Punters still think the Lib Dems will win more seats than the Tories – politicalbetting.com
Punters still think the Lib Dems will win more seats than the Tories – politicalbetting.com
Lib Dems will ‘almost undoubtedly’ win more seats than Tories, says top pollster John Curtice.Sir John Curtice made the stark warning at a fringe event at the Conservative party conference.https://t.co/ZgfPlL3f6R
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The Lib Dems don't look like they'll benefit much from Labour's collapse. They've failed to make an impact or done anything to convince the public they're not Starmer cheerleaders. They're the only party not to call for Reeves to resign for example.
How Zia Yousef could lose the room on an immigration special in Dover was a new level of uselessness. Here he is insulting an audience member:
https://bsky.app/profile/implausibleblog.bsky.social/post/3m774ugj4e22s
Didnt the Stats for Lefties poll put the Tories behind both Greens and LDs in terms of number of seats, with Badenoch losing hers to Reform?
(Labour doing even worse of course, with Starmer losing his seat too)
Labour and the Conservatives are well down, Green is surging, Reform is rising high, and with the Labour meltdown both SNP and Plaid look like making handy gains.
This is I think the natural result of being maxed out on seats in a very geographically concentrated heartland, but mainly defending seats against a party that is down in polling since the election.
However, we might still see Kemi's successor as Deputy PM in such circumstances if we end up with a coalition of the unwilling.
All the polling suggests the LDs will retain most of their seats while the Conservatives will lose a number to Reform. The key to preventing this will be for Reform to drop back and the Conservatives to get back into the mid to upper 20s.
There are clear signs the Conservatives have dragged themselves back to around 20% (in historical terms, still awful but better than where they were a few months back) but if Reform are on 30-35% they will win a number of Tory seats.
As to the LD vs Conservative battle, despite some "talking up" from the usual suspects on here, the only evidence we have from local council by-election contests is the LDs are holding up well in their areas of seats and are being aided and abetted by Reform tearing lumps out of the Conservative vote. "Vote Farage, get Davey" as you might say.
Having a debate on immigration without any immigrants having a say would be rather odd. It wasn't these that gave Zia a hard time (indeed both came over fairly poorly) it was the white British in the audience that were giving him a hard time.
Credit to Polanski and Cooper for winning that audience.
As I've mentioned here before, both the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives have some thinking to do ahead of the next election. The question is whether the next election will primarily be Reform vs Not Reform or Labour vs Not Labour.
It seems some of our Conservative brethren are desperately anxious to paint the Lib Dems as the "stooges" for Labour while failing to realise that in many people's eyes the Tories are the "stooges" for Reform.
Reform seem adamant currently they neither need nor want any kind of electoral alliance, pact or deal with the Conservatives and it's up to the Conservatives to say, in the event of a Parliament with no one party enjoying an overall majority, what they would do. Would they support (even with Confidence & Supply) a minority Reform Government?
Fot the Liberal Democrats, the question is reversed - would they support (even with Confidence & Supply) a minority Labour Government?
Neither party has to make that call anytime soon (assuming the next GE is 2029) and a lot can and will happen between now and then including Reform imploding or splintering and we have Rupert Lowe leading his revolution from the beaches of Gorleston and Zack Polanski leading his revolution from wherever he's leading it but the fact remains we are in a volatile and unpredictable environment and the parties which react best to changing circumstances will prosper and that doesn't always mean instant, social media driven adversarial responses to every little thing or event.
Sir David Ratford, diplomat who investigated a Cold War spy scandal in Moscow
He was thrust into the headlines when a British expat in Moscow rang him in a panic – then two hours later fell from a 12th-floor window
...
Ratford generally kept a low profile, but a tragic incident in June 1983, shortly after his appointment as Minister at the embassy in Moscow, thrust him and his role into the headlines.
Dennis Skinner, representative of the Midland Bank in the Russian capital and doyen of Britain’s business community, plunged to his death from his 12th-floor apartment days after warning that there was a Soviet spy in the embassy; he had rung Ratford in panic just two hours before.
...
Soon after, Skinner’s body was found on the ground below his flat. Cane went to the embassy and asked Ratford how Skinner had been able to return there unaccompanied when he was supposedly being kept safe. Ratford subsequently had to field criticism that the embassy had not itself flown him home in the face of repeated warnings that his life was in danger.
...
He was appointed CVO in 1979, CMG in 1984 and KCMG in 1994.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2025/12/03/sir-david-ratford-cold-war-foreign-office-ambassador/ (£££)
If Reform at least double their vote share at the next GE then the Tories will lose dozens more seats. But the Lib Dems are not so vulnerable to a Reform surge. So the Lib Dems would expect to win more seats than the Tories without winning any extra seats themselves.
It's therefore worth comparing the odds for this bet with odds on Reform most seats, or first place in vote share, as they're likely to be related contingencies.
Reform most seats at 11/10 looks like a better bet than the Lib Dems to win more seats than the Tories at 8/11, and similarly Labour most seats at 27/10 is more attractive than the Tories to win more seats than the Lib Dems at 1/1.
https://www.economist.com/interactive/britain/2025/12/04/our-new-model-captures-the-lottery-of-britains-electoral-system
Our election model considers what might happen in each of Britain’s 632 constituencies if an election were held today. But rather than giving a single prediction, we fine-tuned our model to show a range of possible outcomes, based on historical trends and the latest opinion polls. As illustrated above, Britain’s electoral system is highly uncertain. We drew on data from the past 80 years of elections to quantify this uncertainty, and estimate how it might unfold in an imaginary election.
Torridge DC, Winkleigh
LD: 325 - 42.3% (+8.7)
RefUK: 252 - 32.8% (new)
Con: 191 - 24.9% (-23.7)
Lib Dem GAIN from Conservative
Another desperate night for both Labour and the Conservatives, however.
Curtice never, SFAICS, says what future outcomes will actually be until 10 pm on a Thursday in 2029. When he gets it right.
The Independent has not been entirely fair to him.
I have laid Reform most seats, and that is implicitly backing the Tories I suppose, so think the EVS on them to outseat (?) the LDs is probably alright. The fact the Tories are 9/2 to win most seats and LD are 75/1 means they are a great bet at EVS actually
- NOTA voters trying Reform out
- Rural left of centre non-Labourites being tempted by the shiny new greens (there’s always a fairly strong correlation between green and Lib Dem voting in the shires despite very different politics)
- Swing voters who were motivated to get the Tories out in 2024 sitting it out next time
- An SNP recovery squeezing seats in Scotland
- Weak local performance by the new MP (there will inevitably be one or two of those)
They are less vulnerable than usual to a Tory revival because that party is down further since the GE thanks to Reform. Even a mini surge would leave them in a relatively weak position in Lib Dem heartlands.
By contrast the conservatives face one huge existential battle, against Reform. They are to Reform what the Liberal party was to Labour in the early 20th C.
It seems that the Independent - and TSE - are not averse to a bit of clickbait.
Most seats and wards now seem to fall into either being strong LD prospects, or they pull in a derisory vote worthy of a Tory in Liverpool. All the seats where they could rely on 15% (+/-5%) regardless seem to have disappeared.
Would it? It would be odder to include voices on an issue who had a vested interest, a bias, in one direction.
Stodge is absolutely on the target here. However the decisions faced by LDs and Tories are a bit different. Unless something dramatic changes I think nearly everyone in a seat that LD can win and Labour can't (maybe 100 max) will assume that the LDs, whatever they say in advance, will give enough aid to Labour if it is required to stop a Reform government. LD voters who mostly hate Labour will have a problem over who to vote for. But not many LDs will prefer Reform to Labour.
The Tory situation is quite different. The huge national pool of people who have voted Tory and could possibly do so in the future (whatever they currently say) is absolutely deadlocked between those (like me) who would never vote for them if they might sustain Reform, those who will only vote for them if they would, and those who will vote Tory regardless of outcomes.
The LD path is fairly easy - as long as their ambition remains 70-100 seats max. The Tory path at the moment looks impossible until they can break through as potential winners in their own right.
They also have ‘Reform to have 10 sitting MPs by the next GE’ at 1/2 which is another massive lay in my opinion
The first one seems more wrong though. Is it really 67% likely that both the Tories and Labour have changed leaders by the next GE?
Actually only a few miles across the Wash from North Norfolk.
The point being, if I am right the stronger Reform are the more likely LDs are to gain seats. Our North Dorset seat last time was Con 37%, LD 34%, Reform 16%. Yesterday's projection had N Dorset going to Reform, and it may well do but it's not likely to be the LD voters switching imo.
It’s abrasive and confrontational regardless of whether it is a fair comment or not - context doesn’t matter
https://historicalragbag.com/2020/06/22/king-john-his-treasure-and-the-wash/
Next Question Time is a law 'n' order special. Let's fill the seats with ex-cons.
(Actually, that ain't a bad idea...)
It's not in the interest of anti-migrant parties to solve immigration problems.
Starmer to lose his seat 10/3
Sir Keir lost almost half his voters from 2019-2024 (36641 to 18884) getting 48.9% of the vote compared with 65.4% five years earlier, so he wasn’t exactly killing it when they won a landslide. Now he’s the most unpopular PM in history, and Labour are polling in the teens, there must be a better than 23% chance that he is unseated, if he doesn’t chicken out beforehand (in which case I assume the bet would be void)
The Tories' big strategic problem is that there are relatively few places left where voting for them is now the best way to avoid Labour winning. Indeed voting Tory could easily "let Labour in".
This report is a bit lower but official at 22-23%. 27% was from Personnel Today quoting another MoJ report I can't quickly find.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/671a27f0da8fb5e23e65a435/Estimate_of_the_number_of_working_age_people_with_a_nominal_record_on_the_Police_National_Computer_pdf.pdf
The whole point of Cloudflare is to make websites reliable and scalable.
The Tories' problem is that, their members mostly being elderly, they do have difficulty in getting people to travel to a TV studio of an evening to join the audience. However hard the BBC tries to allocate the seats fairly, the Tories always risk not being able to rustle up enough people to go, or have no shows when their ticket holders decide to stay in with their cocoa.
"The total number of nominal criminal records held (10,520,929) includes not only those persons with convictions but also those with impending prosecutions, cautions, cases that require no further action and any other criminal justice activity on their record, e.g. arrested but not charged." (My bold).
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nominal-criminal-records-on-the-police-national-computer/nominal-criminal-records-on-the-police-national-computer
In an alternative universe, your party delivered the Jenkins Report recommendations back when you were an MP in the early 2000s and we've enjoyed a couple of decades of stable centre-left coalitions.
The reason this sort of works better than a positive appeal is that many people, encouraged by the media, think that most politicians are somewhere between a bit rubbish and totally repulsive. Voting for someone to stop the worst of them seems entirely plausible. But it's a sad state of affairs.
I could be wrong though (and I know you never are 😉) so as I said it would be good to see some polling. Is there something around 2024 vote switchers that would show this?
Cautions should be excluded from the disclosure requirements, sensibly.
Is the nothing out there even slightly positive that might cheer us up?
'An elf reported being screamed at (“I can’t believe you’ve done this. Look what you’ve done to my children. They’re crying, their fingers are blue. You’re rip-off merchants, you’re taking the mickey out of us”), slapped and run over with a buggy. Two dads had a fight in a gingerbread house and one disgruntled employee reportedly told a visitor that “Santa’s fucking dead”. After six days the park closed to visitors. Three years later the organisers were found guilty of eight charges of misleading the public, and jailed for 13 months each.'
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/dec/05/winter-wonderland-disasters
You could just as easily have said "forgetting to buy a train ticket, failing to see a speed limit sign, getting your maths wrong on your tax form...."
33% of current LD voters would vote Conservative in a Conservative v Reform marginal and only 8% Reform
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/51713-is-tactical-voting-more-of-a-threat-or-opportunity-for-reform-uk
Home Alone crowned UK’s favourite Christmas film as nation says 'Ho Ho No' to Die Hard Christmas status
As the festive season is in full swing, one of Britain’s most hotly debated Christmas questions has yet again been put to the test, and the nation has spoken. According to a new survey of 2,000 people in the UK conducted by the BBFC, Die Hard has officially been voted not a Christmas film.
https://www.bbfc.co.uk/press-releases/home-alone-crowned-uks-favourite-christmas-film-as-nation-says-ho-ho-no-to-die-hard-christmas-status
One of the perennial arguments on PB, for example, is what might or might not work to discourage certain categories of information.
The President of the USA also has a criminal record and ex Presidents of France and Brazil have been or are in prison and several former MPs have gone to prison and indeed at least one serving MP has been in prison it is hardly that unusual. Not forgetting all the people who were convicted of an offence but never went to prison.
Even Jesus Christ had a criminal record
We joke that my wife is a thief. Several days after being at a restaurant she found a knife from the restaurant in her bag. She has no idea how it got there (so she says).
Having said that I take @hyufd's point. It is easy to have had a minor offence. I think I am completely clean, but I have had one speeding offence sometime ago from a camera. Does that count? I don't think it does.
I was more traumatized as a 10 year old when I took a Lego brochure from Woolworths thinking it was free, only to discover I had stolen a 10p brochure... The horror, the horror.