The year according to YouGov – politicalbetting.com
The year according to YouGov – politicalbetting.com
?/ How has political opinion changed over 2025?In voting intention, Labour have made the biggest losses, while the Greens have gained most, and Reform UK have established a clear leadRef: 28% (+3 from 12-13 Jan)Lab: 18% (-8)Grn: 17% (+9)Con: 17% (-5)LD: 14% (=)yougov.co.uk/politics/art…
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It’s not difficult to imagine Foakes would be a better keeper than Smith, or that James Rew would score as many runs as Smith does as well as being a better keeper.
It’s not daft to suggest Potts would take more wickets and offer more control than Carse, or Leach be a better option than Jacks or Bashir with the ball. True, he might not take wickets but nor do they, and he wouldn’t leak runs at such a rate.
And yet they are shoved out of the way for players who play ‘the Bazball way.’
I do not think they would necessarily win the Ashes in Australia, but nor would they endlessly self-destruct as this lot have repeatedly over the last twelve months.
Which tells me there is something fundamentally wrong with the national selectors that needs changing.
I mean, you may be referring to incumbent leaders, but as Massive and Lettuce Lady continue to self destruct in ways that would make Ollie Pope blush for him not to have looked like more of a tosser than he did is surely some achievement.
Good morning, everyone.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/19/uk-government-borrowing-november-rachel-reeves-budget-economy
Or else a rousing New Year's Eve chorus of D:Ream
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6QhAZckY8w
They dosh up their mates and make the rest of us foot the bill.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed public sector net borrowing – the difference between spending and income – was £11.7bn last month, £1.9bn less than in the same month a year earlier.
I remember when it meant debt, and then when reducing the deficit confused things for some
I note how you omitted the expected spending was £10bn but was actually £11.9bn.
By their fruits shall ye know them.
And you can hardly judge him for not performing when he hasn't been picked (absurdly not for this wicket).
You don't write off promising spinners in they're early twenties.
Jacks rather more evidently doesn't have it (though it's instructive to note that he's bowled 39 overs in this test - and a mere 259 in red ball cricket in the last three years).
Enjoy the pictures at the top of this article.
https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/ashes-tours-can-end-careers-ollie-pope-could-be-next-1516133
So the PB thread like the UK main stream media totally ignored it, literal tumble weed here and elsewhere, special shout out to SkyNews for mentioning it but doing sod all else to investigate it. Now just imagine if this had been a governing party at Westminster where now THREE female elected MPs had been reported to have had their offices bugged by party staffers?! I have no doubt that the Westminster Lobby would have been all over the story and it would have been wall to wall coverage in the 24/7 News channels, especially when the original breaking story reported that the male aid who bugged one female MSP had since moved to work for an SNP MP?!
Sorry TSE but I was really annoyed when you almost affectionately made fun of and dismissed this shocking scandal, and it is incredible serious story that should have resulted in not only a Parliamentary investigation, but a Police investigation too. I said early yesterday that Holyrood was not only broken, it really is not fit for purpose and that matters with a big election looming there in May next year and I stand by that claim today more than ever. But again I was just so saddened and frustrated at the lack of response here or in the media, not even the most basic questions asked. And to say this scandal stinks is an understatement, no one has asked why or to what end these female SNP MSPs who remain anonymous were bugged, but the Scottish Sun is reporting it suggests internal SNP infighting.
But the cynic in me after 18 eighteen years of this appalling SNP Government did have one question, why did it take until yesterday for this breaking story to finally see the light of day just as Holyrood went into Christmas recess and both politicians and political journalists departed to go on their festive holidays until the New Year.. Its almost as if this story finally having to break was stage managed so it would hopefully get the least attention or any proper scrutiny by the Holyrood Parliament, the local media or the public. This is how the SNP operate, totally secretive and utterly ruthless in their media management and so cynically in their media operation but they get away with it time and time again because Scotland is deemed a side show despite the fact that they control so much of our public services up here and including taxation when it comes to budgets but we like Wales and NI are totally failed by the UK media!
And the PB crew fell for it yet again yesterday because they were not even interested.... Oh to be a female MSP in the work place at Holyrood right now!
Its obvious that while Badenoch continues to shed support to Farage, Polanski continues to gain supporters from Starmer. The Greens are where those former Labour voters have gone.
Incidentally Polanski is also the most popular of the party leaders, albeit slightly negative and 49% not taking a view.
I think there will be a lot of attention to the Greens in 2026, particularly they are likely to do well in the May elections in England.
The Greens are a problem for the left including the lib dems but anyone who supports Polanski's promises is no better than those supporting Farage
Both are extreme and incoherent
Then I thought what if AI could replace the word 'tragedy' with 'subsidy' to produce alternate lyrics ... but WTAF. Here's the conversation with AI
It's too long to produce here but if you'd like political parody complete with lyrics, stage direction and instructions for the movie video, here it is.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/yes-BSm1B4ZcSzWQtjao1DX5fg
A shimmering 1970s disco aesthetic fused with a modern “financial empowerment” theme. Think glitter meets government grant, with tongue-in-cheek flair and plenty of sparkle.
The Tories have gone backwards against a disasterously unpopular government, and are heading for another drubbing in the May elections.
How much is typical mid term blues?
How much withstands a tactical battle vs Reform?
Feels very volatile to me. Polanski is an impressive communicator for sure, but doesn't have the answers, so the Farage parallel is valid imo.
Righty-ho !
You could have included a quote with context; you chose not to do so.
Here, for example, is the Guardian's Scotland page:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/scotland
They're the national most likely to run with the story, and so far, crickets.
A quick google throws up only the Scottish Sun:
https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/15705778/female-snp-msps-bugged-male-aides-spying-scandal/
I suspect that this might be one of those stories which takes a few days (or even weeks, given the impending Xmas break) to gain some momentum.
It feels like mainly the left wing disappointment vote now Labour is actually in government.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxes/publicsectorfinance/bulletins/publicsectorfinances/november2025
"Public sector net debt excluding public sector banks - a measure of the amount of money owed to the UK private sector and overseas, less any liquid assets held - was provisionally estimated at 95.6% of GDP at the end of November 2025; this was 0.3 percentage points more than at the end of November 2024 and remains at levels last seen in the early 1960s."
I expect that will end what little credibility they retained as a serious environmental movement, but more interesting is whether or not that split in the left of centre vote will persist into the next election.
Which is why the replacement of Starmer will be someone from the centre-left of the party, not Streeting or Mahmood.
'The so-called ‘hero voters’ Labour targeted in 2024 did not actually turn out for them in any great numbers. So not only are Labour fighting the last war, they are fighting it with a battle-plan that didn’t actually work. It’s Labour’s very own winter invasion of Russia.'
@benansell.bsky.social
https://benansell.substack.com/p/bloc-parties
To an extent he is the same as Farage, though wwithout the foreign ownership.
Between Farage and Polanski supporters there is half of our electorate. We might be appalled at that but it looks like the future, with Polanski representing a Populist left.
What do our PB historians made of it ?
https://x.com/joachim_voth/status/2001688613055267204
How did people in 1913 see the world? How did they think about the future? We trained LLMs exclusively on pre-1913 texts—no Wikipedia, no 20/20. The model literally doesn't know WWI happened. Announcing the Ranke-4B family of models. Coming soon: https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms
However when he turned to debt, and the issue of at what point it becomes unsustainable, Bailey twice gave thoughtful and considered replies which failed to touch on the question in any way at all. After which Rajan turned to the subject of, IIRC, Christmas ties.
It felt, no doubt wrongly, to this listener, that there was an interview deal: the question would be asked and not answered, and no attention drawn to the yawning gap.
If it isn't Bailey's job to have a view on this, whose is it? And at what point does debt become unsustainable?
Either are going to struggle to govern in the slightest bit coherently.
We might look back on the last decade as a period of relative competence.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/25710475.female-msps-say-bugged-male-staffers/
https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/at-least-three-female-snp-msps-say-they-were-bugged-by-male-aides-5448975?ref=ed_direct
And Herald, DT, DM, DE(Scot), BBC, Sky.
No 10 normally holds two briefings on most days that parliament sits to allow the lobby – political journalists that cover Westminster – to question the prime minister’s official spokesperson.
But in an email on Thursday, Tim Allan, Downing Street’s executive director of communications, said there would be no afternoon briefings from next month. He said No 10 would instead hold “occasional” afternoon press conferences with ministers, as well as technical briefings with officials.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/dec/18/journalists-condemn-surprise-shake-up-no-10-lobby-briefings
To me that does not look like a thing that will help the Downing Street comms strategy deliver what they perhaps need - unless there is more to come alongside these changes.
Im sure that will inspire support.
Werent they meant to be better, cleaner the adults in the room ?
The more you look at those two, the more you realise just how fortunate Graeme Swann was to be abandoned in his teens and not come back for several years.
Merry Christmas everyone.
(NB He visited Algarkirk on 12th March 1914).
And the point about never playing red ball cricket is the most powerful one. Swann bowled up to 1000 overs in a season; Jacks less than ninety.
Controlling our borders and migration is a sensible thing. The Greens are merely, like Lib Dem’s, open door fanatics. That’s fair enough but to pretend controlling borders and migration is reform lite is wrong, there’s no remigration talk.
Also changing the rules on the years needed to get ILR is absolutely right. The Boriswave was an economic time bomb. As has been discussed previously.
It's the mirror image of the problem the Conservatives still haven't really answered after twenty years of Faragism. How should a party of government deal with a rival saying all the things that you also wish were true, but you know aren't?
If you move towards the populists on your side, throw them a bone so to speak, it doesn't win back many voters. The populists will pocket the wins, look vindicated and still be better communicators. So they will just go one step more extreme. And repeat.
I think PBers have occasionally spoken approvingly of the German Greens. Their most prominent politician of recent times, Baerbock, seems to have become part of the German establishment, right down to adopting their unblinking support of every action of Israel. She’s now president of the UN General Assembly. At least Polanski is unlikely to take that path.
The national media haven't yet really got started on this, I think ?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czdg21yq833o.amp
I'm just forecasting that either will likely be even worse in government.
An idea of how people thought and felt in any era can be gained by reading newspapers of the period for several days*, and the results are usually interesting. AI is doing the same thing, just quicker.
*Something that will be to put it mildly more challenging for historians of our own times.
It’s the ten ton African bush elephant in the very small room.
Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;
And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;
And the countryside not caring
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheats' restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word—the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
Mone, David Mellor (not that one!), Andrew Mills, Cummings, Gove, Hancock, Chadlington, is just a small number of the spivs who made millions from PPE that was unfit for purpose and politicians who at the very least did not deal with perceived conflicts of interest properly.
If Alan is able to point to any Labour ministers or advisers guilty of similar then they should be investigated and dealt with.
Support or opposition to Israel hasn't much, if anything at all to do with environmentalism.
But you raise a good question. What might the policies be of a serious Green Party which aspired to actually govern effectively, and was motivated primarily by environmental pragmatism ?
Where's the growth, where's the housebuilding, where's the debt reduction ?
There isnt any.
Like all AIs, it will be a fallible tool which needs someone with actual knowledge of a given period to use most effectively, but it might be quite a powerful one, since it could/can have access to a vast amount of texts in any language.
(Consider, for example, the massive volumes of Korean court histories, which on their own might otherwise require a lifetime of study.)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Opinion_polling_graph_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election_(post-2024).svg
The Tories are now averaging ahead of Labour, for the first time in yonks. Labour are at risk of being reeled in by the Greens. I know you want to depict the Tories as dead, but that may not be the story of 2026-8.
Re the debt burden, there's no good answer to the question, "when does it become unsustainable?". Technically it's sustainable for as long as we can service it but there's more to it than that. Eg if the financial constraints it creates are leading the public to consider voting populist chancers and fantasists into government you could argue it's already become politically unsustainable.
"They dosh up their mates and make the rest of us foot the bill" is what the Johnson govt did to the tune of £billions.
Labour has had some scandals, which they have dealt with in the main, Rayner, Siddique, Mandelson, but mainly they've just been a bit crap and not delivered on promises.
You should be glad, just think how angry you'd be if Labour were delivering on their manifesto promises, they might even be popular.
This tended to inspire further nostalgia about the halcyon final days of peace, followed by the greyness and grimness of war, which rather drew a veil over memories of the disasters brewing in Ireland and the coal industry.
Looking him he's interesting as a Liberal teetotaller and campaigner for women's suffrage, with a weekly article in the Manchester Guardian. He was old - appointed at 67 and died in post at 77. Archbishop Randolf Davidson thought him "faddish".
By 1910 Lincoln Diocese had shrunk; up until 1884 it included Nottinghamshire.
My favourite example of knowledge "bound by what is available online" is everyone who has been quoting and linking to "The Catholic Encyclopaedia" as an authoritative source on everything Roman Catholic since the 1990s, which is is actually the 1913-15 edition transcribed largely by hand * - so is perhaps overweight in the "interesting" nature of Victorian Roman Catholic opinion. I've been mentioning it in places for decades, but no one has been interested; easy availability overrules homework. They literally miss out on the entirety of modern research and scholarship.
It's ironic that we now have a Governing movement in the USA which in measure wants to live in that period.
* https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/00002a.htm
In the longer run Labour, despite their continuing fall have slightly less to fear than the Tories. If the Tories are unlucky Reform will demolish them. There is no one party that looks, at this moment, that it can eat Labour.
Both may yet be demolished, and both may yet regain their top slots, but the Tory position (I have voted for them for 50 years but not now, and would really like them to recover their sanity) is more dangerous than Labour's.
Sure, rehashing, but clearly the story isn't being ignored. I think rather as @AugustusCarp2 and @TSE made clear nobody has any idea what is going on or cui bono. And I suppose if one lets speculation rip regardless then there's the risk of a defamation or even contempt action - remember the identification by elimination precedent of a few years back.
BTW the original Scotsman tweet was ambiguous - at least one other report seems to make clear the (first?) alleged bugging was done by someone acting as a MSP staffer, not a SNP party staffer, ie direct employee of the individual MSP using SP funding. Not that it changes the demerits of the alleged action, but it's worth considering the practical and legal implications.
But at least you can accept this is a failing government and there is no prospect short term of things improving.
(The Lincoln Record Society are a good deed in a bad world. Long may they prosper.)
To be polling 7% worse than the worst Tory election result in 2 centuries is not good for the Tories.
It isn't just the polling that shows this very poor mid term performance by the Tories it is also the almost weekly defections of former Tory MPs and councillors to Reform. They know that their only way back into elected positions is to defect to another party.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8SLZ9w4tiKc
One for @Sunil_Prasannan