the economy, and really setting out an alternative. If the Tories win back a modicum of credibility on the economy, even if not to everyone, the political landscape shifts again.
Truss was adored. The right wing press thought she was the Messiah. The Mail doted on her. Crazies like Dorries and Rees Mogg are everywhere. Anyone wishing for a Tory renaissance anytime soon ought to read it.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/25/minnesota-fight-trump-somalis-tps-order
In the days since the president said he would be ending a legal immigration status program for Somalis in Minnesota, local elected officials and community members said they will fight back.
On Truth Social on Friday, Trump wrote that he would be “terminating, effective immediately” temporary protected status for Somalis in Minnesota. Trump wrote that Minnesota was a “hub of fraudulent money laundering activity”. “Send them back to where they came from. It’s OVER!” he wrote.
Community advocates said the rhetoric smearing all Somalis is inaccurate and puts them at risk. They worry about increased targeting for immigration enforcement and demonization of the Somali community.
The move comes after several high-profile instances of fraud in state programs including by Somali residents, which rightwing media have amplified. A recent piece alleged these fraudulent activities meant Minnesota taxpayers were funding terrorist groups in Somalia. Minnesota’s Republican members of Congress then elevated that claim in a letter seeking an investigation.
“If anyone, regardless of their race, religion, or ethnicity, committed fraud, they should be held accountable under the law as individuals,” Khalid Omar, an organizer with interfaith group Isaiah, said. “Collective punishment is wrong and racist, and using the actions of a few people to attack an entire community is un-American.”
TPS allows people from countries with unsafe or unstable conditions to live legally in the US. An administration can grant or remove it, through the Department of Homeland Security, as the Trump administration has done for countries such as Venezuela since Trump took office in January. The department has so far not removed Somalia from the countries under the status.
Typically, the removal of TPS would apply nationwide, not just to a single state like Minnesota, making Trump’s promise to remove it solely for the state, and seemingly not related to Somalia’s stability, legally questionable.
“Obviously, fraud investigations in the United States do not have anything to do with whether conditions in Somalia have stabilized or not,” said Julia Decker, policy director at the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.
Minnesota is home to the nation’s largest Somali population, most of whom are US citizens. Ilhan Omar, a congresswoman and frequent target for Trump and his allies, said in a statement on X, in response to supporters of Trump’s announcement: “I am a citizen and so are majority of Somalis in America. Good luck celebrating a policy change that really doesn’t have much impact on the Somalis you love to hate. We are here to stay.”
TPS currently protects about 700 people from Somalia residing across the US from deportation..
It’s the economy, it’s tax, it’s future stability. It’s the Tories pitch and the government’s weakness.
Trump: I had an MRI and the result was outstanding.
Reporter: Was it your brain?
Trump: I have no idea what they analyzed, but whatever they analyzed, they analyzed it well.
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1989514749504360781
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn09x11yr7ro
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxweyy157go
The notion that it's biased against him is utterly laughable.
@RpsAgainstTrump
Asked if he’ll attend the funeral of West Virginia National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom, Trump said:
“It’s certainly something I can conceive of… I won West Virginia by one of the biggest margins of any president anywhere.”
https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1994228073760276785?s=20
Comedy on TwiX as fuker fans try to justify why a black shirt and a gold party badge and 18 are not fascist. We truly are waiting for the worms...
Coming soon! Hugo Boss leather trenchcoats. And fetching thigh-length leather boots.
Vance having direct power, or Vance having power behind the throne of a blob of orange jelly with a massive ego?
Not a cheerful thought for a Friday morning, but there you are.
I see that cash out is currently at 15/2 (I was on at 100+) and wish I'd put more on
The lesson labour should learn is the Tories got rid of Truss in just 6 weeks not an 18 month slow burn of economic tragedy and incompetence delivered by Starmer and Reeves
I note the markets are expressing concern that because of the back loading of the tax increases towards the next GE the government may attempt to defer the pain until the next parliament
The only way I want Trump defanged is by a Democratic landslide next year. But it's looking increasingly possible that age will catch up with him first.
But I think it's worth making a market on.
Deferring all the fiscal pain to the next parliament was the Sunak/Hunt strategy, so perfectly fair game to return the favour.
The risk is that Labour might win that election, unlikely as that seems. More likely Reform collapses in true "Your Party" style.
Ie no evidence for the accusation but some sort of event that they could build on
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2025/nov/28/workers-rights-bill-unfair-dismissal-uk-politics-latest-news-updates-labour-budget-keir-starmer
Worst of all worlds.
To conflate her circumstances with those of Starmer and Reeves is ridiculous.
If anything, the "slow burn of economic tragedy and incompetence" could, if I were callous, be described as Continuity Sunak and Hunt and I agree that's the problem. There is the same timidity among this Labour Government as there was with Blair after 1997 but he inherited (thanks to Ken Clarke) as strong an economy as you could wish and Brown followed Clarke's spending until 1999 when, to general agreement, spending started to rise.
Reeves has an understand of the enormity of the problem, no doubt, but she is as bereft of solutions as most other western Governments at this time who are likewise struggling with the post-pandemic inheritance of demographic, technological, socio-economic and geopolitical changes, all of which combine to negate economic growth.
Truss and Kwarteng failed, in part, because their proposals bumped up against people's notion of "fairness" which is not what it was. The perception of encouraging economic growth by making the very wealthy even wealthier and making the poorest and those dependent on Government largesse even poorer might be economically "sound" for growth but it doesn't work politically as all the polling suggests.
Reeves also faces the economic and political conundrum which, simply put, is you can increase everyone's taxes but not mine and you can cut everyone else's services but not the ones I and my family use. Magnify that by 50-60 million and you have the current Gordian Knot which is strangling politics and economics alike.
Starmer and Reeves didn't as they funded their increased spending, especially on welfare, with higher taxes, especially on property, savings, shares and private pensions. Even if some of those taxes don't come in until 2029