Imagine if Keir Starmer set the legal dogs on Andrew Bailey for not slashing interest rates. If that didn't lead to his departure (Starmer, I mean) it'd indicate we were well down the path from liberal democracy to authoritarianism, wouldn't it?
Is the Bank of England's role in setting interest rates actually codified in statute, or is it simply a decision Gordon Brown took that everyone has stuck with since?
I think the difference in Britain is that the Executive in Britain has much more freedom to act, in law, than in the US, because the Executive in Britain is constrained by the ability of the Commons to replace it at will - as happened twice during the last Parliament - more than by a Constitution or law.
So a comparison between the powers and actions of the Executive in the US and the UK doesn't really make any sense, because they operate so very differently.
Yes, different systems. Our particular sour spot would be a PM of bad despotic character with a big majority and a supine 'one man band' party. Food for thought given current polling.
Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.
Given his record in government and other stuff I believe he would sell his granny if offered.
Imagine if Keir Starmer set the legal dogs on Andrew Bailey for not slashing interest rates. If that didn't lead to his departure (Starmer, I mean) it'd indicate we were well down the path from liberal democracy to authoritarianism, wouldn't it?
The U.K. populist parties of both Right and Left want to “take back control” of Bank of England decisions.
BREAKING: Former Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi defects to Reform UK
Isn't he one of the ones along with Shapps that are trying to get back next time? So it'll be a purely self-interested calculation as to in which party he is more likely to win a seat. Be funny if all these chicken-run Tories have chosen wrong and are defeated, maybe by contuinuity Tories, by the time the election comes!
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
"D'Hondt" was a Belgian civil servant who gave his name to a particular formula often used to calculate the number of seats according to the propoortion of votes cast. The D'Hondt Formula is the one used to calculate the seats in an STV election. STV is the D'Hondt process in action.
Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.
Given his record in government and other stuff I believe he would sell his granny if offered.
Sadly malc, some of us no longer have grannies to sell.
Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.
We knew he's not very bright and today's announcement confirms that.
It also puts him very much into the I'm alright Jack / do as I do not as I say set of people who should be avoided at all costs.
Thanks for this, Ben, and "Ho, hum" for my predictions.
Does anyone get the impression that there seemed to be very little reviewing of 2025 both on PB and across the wider media? If ever a year slipped into history unloved and unmarked, 2025 was it, and perhaps it is a wider malaise than simply Starmer or Trump or any one of the news stories this year.
And yet, and this is true for most years, and is an important corollary to the go and vote / politics is vital brigade: how often does politics directly turn the course of somebody's life on here? Despite Trump, despite Labour, despite war and refugees and all, most years and last year, the effects of politics on my life were very much at the margins and I think most people can say the same. So, however mad it gets out there, remember it remains a niche and peripheral interest.
Perhaps politics will come for me this year, and perhaps it is naive to be complacent about it, but more likely "They'll burn down the synagogues at 6 o'clock, and we'll all carry on like before".
A perceptive post. I do sometimes wonder if it makes a blind bit of difference to my life which party / politicians are elected but on the macro scale I fear it does - the world feels much less safe with Trump in the White House.
Indeed. To echo TSE’s comments, I think a US invasion of Greenland would have a huge impact on all of us in the UK.
73% of Americans oppose invading Greenland, just 8% in favour, even a majority of Republican voters are opposed. It is not happening.
A purchase offer is more likely but still only 28% in favour
Like a lot of things in the American democracy/opposition to Trump category, the views of the American public only matter if they matter.
Is there any sign at all that they do? In the Good Place, "congressmen and senators want to be re-elected" is a good answer, but it's not obvious that we are in the Good Place.
73% opposition is enough to ensure even Congress impeaches and convicts Trump if he invaded Greenland (which he won't). The fact less than half of even Republican voters back such an invasion means most Republican Senators would vote to convict Trump rather than face losing their seats in that eventuality, which is again why Trump won't.
He will try and buy Greenland which over half of Republicans at least back but that is it
This argument is predicated on there being a continuing future of free and fair elections in the USA. I don't think we can begin assessing that until after the November election time.
No, given almost half of Republican Senators and a few GOP House Reps have joined all the Democrats to tell Trump not to invade Greenland he would be impeached if he did so by the House and likely convicted by the required 2/3 margin in the Senate even now if he invaded Greenland.
If Democrats as polls predict take the House in November they will almost certainly impeach again Trump even if he doesn't invade Greenland.
As I said, US midterms are run by State governments NOT the Federal government
Personally I think Trump SOP is to suggest an ultra-extreme policy opyion in order to reduce opposition to a slightly less extreme one. I can't see a US invasion of Greenald, but a buy-out or similar might well be offered. It's an interesting question how open voters are to buyouts. {Patriotism per se is unfashionable, and most countries have unpopular governments and oppositions specialising in cashing in on Government unpopularity. Is there a price that Greenlanders (who aren't thrilled by Danish support, but at present even less thrilled by becoming American) wou,d accept? $100K doesn't seem enough, but $1 billionK per head? Come to that, would British voters resist any offer?
I expect the break-even would be around $1m per head. So that’s 50-60bn for the US to spend.
I was wondering, is there any precedent for a country to bribe inhabitants of another country to sell their sovereignty? Not the rulers (as the US effectively did multiple times at both local and state level) but the inhabitants?
The political issue in the 50 states would not necessarily be the total cost, though that’s still material, but the fairness point. “Why are those lazy workshy Greenlanders sitting in clover on the expense account of Uncle Sam while I, a patriotic hard working American, struggle to pay the grocery bills each week?”
Denmark provides about $700 million subsidy a year; the EU around $100 million on top. So I guess 30 years subsidy as a lump sum comes to a $24 billion figure, if you don't care USA or Denmark. Any hostile takeover needs a premium, so your numbers look right. Although we are not including a who-in their-right-mind-would-trust-a-Trump-contract premium.
The US could on the other hand save their money and still get all the bases they want
Greenland is not about US bases. It's about America carving up Arctic mineral rights with Russia and China. Ditto making Canada the 51st state.
Probably. Complicated by the Greenlandic government cancelling several mining projects on environmental grounds. ie local people didn't want them despite promised economic benefits.
about Reform's need to recruit high calibre in high quantities.
Zahawi is too careless. Anyone of course can make careless errors with the HMRC that leads to having to pay £5,000,000 following investigation. It happens to me all the time. But it does mean you are not quite what the Reform team are looking for. The lack of high quality, transparently decent and credible recruits is a big problem for them, unless they are hiding a lot of lights under a lot of bushels.
My 6th place - thank you Ben Pointer - inspires me to repeat that by the end of 2026 Reform will not have a commanding poll lead. And in the next GE they will come second or third in votes and seats.
Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.
I am shocked and very disappointed in Zahawi.
Shows him to be an opportunist and chancer but without any sense of loyalty, He got his Stratford on Avon seat in the first place over a loyal hardworking Tory councillor because he made a showy speech, they should have selected the decent but dull councillor not the flashy Nadim.
Thanks for this, Ben, and "Ho, hum" for my predictions.
Does anyone get the impression that there seemed to be very little reviewing of 2025 both on PB and across the wider media? If ever a year slipped into history unloved and unmarked, 2025 was it, and perhaps it is a wider malaise than simply Starmer or Trump or any one of the news stories this year.
And yet, and this is true for most years, and is an important corollary to the go and vote / politics is vital brigade: how often does politics directly turn the course of somebody's life on here? Despite Trump, despite Labour, despite war and refugees and all, most years and last year, the effects of politics on my life were very much at the margins and I think most people can say the same. So, however mad it gets out there, remember it remains a niche and peripheral interest.
Perhaps politics will come for me this year, and perhaps it is naive to be complacent about it, but more likely "They'll burn down the synagogues at 6 o'clock, and we'll all carry on like before".
A perceptive post. I do sometimes wonder if it makes a blind bit of difference to my life which party / politicians are elected but on the macro scale I fear it does - the world feels much less safe with Trump in the White House.
Indeed. To echo TSE’s comments, I think a US invasion of Greenland would have a huge impact on all of us in the UK.
73% of Americans oppose invading Greenland, just 8% in favour, even a majority of Republican voters are opposed. It is not happening.
A purchase offer is more likely but still only 28% in favour
Like a lot of things in the American democracy/opposition to Trump category, the views of the American public only matter if they matter.
Is there any sign at all that they do? In the Good Place, "congressmen and senators want to be re-elected" is a good answer, but it's not obvious that we are in the Good Place.
73% opposition is enough to ensure even Congress impeaches and convicts Trump if he invaded Greenland (which he won't). The fact less than half of even Republican voters back such an invasion means most Republican Senators would vote to convict Trump rather than face losing their seats in that eventuality, which is again why Trump won't.
He will try and buy Greenland which over half of Republicans at least back but that is it
This argument is predicated on there being a continuing future of free and fair elections in the USA. I don't think we can begin assessing that until after the November election time.
No, given almost half of Republican Senators and a few GOP House Reps have joined all the Democrats to tell Trump not to invade Greenland he would be impeached if he did so by the House and likely convicted by the required 2/3 margin in the Senate even now if he invaded Greenland.
If Democrats as polls predict take the House in November they will almost certainly impeach again Trump even if he doesn't invade Greenland.
As I said, US midterms are run by State governments NOT the Federal government
Personally I think Trump SOP is to suggest an ultra-extreme policy opyion in order to reduce opposition to a slightly less extreme one. I can't see a US invasion of Greenald, but a buy-out or similar might well be offered. It's an interesting question how open voters are to buyouts. {Patriotism per se is unfashionable, and most countries have unpopular governments and oppositions specialising in cashing in on Government unpopularity. Is there a price that Greenlanders (who aren't thrilled by Danish support, but at present even less thrilled by becoming American) wou,d accept? $100K doesn't seem enough, but $1 billionK per head? Come to that, would British voters resist any offer?
I expect the break-even would be around $1m per head. So that’s 50-60bn for the US to spend.
I was wondering, is there any precedent for a country to bribe inhabitants of another country to sell their sovereignty? Not the rulers (as the US effectively did multiple times at both local and state level) but the inhabitants?
The political issue in the 50 states would not necessarily be the total cost, though that’s still material, but the fairness point. “Why are those lazy workshy Greenlanders sitting in clover on the expense account of Uncle Sam while I, a patriotic hard working American, struggle to pay the grocery bills each week?”
Denmark provides about $700 million subsidy a year; the EU around $100 million on top. So I guess 30 years subsidy as a lump sum comes to a $24 billion figure, if you don't care USA or Denmark. Any hostile takeover needs a premium, so your numbers look right. Although we are not including a who-in their-right-mind-would-trust-a-Trump-contract premium.
The US could on the other hand save their money and still get all the bases they want
Greenland is not about US bases. It's about America carving up Arctic mineral rights with Russia and China. Ditto making Canada the 51st state.
Probably. Complicated by the Greenlandic government cancelling several mining projects on environmental grounds. ie local people didn't want them despite promised economic benefits.
A recent poll said that a whole 6% of Greenlanders wanted to join the US.
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
More correctly the number of seats a party wins is influenced by how the voters react to the number of candidates the party fields, and the qualities of those candidates.
No other electoral system gives the voters as much power to select the party affiliation and individual qualities of the politician they wish to represent them.
Short of banning political parties I can't think of an electoral system that more effectively minimises the power of political parties. Whereas party list PR puts the party bureaucracy even more in control than with FPTP.
The 2 downsides of STV are the time it takes to count and the fact parties can game the system by just standing the number of candidates they expect to win as candidates.
Which means that a political party who does unexpectedly well (say Sinn Fein in the last set of Irish elections) end up winning only the seats they've put candidates up for when they could have won another 10-20 seats.
Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.
I am shocked and very disappointed in Zahawi.
Shows him to be an opportunist and chancer but without any sense of loyalty, he got his Stratford on Avon seat in the first place over a loyal hardworking Tory councillor because he made a showy speech, they should have selected the decent but dull councillor not the flashy Nadim.
Farage is welcome to him!
Indeed. The Tory party should only ever want loyal opportunists and chancers!
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
"D'Hondt" was a Belgian civil servant who gave his name to a particular formula often used to calculate the number of seats according to the propoortion of votes cast. The D'Hondt Formula is the one used to calculate the seats in an STV election. STV is the D'Hondt process in action.
Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.
Given his record in government and other stuff I believe he would sell his granny if offered.
Sadly malc, some of us no longer have grannies to sell.
I'm more than eight years a grandorphan.
Sadly for me it is so long ago now I cannot even remember how many years but around 60 at least , one I never saw and other when I was young.
Ofcom investigating the exploitative porn generator formerly known as Twitter
And ignoring that Gemini and Meta's AI (IIRC) turned out to do the same, just no one has made a equivalent fuss in the media? We're less different to Trump's America than we'd like to believe.
Also, this whole circus is about trying to ram a genie back into a bottle into which it's not going to go. They'll be "Pornification" apps running locally on people's phones inside a couple of years, Online Safety Act or not. I don't like the shape of the future very much, but it's coming, like it or not - Ofcom are merely a more leadfooted King Canute, not so much standing on the beach telling the tide not to come further up as wading into the sea at low water and commanding it to go further away.
On the (minor) plus side, it will make all the problems with stolen/illicitly shared nudes much smaller, as everyone will plausibly be able to claim any given image or video of then is a fake,whether it is or not.
Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.
I am shocked and very disappointed in Zahawi.
Shows him to be an opportunist and chancer but without any sense of loyalty, He got his Stratford on Avon seat in the first place over a loyal hardworking Tory councillor because he made a showy speech, they should have selected the decent but dull councillor not the flashy Nadim.
Farage is welcome to him!
From the very first time I spotted him in the Commons, I thought here is a man who thinks he should be going places. And fair play to him, he managed to (briefly) secure one of the great offices of state.
Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.
Given his record in government and other stuff I believe he would sell his granny if offered.
Sadly malc, some of us no longer have grannies to sell.
I'm more than eight years a grandorphan.
Selling your granny is stupid, anyway. It would incur immediate Capital Gains Tax liability.
What you should do is create a derivative of your Granny - Elderly Relative Debt Obligations - with physical delivery in a no-tax location. And sell that, on an OTC market in ERDOs
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
"D'Hondt" was a Belgian civil servant who gave his name to a particular formula often used to calculate the number of seats according to the propoortion of votes cast. The D'Hondt Formula is the one used to calculate the seats in an STV election. STV is the D'Hondt process in action.
STV is a bastardised version.
One vote for one party. Party lists. Happy days.
Not for me, thanks! For me, the Single Transferrable Vote in Multi Member Constituencies if the Gold Standard for elections.
Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.
Given his record in government and other stuff I believe he would sell his granny if offered.
Sadly malc, some of us no longer have grannies to sell.
I'm more than eight years a grandorphan.
So you're more worried about being the one who is sold?
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
"D'Hondt" was a Belgian civil servant who gave his name to a particular formula often used to calculate the number of seats according to the propoortion of votes cast. The D'Hondt Formula is the one used to calculate the seats in an STV election. STV is the D'Hondt process in action.
STV is a bastardised version.
One vote for one party. Party lists. Happy days.
I rather like STV because it gives you as a voter a real say over the candidates as well as the party. Say party X will definitely win one member and maybe two in a five member seat and puts up three candidates. Those candidates will put more effort into being the first ranked candidate within the party slate than competing with candidates from other parties.
Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.
Given his record in government and other stuff I believe he would sell his granny if offered.
Sadly malc, some of us no longer have grannies to sell.
I'm more than eight years a grandorphan.
Selling your granny is stupid, anyway. It would incur immediate Capital Gains Tax liability.
What you should do is create a derivative of your Granny - Elderly Relative Debt Obligations - with physical delivery in a no-tax location. And sell that, on an OTC market in ERDOs
All fine until the consequent bubble in granny valuations bursts and it plunges us into a steep and prolonged recession.
Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.
I am shocked and very disappointed in Zahawi.
Shows him to be an opportunist and chancer but without any sense of loyalty, He got his Stratford on Avon seat in the first place over a loyal hardworking Tory councillor because he made a showy speech, they should have selected the decent but dull councillor not the flashy Nadim.
Farage is welcome to him!
But did it tell us anything that we didn't already know?
Nadhim Zahawi, bloody hell. Didn't expect him to join Reform.
Definitely a surprise there, I won’t make the usual joke about the average intelligence of both parties going up as a result!
As might have been said before, Reform do need to get a team together to shadow at least the key ministries, so someone with Treasury experience is undoubtedly going to be useful.
Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.
Given his record in government and other stuff I believe he would sell his granny if offered.
Sadly malc, some of us no longer have grannies to sell.
I'm more than eight years a grandorphan.
Selling your granny is stupid, anyway. It would incur immediate Capital Gains Tax liability.
What you should do is create a derivative of your Granny - Elderly Relative Debt Obligations - with physical delivery in a no-tax location. And sell that, on an OTC market in ERDOs
About that physical delivery. Does your granny want to go to Switzerland. She may think there is another agenda.
Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
More correctly the number of seats a party wins is influenced by how the voters react to the number of candidates the party fields, and the qualities of those candidates.
No other electoral system gives the voters as much power to select the party affiliation and individual qualities of the politician they wish to represent them.
Short of banning political parties I can't think of an electoral system that more effectively minimises the power of political parties. Whereas party list PR puts the party bureaucracy even more in control than with FPTP.
The 2 downsides of STV are the time it takes to count and the fact parties can game the system by just standing the number of candidates they expect to win as candidates.
Which means that a political party who does unexpectedly well (say Sinn Fein in the last set of Irish elections) end up winning only the seats they've put candidates up for when they could have won another 10-20 seats.
So, like you say, if a party tries to restrict voter choice by standing fewer candidates then it risks losing out. There's quite a history of that in different ways in Irish politics.
The current Irish President left the Labour party when the party refused to stand her as a second candidate in her constituency, so she stood as an independent and was eventually elected as an independent despite the party's decision.
There are lots of similar examples of how STV weakens the hold the party machine has over candidate selection.
Edit: That's not to say that it isn't a weakness in the system, or that it doesn't have other weaknesses. No election system is perfect, but I think STV prioritises the things that I think are important - even though it results in the election of a bunch of right eejits in Ireland.
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
"D'Hondt" was a Belgian civil servant who gave his name to a particular formula often used to calculate the number of seats according to the propoortion of votes cast. The D'Hondt Formula is the one used to calculate the seats in an STV election. STV is the D'Hondt process in action.
STV is a bastardised version.
One vote for one party. Party lists. Happy days.
I rather like STV because it gives you as a voter a real say over the candidates as well as the party. Say party X will definitely win one member and maybe two in a five member seat and puts up three candidates. Those candidates will put more effort into being the first ranked candidate within the party slate than competing with candidates from other parties.
Plus election nights would be full of fun for all us election anoraks, and what's not to like about a system that has multiple rounds of counting, extending our excitement still further?
Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.
I am shocked and very disappointed in Zahawi.
Shows him to be an opportunist and chancer but without any sense of loyalty, He got his Stratford on Avon seat in the first place over a loyal hardworking Tory councillor because he made a showy speech, they should have selected the decent but dull councillor not the flashy Nadim.
Farage is welcome to him!
From the very first time I spotted him in the Commons, I thought here is a man who thinks he should be going places. And fair play to him, he managed to (briefly) secure one of the great offices of state.
'I thought here is a man who THINKS HE should be going places.' Says it all!
Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.
Given his record in government and other stuff I believe he would sell his granny if offered.
Sadly malc, some of us no longer have grannies to sell.
I'm more than eight years a grandorphan.
Selling your granny is stupid, anyway. It would incur immediate Capital Gains Tax liability.
What you should do is create a derivative of your Granny - Elderly Relative Debt Obligations - with physical delivery in a no-tax location. And sell that, on an OTC market in ERDOs
All fine until the consequent bubble in granny valuations bursts and it plunges us into a steep and prolonged recession.
{John Tuld mode}
When the market goes south, we dump grannies on anyone stupid enough to buy.
Buy again at the bottom. We lose on the crash, but make a fortune on the rebound.
Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.
I am shocked and very disappointed in Zahawi.
Shows him to be an opportunist and chancer but without any sense of loyalty, He got his Stratford on Avon seat in the first place over a loyal hardworking Tory councillor because he made a showy speech, they should have selected the decent but dull councillor not the flashy Nadim.
Farage is welcome to him!
He behaved very badly when there was investigation of his tax affairs. To be honest I think he's lucky (of course its not luck is it?) not to have been prosecuted.
Off thread - I saw this on facebook the other day. It's actually quite a good shorthand for 'what does the electorate think about the rest of the world'.
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
More correctly the number of seats a party wins is influenced by how the voters react to the number of candidates the party fields, and the qualities of those candidates.
No other electoral system gives the voters as much power to select the party affiliation and individual qualities of the politician they wish to represent them.
Short of banning political parties I can't think of an electoral system that more effectively minimises the power of political parties. Whereas party list PR puts the party bureaucracy even more in control than with FPTP.
The 2 downsides of STV are the time it takes to count and the fact parties can game the system by just standing the number of candidates they expect to win as candidates.
Which means that a political party who does unexpectedly well (say Sinn Fein in the last set of Irish elections) end up winning only the seats they've put candidates up for when they could have won another 10-20 seats.
I don't see the time taken to count the votes as a downside. Think of it as a sort of jury verdict - we don't object when juries take their time.
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
More correctly the number of seats a party wins is influenced by how the voters react to the number of candidates the party fields, and the qualities of those candidates.
No other electoral system gives the voters as much power to select the party affiliation and individual qualities of the politician they wish to represent them.
Short of banning political parties I can't think of an electoral system that more effectively minimises the power of political parties. Whereas party list PR puts the party bureaucracy even more in control than with FPTP.
The 2 downsides of STV are the time it takes to count and the fact parties can game the system by just standing the number of candidates they expect to win as candidates.
Which means that a political party who does unexpectedly well (say Sinn Fein in the last set of Irish elections) end up winning only the seats they've put candidates up for when they could have won another 10-20 seats.
So, like you say, if a party tries to restrict voter choice by standing fewer candidates then it risks losing out. There's quite a history of that in different ways in Irish politics.
The current Irish President left the Labour party when the party refused to stand her as a second candidate in her constituency, so she stood as an independent and was eventually elected as an independent despite the party's decision.
There are lots of similar examples of how STV weakens the hold the party machine has over candidate selection.
I think it's the opposite - stand 1 candidate and you can be sure they are going to win 1 of the 5 seats.
Stand 2 candidates and it's possible with first choices split across both candidates, both could be eliminated before either win a seat.
So it becomes a gamble, 1 guaranteed win or risk the vote and potentially win 2 seats (or the wrong candidate wins 1 seat).
But as you can see it does allow independent candidates to thrive, because they win on personal / none of the above votes, the issue getting enough first choices to not be eliminated early on.
Nadhim Zahawi, bloody hell. Didn't expect him to join Reform.
Definitely a surprise there, I won’t make the usual joke about the average intelligence of both parties going up as a result!
As might have been said before, Reform do need to get a team together to shadow at least the key ministries, so someone with Treasury experience is undoubtedly going to be useful.
But he's another one of these neo-Thatcherites whose economic views are completely at odds with the support base that Reform is carving out
Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.
I am shocked and very disappointed in Zahawi.
Shows him to be an opportunist and chancer but without any sense of loyalty, He got his Stratford on Avon seat in the first place over a loyal hardworking Tory councillor because he made a showy speech, they should have selected the decent but dull councillor not the flashy Nadim.
Farage is welcome to him!
He behaved very badly when there was investigation of his tax affairs. To be honest I think he's lucky (of course its not luck is it?) not to have been prosecuted.
If he hadn't been in politics - he definitely would have been. Knowing how HMRC investigations work, someone senior most have decided it wasn't worth the internal political risk...
Hard to overstate what a remarkable statement this is from a Republican senator — even a retiring one — accusing thte Trump White House of weaponizing DOJ to control the Fed:
It’s not the first time either. He did it with Lisa Cooke.
"It is now" - where has this guy been for the last year? That's the problem with sitting silent when it's your political opponents being subjugated - eventually the regime will come for your friends too.
JPOW is the darling of the very-online-finance-bro. Will be interesting if there is something of a schism or, as usual, everyone comes into line with Trump.
I’ve criticised Trumps handling of the fed since the get go, if you’re referring to me in the first paragraph, and his pressuring of Powell.
If you mean Powell he has stood up to Trump. Just by not bowing to his demands.
Powell really isn’t anyone’s darling. He’s not been great and neither has the fed. Too slow to react to inflation which he thought was transitory, it wasn’t.
Off thread - I saw this on facebook the other day. It's actually quite a good shorthand for 'what does the electorate think about the rest of the world'.
about Reform's need to recruit high calibre in high quantities.
Zahawi is too careless. Anyone of course can make careless errors with the HMRC that leads to having to pay £5,000,000 following investigation. It happens to me all the time. But it does mean you are not quite what the Reform team are looking for. The lack of high quality, transparently decent and credible recruits is a big problem for them, unless they are hiding a lot of lights under a lot of bushels.
My 6th place - thank you Ben Pointer - inspires me to repeat that by the end of 2026 Reform will not have a commanding poll lead. And in the next GE they will come second or third in votes and seats.
Who do you forsee replacing them in the running? Labour seem to be continuing unchanged on a straight line decline in the polling which presumably has to flatten off somewhere, but it's a stretch to imagine a way back up for them from here. Every week it's another u-turn or an unforced error, their coalition splinters a fraction more, and every week their numbers decline further.
The LDs have been consistently useless, uninteresting, and have no narrative or answers.
The Tories are just about treading water, despite Kemi's best PMQs performances (barring her terrible showing last week) in ages. But that's the problem with a pitch which boils down to "Farage is right, so vote for me". She demolishes Starmer easily, but gets herself no credit, because of his endless chant back of "fourteen years".
So barring a second coming of the SDP, or "Your Party" suddenly discovering hitherto unknown levels of organisational ability (like agreeing if they actually are a party or not), the only rising star left in town is Zac. He's clearly eating up the left end of the labor vote at a rate of knots, but once that's been consumed, where does he go then? He's not going to appeal to many Tories, probably not many LDs. And I think Farage's populists probably for the most part prefer Farage's populism to Zac's.
Which leaves the only other possibly being for Farage to do or say something so beyond the pail his voter go off to DNV. But I think he's pretty good at not doing that.
Imagine if Keir Starmer set the legal dogs on Andrew Bailey for not slashing interest rates. If that didn't lead to his departure (Starmer, I mean) it'd indicate we were well down the path from liberal democracy to authoritarianism, wouldn't it?
Is the Bank of England's role in setting interest rates actually codified in statute, or is it simply a decision Gordon Brown took that everyone has stuck with since?
I think the difference in Britain is that the Executive in Britain has much more freedom to act, in law, than in the US, because the Executive in Britain is constrained by the ability of the Commons to replace it at will - as happened twice during the last Parliament - more than by a Constitution or law.
So a comparison between the powers and actions of the Executive in the US and the UK doesn't really make any sense, because they operate so very differently.
Yes, different systems. Our particular sour spot would be a PM of bad despotic character with a big majority and a supine 'one man band' party. Food for thought given current polling.
"The Prime Minister loses the election. When he arrives at Buckingham Palace, King Charles III assumes he will do the usual thing: resign, and advise the King to send for the leader of the biggest party in Parliament. But this is no ordinary Prime Minister.
This is Max Moore, charismatic leader of the Britons First Party, and he has no more intention of resigning just because the voters rejected him than Donald Trump did in 2016. Can Max Moore get away with it?
Written by Francis Beckett (Tom Lehrer is Teaching Math...), the nail-biting satire, It Couldn’t Happen Here, comes to the OSO Barnes from Thursday 15 to Sunday 18 January."
In a crowded field for dumbest MP, Steve Reed is rapidly becoming a frontrunner.
'He recounts the story of two Jewish constituents coming to him because a local school had handed out biscuits with icing depicting the Palestinian flag on a "cultural day."'
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
"D'Hondt" was a Belgian civil servant who gave his name to a particular formula often used to calculate the number of seats according to the propoortion of votes cast. The D'Hondt Formula is the one used to calculate the seats in an STV election. STV is the D'Hondt process in action.
STV is a bastardised version.
One vote for one party. Party lists. Happy days.
I rather like STV because it gives you as a voter a real say over the candidates as well as the party. Say party X will definitely win one member and maybe two in a five member seat and puts up three candidates. Those candidates will put more effort into being the first ranked candidate within the party slate than competing with candidates from other parties.
Internal bunfights should all be settled in primaries, not in the General Election.
IF you want to influence the order of candidates on the party list, join the party and vote in the primaries.
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
More correctly the number of seats a party wins is influenced by how the voters react to the number of candidates the party fields, and the qualities of those candidates.
No other electoral system gives the voters as much power to select the party affiliation and individual qualities of the politician they wish to represent them.
Short of banning political parties I can't think of an electoral system that more effectively minimises the power of political parties. Whereas party list PR puts the party bureaucracy even more in control than with FPTP.
The 2 downsides of STV are the time it takes to count and the fact parties can game the system by just standing the number of candidates they expect to win as candidates.
Which means that a political party who does unexpectedly well (say Sinn Fein in the last set of Irish elections) end up winning only the seats they've put candidates up for when they could have won another 10-20 seats.
So, like you say, if a party tries to restrict voter choice by standing fewer candidates then it risks losing out. There's quite a history of that in different ways in Irish politics.
The current Irish President left the Labour party when the party refused to stand her as a second candidate in her constituency, so she stood as an independent and was eventually elected as an independent despite the party's decision.
There are lots of similar examples of how STV weakens the hold the party machine has over candidate selection.
I think it's the opposite - stand 1 candidate and you can be sure they are going to win 1 of the 5 seats.
Stand 2 candidates and it's possible with first choices split across both candidates, both could be eliminated before either win a seat.
So it becomes a gamble, 1 guaranteed win or risk the vote and potentially win 2 seats (or the wrong candidate wins 1 seat).
But as you can see it does allow independent candidates to thrive, because they win on personal / none of the above votes, the issue getting enough first choices to not be eliminated early on.
A popular Independent can also get elected under d'Hondt.
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
More correctly the number of seats a party wins is influenced by how the voters react to the number of candidates the party fields, and the qualities of those candidates.
No other electoral system gives the voters as much power to select the party affiliation and individual qualities of the politician they wish to represent them.
Short of banning political parties I can't think of an electoral system that more effectively minimises the power of political parties. Whereas party list PR puts the party bureaucracy even more in control than with FPTP.
The 2 downsides of STV are the time it takes to count and the fact parties can game the system by just standing the number of candidates they expect to win as candidates.
Which means that a political party who does unexpectedly well (say Sinn Fein in the last set of Irish elections) end up winning only the seats they've put candidates up for when they could have won another 10-20 seats.
I don't think time taken to count the vote is a downside if it leads to a more representative/better result.
It is true you optimally want to stand the number of candidates that you might win on a good day, but not more than that. I would count that as an undesirable quirk of the STV method - ideally you wouldn't be penalised for providing more candidates - but no-one's gaming the system. Everyone understands the calculation. In general you want to stand as many candidates as you might win. Sinn Fein miscalculated. It was their fault.
Thanks for this, Ben, and "Ho, hum" for my predictions.
Does anyone get the impression that there seemed to be very little reviewing of 2025 both on PB and across the wider media? If ever a year slipped into history unloved and unmarked, 2025 was it, and perhaps it is a wider malaise than simply Starmer or Trump or any one of the news stories this year.
And yet, and this is true for most years, and is an important corollary to the go and vote / politics is vital brigade: how often does politics directly turn the course of somebody's life on here? Despite Trump, despite Labour, despite war and refugees and all, most years and last year, the effects of politics on my life were very much at the margins and I think most people can say the same. So, however mad it gets out there, remember it remains a niche and peripheral interest.
Perhaps politics will come for me this year, and perhaps it is naive to be complacent about it, but more likely "They'll burn down the synagogues at 6 o'clock, and we'll all carry on like before".
A perceptive post. I do sometimes wonder if it makes a blind bit of difference to my life which party / politicians are elected but on the macro scale I fear it does - the world feels much less safe with Trump in the White House.
Indeed. To echo TSE’s comments, I think a US invasion of Greenland would have a huge impact on all of us in the UK.
73% of Americans oppose invading Greenland, just 8% in favour, even a majority of Republican voters are opposed. It is not happening.
A purchase offer is more likely but still only 28% in favour
Like a lot of things in the American democracy/opposition to Trump category, the views of the American public only matter if they matter.
Is there any sign at all that they do? In the Good Place, "congressmen and senators want to be re-elected" is a good answer, but it's not obvious that we are in the Good Place.
73% opposition is enough to ensure even Congress impeaches and convicts Trump if he invaded Greenland (which he won't). The fact less than half of even Republican voters back such an invasion means most Republican Senators would vote to convict Trump rather than face losing their seats in that eventuality, which is again why Trump won't.
He will try and buy Greenland which over half of Republicans at least back but that is it
This argument is predicated on there being a continuing future of free and fair elections in the USA. I don't think we can begin assessing that until after the November election time.
No, given almost half of Republican Senators and a few GOP House Reps have joined all the Democrats to tell Trump not to invade Greenland he would be impeached if he did so by the House and likely convicted by the required 2/3 margin in the Senate even now if he invaded Greenland.
If Democrats as polls predict take the House in November they will almost certainly impeach again Trump even if he doesn't invade Greenland.
As I said, US midterms are run by State governments NOT the Federal government
Personally I think Trump SOP is to suggest an ultra-extreme policy opyion in order to reduce opposition to a slightly less extreme one. I can't see a US invasion of Greenald, but a buy-out or similar might well be offered. It's an interesting question how open voters are to buyouts. {Patriotism per se is unfashionable, and most countries have unpopular governments and oppositions specialising in cashing in on Government unpopularity. Is there a price that Greenlanders (who aren't thrilled by Danish support, but at present even less thrilled by becoming American) wou,d accept? $100K doesn't seem enough, but $1 billionK per head? Come to that, would British voters resist any offer?
I expect the break-even would be around $1m per head. So that’s 50-60bn for the US to spend.
I was wondering, is there any precedent for a country to bribe inhabitants of another country to sell their sovereignty? Not the rulers (as the US effectively did multiple times at both local and state level) but the inhabitants?
The political issue in the 50 states would not necessarily be the total cost, though that’s still material, but the fairness point. “Why are those lazy workshy Greenlanders sitting in clover on the expense account of Uncle Sam while I, a patriotic hard working American, struggle to pay the grocery bills each week?”
Denmark provides about $700 million subsidy a year; the EU around $100 million on top. So I guess 30 years subsidy as a lump sum comes to a $24 billion figure, if you don't care USA or Denmark. Any hostile takeover needs a premium, so your numbers look right. Although we are not including a who-in their-right-mind-would-trust-a-Trump-contract premium.
The US could on the other hand save their money and still get all the bases they want
I would only accept a payoff for accepting US sovereignty if I could take the money and emigrate immediately.
No amount of money would reconcile me to living under the jurisdiction of Trump's FBI and ICE.
Is that really true? I'd like to think I'd say the same but, faced with the freedom for me and my family that £1m would offer, I'd find it hard to say no.
Though my kids would still have to grow up in the society around us so maybe I'd resist.
ETA big thanks for the competition Ben - I'm pleasantly surprised I wasn't last.
Thanks for this, Ben, and "Ho, hum" for my predictions.
Does anyone get the impression that there seemed to be very little reviewing of 2025 both on PB and across the wider media? If ever a year slipped into history unloved and unmarked, 2025 was it, and perhaps it is a wider malaise than simply Starmer or Trump or any one of the news stories this year.
And yet, and this is true for most years, and is an important corollary to the go and vote / politics is vital brigade: how often does politics directly turn the course of somebody's life on here? Despite Trump, despite Labour, despite war and refugees and all, most years and last year, the effects of politics on my life were very much at the margins and I think most people can say the same. So, however mad it gets out there, remember it remains a niche and peripheral interest.
Perhaps politics will come for me this year, and perhaps it is naive to be complacent about it, but more likely "They'll burn down the synagogues at 6 o'clock, and we'll all carry on like before".
A really interesting post, for which many thanks.
2024 was always going to be a hard act to follow for this site - having both a UK General Election and a US Presidential election in the same year is basically two trips to the buffet on the same day and it's fair to say many on here didn't like either result. A world with Sunak as Prime Minister and Harris as President would be a very different place, you'd imagine.
As to the day-to-day impact of politics, what happens locally affects me more than what happens nationally in the short term (the longer term is different). We have in 2026 local elections here in London and that will have an impact even though I imagine barely a third of those who can vote will vote.
We are all political or politics enthusiasts - we wouldn't be here otherwise. Sometimes, we like to see change before it manifests more broadly and spot trends before they become obvious -the betting part of the site plays to that.
We all have our agendas, our teams and our flags and the debates/arguments reflect those. Too often we revisit old battles simply because we can but as the annual prediction contest shows, trying to read the runes of the future - well, I'd have more chance of going through the card at Lingfield this afternoon.
A world with Sunak as PM still and Harris as US President would have been better for Ukraine, better for the UK economy and business owners, wealthy pensioners and property owners and farmers, better for woke in the US, worse for Putin and Netanyahu, worse for UK train drivers and GPs and those claiming lots of welfare and better for the global free market which would still be largely tariff free and better for tackling climate change. It would have been good for trans in the US, not so good for trans in the UK.
It would also have been a better world for those who like slick and articulate leaders, which Sunak and Harris were clearly more than Starmer and Trump. Most of the white working class and lower middle class in both nations though clearly rejected Sunak and Harris for what they thought would be straightforward common sense with Starmer and Trump
I’m not sure Harris would be better for the economy. Her plan to tax unrealised gains as wealth was stupid.
The US economy is forecast to grow at 5.4% in the final quarter. Harris woilent achieve that.
Nadim Zahawi arrived in the UK from Iraq as a child refugee. His family claimed asylum once they were here. Today he has joined Reform who will stop all in country asylum applications. Under his new party, his own family fleeing persecution would be immediately deported.
Given his record in government and other stuff I believe he would sell his granny if offered.
Sadly malc, some of us no longer have grannies to sell.
I'm more than eight years a grandorphan.
So you're more worried about being the one who is sold?
My wife and I are great-grandparents. Where does that leave us?
Imagine if Keir Starmer set the legal dogs on Andrew Bailey for not slashing interest rates. If that didn't lead to his departure (Starmer, I mean) it'd indicate we were well down the path from liberal democracy to authoritarianism, wouldn't it?
Is the Bank of England's role in setting interest rates actually codified in statute, or is it simply a decision Gordon Brown took that everyone has stuck with since?
I think the difference in Britain is that the Executive in Britain has much more freedom to act, in law, than in the US, because the Executive in Britain is constrained by the ability of the Commons to replace it at will - as happened twice during the last Parliament - more than by a Constitution or law.
So a comparison between the powers and actions of the Executive in the US and the UK doesn't really make any sense, because they operate so very differently.
Yes, different systems. Our particular sour spot would be a PM of bad despotic character with a big majority and a supine 'one man band' party. Food for thought given current polling.
"The Prime Minister loses the election. When he arrives at Buckingham Palace, King Charles III assumes he will do the usual thing: resign, and advise the King to send for the leader of the biggest party in Parliament. But this is no ordinary Prime Minister.
This is Max Moore, charismatic leader of the Britons First Party, and he has no more intention of resigning just because the voters rejected him than Donald Trump did in 2016. Can Max Moore get away with it?
Written by Francis Beckett (Tom Lehrer is Teaching Math...), the nail-biting satire, It Couldn’t Happen Here, comes to the OSO Barnes from Thursday 15 to Sunday 18 January."
I've booked my seat.
No, the King is head of state ie the equivalent of the US President on that front and also is head of the UK armed forces as the US President is head of the US armed forces while the UK PM is just his chief minister. If a PM no longer commands support from most MPs in Parliament, the King can just dismiss him or her and appoint a new PM who does command the support of most MPs. The PM can do nothing to stop the King on that front as Parliament and the army would back the King
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
"D'Hondt" was a Belgian civil servant who gave his name to a particular formula often used to calculate the number of seats according to the propoortion of votes cast. The D'Hondt Formula is the one used to calculate the seats in an STV election. STV is the D'Hondt process in action.
STV is a bastardised version.
One vote for one party. Party lists. Happy days.
I rather like STV because it gives you as a voter a real say over the candidates as well as the party. Say party X will definitely win one member and maybe two in a five member seat and puts up three candidates. Those candidates will put more effort into being the first ranked candidate within the party slate than competing with candidates from other parties.
Internal bunfights should all be settled in primaries, not in the General Election.
IF you want to influence the order of candidates on the party list, join the party and vote in the primaries.
Internal bunfights should all be settled in primaries, not in the General Election. Why?
Party List systems give too much power to the activists (who are an odd lot - I should know) and remove power from the ordinary voter.
I think your scoring system a little harsh on the economy questions. +- 0.1% on GDP growth is a very narrow range, whilst within 2% points on polling (especially for parties polling under 20%) is quite a wide band.
I would also have been tempted to give a point or two credit to anyone who predicted Australian victory in the Ashes.
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
"D'Hondt" was a Belgian civil servant who gave his name to a particular formula often used to calculate the number of seats according to the propoortion of votes cast. The D'Hondt Formula is the one used to calculate the seats in an STV election. STV is the D'Hondt process in action.
STV is a bastardised version.
One vote for one party. Party lists. Happy days.
I rather like STV because it gives you as a voter a real say over the candidates as well as the party. Say party X will definitely win one member and maybe two in a five member seat and puts up three candidates. Those candidates will put more effort into being the first ranked candidate within the party slate than competing with candidates from other parties.
Internal bunfights should all be settled in primaries, not in the General Election.
IF you want to influence the order of candidates on the party list, join the party and vote in the primaries.
Except if you support a party but think their candidate is a dick, you have no alternative but to vote for the dick. Bearing in mind how small political parties are, it seems that giving the voters rather than a few dozen party members the power to choose between candidates is no bad thing.
Thanks for this, Ben, and "Ho, hum" for my predictions.
Does anyone get the impression that there seemed to be very little reviewing of 2025 both on PB and across the wider media? If ever a year slipped into history unloved and unmarked, 2025 was it, and perhaps it is a wider malaise than simply Starmer or Trump or any one of the news stories this year.
And yet, and this is true for most years, and is an important corollary to the go and vote / politics is vital brigade: how often does politics directly turn the course of somebody's life on here? Despite Trump, despite Labour, despite war and refugees and all, most years and last year, the effects of politics on my life were very much at the margins and I think most people can say the same. So, however mad it gets out there, remember it remains a niche and peripheral interest.
Perhaps politics will come for me this year, and perhaps it is naive to be complacent about it, but more likely "They'll burn down the synagogues at 6 o'clock, and we'll all carry on like before".
A really interesting post, for which many thanks.
2024 was always going to be a hard act to follow for this site - having both a UK General Election and a US Presidential election in the same year is basically two trips to the buffet on the same day and it's fair to say many on here didn't like either result. A world with Sunak as Prime Minister and Harris as President would be a very different place, you'd imagine.
As to the day-to-day impact of politics, what happens locally affects me more than what happens nationally in the short term (the longer term is different). We have in 2026 local elections here in London and that will have an impact even though I imagine barely a third of those who can vote will vote.
We are all political or politics enthusiasts - we wouldn't be here otherwise. Sometimes, we like to see change before it manifests more broadly and spot trends before they become obvious -the betting part of the site plays to that.
We all have our agendas, our teams and our flags and the debates/arguments reflect those. Too often we revisit old battles simply because we can but as the annual prediction contest shows, trying to read the runes of the future - well, I'd have more chance of going through the card at Lingfield this afternoon.
A world with Sunak as PM still and Harris as US President would have been better for Ukraine, better for the UK economy and business owners, wealthy pensioners and property owners and farmers, better for woke in the US, worse for Putin and Netanyahu, worse for UK train drivers and GPs and those claiming lots of welfare and better for the global free market which would still be largely tariff free and better for tackling climate change. It would have been good for trans in the US, not so good for trans in the UK.
It would also have been a better world for those who like slick and articulate leaders, which Sunak and Harris were clearly more than Starmer and Trump. Most of the white working class and lower middle class in both nations though clearly rejected Sunak and Harris for what they thought would be straightforward common sense with Starmer and Trump
I’m not sure Harris would be better for the economy. Her plan to tax unrealised gains as wealth was stupid.
The US economy is forecast to grow at 5.4% in the final quarter. Harris woilent achieve that.
Not her tax and spend plans no, though Harris would not have imposed the tariffs on US imports Trump has which are increasing US prices
Imagine if Keir Starmer set the legal dogs on Andrew Bailey for not slashing interest rates. If that didn't lead to his departure (Starmer, I mean) it'd indicate we were well down the path from liberal democracy to authoritarianism, wouldn't it?
Is the Bank of England's role in setting interest rates actually codified in statute, or is it simply a decision Gordon Brown took that everyone has stuck with since?
I think the difference in Britain is that the Executive in Britain has much more freedom to act, in law, than in the US, because the Executive in Britain is constrained by the ability of the Commons to replace it at will - as happened twice during the last Parliament - more than by a Constitution or law.
So a comparison between the powers and actions of the Executive in the US and the UK doesn't really make any sense, because they operate so very differently.
Yes, different systems. Our particular sour spot would be a PM of bad despotic character with a big majority and a supine 'one man band' party. Food for thought given current polling.
"The Prime Minister loses the election. When he arrives at Buckingham Palace, King Charles III assumes he will do the usual thing: resign, and advise the King to send for the leader of the biggest party in Parliament. But this is no ordinary Prime Minister.
This is Max Moore, charismatic leader of the Britons First Party, and he has no more intention of resigning just because the voters rejected him than Donald Trump did in 2016. Can Max Moore get away with it?
Written by Francis Beckett (Tom Lehrer is Teaching Math...), the nail-biting satire, It Couldn’t Happen Here, comes to the OSO Barnes from Thursday 15 to Sunday 18 January."
I've booked my seat.
No, the King is head of state ie the equivalent of the US President on that front and also is head of the UK armed forces as the US President is head of the US armed forces while the UK PM is just his chief minister. If a PM no longer commands support from most MPs in Parliament, the King can just dismiss him or her and appoint a new PM who does command the support of most MPs. The PM can do nothing to stop the King on that front as Parliament and the army would back the King
If I were Kemi I’d be very relaxed about Zahawi going.
The more the discredited old guard go, the easier it becomes to move forwards with a new proposition.
Kemi this morning, 'Oh dear, I have lost Zahawi, Nadine Dorries, Gullis, Kruger, Berry, Andrea Jenkyns. Who next will follow them to Reform? Liz Truss? I will keep the champagne on ice!'
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
"D'Hondt" was a Belgian civil servant who gave his name to a particular formula often used to calculate the number of seats according to the propoortion of votes cast. The D'Hondt Formula is the one used to calculate the seats in an STV election. STV is the D'Hondt process in action.
STV is a bastardised version.
One vote for one party. Party lists. Happy days.
I rather like STV because it gives you as a voter a real say over the candidates as well as the party. Say party X will definitely win one member and maybe two in a five member seat and puts up three candidates. Those candidates will put more effort into being the first ranked candidate within the party slate than competing with candidates from other parties.
Internal bunfights should all be settled in primaries, not in the General Election.
IF you want to influence the order of candidates on the party list, join the party and vote in the primaries.
You are not explaining why it's actually bad for voters to have a say over which candidate gets elected.
It's no secret that SNP will win a whole bunch of members under any electoral system in Scotland (we have three four different systems to choose from depending on the type of government, so we're kind of experts). But at least with STV I can suggest we get Mary rather than Jim.
Thanks for this, Ben, and "Ho, hum" for my predictions.
Does anyone get the impression that there seemed to be very little reviewing of 2025 both on PB and across the wider media? If ever a year slipped into history unloved and unmarked, 2025 was it, and perhaps it is a wider malaise than simply Starmer or Trump or any one of the news stories this year.
And yet, and this is true for most years, and is an important corollary to the go and vote / politics is vital brigade: how often does politics directly turn the course of somebody's life on here? Despite Trump, despite Labour, despite war and refugees and all, most years and last year, the effects of politics on my life were very much at the margins and I think most people can say the same. So, however mad it gets out there, remember it remains a niche and peripheral interest.
Perhaps politics will come for me this year, and perhaps it is naive to be complacent about it, but more likely "They'll burn down the synagogues at 6 o'clock, and we'll all carry on like before".
A really interesting post, for which many thanks.
2024 was always going to be a hard act to follow for this site - having both a UK General Election and a US Presidential election in the same year is basically two trips to the buffet on the same day and it's fair to say many on here didn't like either result. A world with Sunak as Prime Minister and Harris as President would be a very different place, you'd imagine.
As to the day-to-day impact of politics, what happens locally affects me more than what happens nationally in the short term (the longer term is different). We have in 2026 local elections here in London and that will have an impact even though I imagine barely a third of those who can vote will vote.
We are all political or politics enthusiasts - we wouldn't be here otherwise. Sometimes, we like to see change before it manifests more broadly and spot trends before they become obvious -the betting part of the site plays to that.
We all have our agendas, our teams and our flags and the debates/arguments reflect those. Too often we revisit old battles simply because we can but as the annual prediction contest shows, trying to read the runes of the future - well, I'd have more chance of going through the card at Lingfield this afternoon.
A world with Sunak as PM still and Harris as US President would have been better for Ukraine, better for the UK economy and business owners, wealthy pensioners and property owners and farmers, better for woke in the US, worse for Putin and Netanyahu, worse for UK train drivers and GPs and those claiming lots of welfare and better for the global free market which would still be largely tariff free and better for tackling climate change. It would have been good for trans in the US, not so good for trans in the UK.
It would also have been a better world for those who like slick and articulate leaders, which Sunak and Harris were clearly more than Starmer and Trump. Most of the white working class and lower middle class in both nations though clearly rejected Sunak and Harris for what they thought would be straightforward common sense with Starmer and Trump
I’m not sure Harris would be better for the economy. Her plan to tax unrealised gains as wealth was stupid.
The US economy is forecast to grow at 5.4% in the final quarter. Harris woilent achieve that.
Not her tax and spend plans no, though Harris would not have imposed the tariffs on US imports Trump has which are increasing US prices
No they’re not. Evidence is most of the costs are being absorbed.
If I were Kemi I’d be very relaxed about Zahawi going.
The more the discredited old guard go, the easier it becomes to move forwards with a new proposition.
Kemi this morning, 'Oh dear, I have lost Zahawi, Nadine Dorries, Gullis, Kruger, Berry, Andrea Jenkyns. Who next will follow them to Reform? Liz Truss? I will keep the champagne on ice!'
Behind a paywall, but here's the gist: As rules currently stand, trade union affiliate members (who are not otherwise Labour members) are going to be more influential than hitherto in electing the next Labour leader because: 1. Labour membership is plummeting, so Labour members are becoming a smaller part of the eligible selectorate which also includes members of affiliated trade unions who pay the political levy (Unite, Unison, GMB etc.) 2. Since 2021, union members who pay the political levy no longer have to register themselves as Labour affiliate members in order to be entitled to a vote, and unions could (if they wish) facilitate participation by arranging to automatically send all eligible members a ballot paper. 3. Paying the political levy has switched to being opt out not opt in under the 2025 Employment Rights Act.
So the outcome could depend a lot on whether the left wing leadership of Unite and Unison engage actively in the process, campaigning for a particular candidate.
Thanks for this, Ben, and "Ho, hum" for my predictions.
Does anyone get the impression that there seemed to be very little reviewing of 2025 both on PB and across the wider media? If ever a year slipped into history unloved and unmarked, 2025 was it, and perhaps it is a wider malaise than simply Starmer or Trump or any one of the news stories this year.
And yet, and this is true for most years, and is an important corollary to the go and vote / politics is vital brigade: how often does politics directly turn the course of somebody's life on here? Despite Trump, despite Labour, despite war and refugees and all, most years and last year, the effects of politics on my life were very much at the margins and I think most people can say the same. So, however mad it gets out there, remember it remains a niche and peripheral interest.
Perhaps politics will come for me this year, and perhaps it is naive to be complacent about it, but more likely "They'll burn down the synagogues at 6 o'clock, and we'll all carry on like before".
A really interesting post, for which many thanks.
2024 was always going to be a hard act to follow for this site - having both a UK General Election and a US Presidential election in the same year is basically two trips to the buffet on the same day and it's fair to say many on here didn't like either result. A world with Sunak as Prime Minister and Harris as President would be a very different place, you'd imagine.
As to the day-to-day impact of politics, what happens locally affects me more than what happens nationally in the short term (the longer term is different). We have in 2026 local elections here in London and that will have an impact even though I imagine barely a third of those who can vote will vote.
We are all political or politics enthusiasts - we wouldn't be here otherwise. Sometimes, we like to see change before it manifests more broadly and spot trends before they become obvious -the betting part of the site plays to that.
We all have our agendas, our teams and our flags and the debates/arguments reflect those. Too often we revisit old battles simply because we can but as the annual prediction contest shows, trying to read the runes of the future - well, I'd have more chance of going through the card at Lingfield this afternoon.
A world with Sunak as PM still and Harris as US President would have been better for Ukraine, better for the UK economy and business owners, wealthy pensioners and property owners and farmers, better for woke in the US, worse for Putin and Netanyahu, worse for UK train drivers and GPs and those claiming lots of welfare and better for the global free market which would still be largely tariff free and better for tackling climate change. It would have been good for trans in the US, not so good for trans in the UK.
It would also have been a better world for those who like slick and articulate leaders, which Sunak and Harris were clearly more than Starmer and Trump. Most of the white working class and lower middle class in both nations though clearly rejected Sunak and Harris for what they thought would be straightforward common sense with Starmer and Trump
I’m not sure Harris would be better for the economy. Her plan to tax unrealised gains as wealth was stupid.
The US economy is forecast to grow at 5.4% in the final quarter. Harris woilent achieve that.
California is about to propose something similar on unrealised capital gains, which is likely to result in good news for Texas and Florida.
The Minnesota fraud story would be rather interesting now, if Tim Walz was the sitting Veep. I suspect there’s a lot more to come on that front in the next few weeks, and not restricted to the one state. There’s billions of federal dollars distributed by States, easy to see how it gets passed out to favourable groups who make campaign contributions, with little oversight to auditing.
Thanks for this, Ben, and "Ho, hum" for my predictions.
Does anyone get the impression that there seemed to be very little reviewing of 2025 both on PB and across the wider media? If ever a year slipped into history unloved and unmarked, 2025 was it, and perhaps it is a wider malaise than simply Starmer or Trump or any one of the news stories this year.
And yet, and this is true for most years, and is an important corollary to the go and vote / politics is vital brigade: how often does politics directly turn the course of somebody's life on here? Despite Trump, despite Labour, despite war and refugees and all, most years and last year, the effects of politics on my life were very much at the margins and I think most people can say the same. So, however mad it gets out there, remember it remains a niche and peripheral interest.
Perhaps politics will come for me this year, and perhaps it is naive to be complacent about it, but more likely "They'll burn down the synagogues at 6 o'clock, and we'll all carry on like before".
A really interesting post, for which many thanks.
2024 was always going to be a hard act to follow for this site - having both a UK General Election and a US Presidential election in the same year is basically two trips to the buffet on the same day and it's fair to say many on here didn't like either result. A world with Sunak as Prime Minister and Harris as President would be a very different place, you'd imagine.
As to the day-to-day impact of politics, what happens locally affects me more than what happens nationally in the short term (the longer term is different). We have in 2026 local elections here in London and that will have an impact even though I imagine barely a third of those who can vote will vote.
We are all political or politics enthusiasts - we wouldn't be here otherwise. Sometimes, we like to see change before it manifests more broadly and spot trends before they become obvious -the betting part of the site plays to that.
We all have our agendas, our teams and our flags and the debates/arguments reflect those. Too often we revisit old battles simply because we can but as the annual prediction contest shows, trying to read the runes of the future - well, I'd have more chance of going through the card at Lingfield this afternoon.
A world with Sunak as PM still and Harris as US President would have been better for Ukraine, better for the UK economy and business owners, wealthy pensioners and property owners and farmers, better for woke in the US, worse for Putin and Netanyahu, worse for UK train drivers and GPs and those claiming lots of welfare and better for the global free market which would still be largely tariff free and better for tackling climate change. It would have been good for trans in the US, not so good for trans in the UK.
It would also have been a better world for those who like slick and articulate leaders, which Sunak and Harris were clearly more than Starmer and Trump. Most of the white working class and lower middle class in both nations though clearly rejected Sunak and Harris for what they thought would be straightforward common sense with Starmer and Trump
I’m not sure Harris would be better for the economy. Her plan to tax unrealised gains as wealth was stupid.
The US economy is forecast to grow at 5.4% in the final quarter. Harris woilent achieve that.
Not her tax and spend plans no, though Harris would not have imposed the tariffs on US imports Trump has which are increasing US prices
No they’re not. Evidence is most of the costs are being absorbed.
Off thread - I saw this on facebook the other day. It's actually quite a good shorthand for 'what does the electorate think about the rest of the world'.
In short, we like New Zealand, Canada and Australia, and also Scandinavia, and also Spain.
@Gardenwalker may be interested given his recent article and his antecedents.
Eyeing the middle ranking countries, there seems to be significant crossover between countries we esteem economically/politically, and favoured holiday destinations.
Behind a paywall, but here's the gist: As rules currently stand, trade union affiliate members (who are not otherwise Labour members) are going to be more influential than hitherto in electing the next Labour leader because: 1. Labour membership is plummeting, so Labour members are becoming a smaller part of the eligible selectorate which also includes members of affiliated trade unions who pay the political levy (Unite, Unison, GMB etc.) 2. Since 2021, union members who pay the political levy no longer have to register themselves as Labour affiliate members in order to be entitled to a vote, and unions could (if they wish) facilitate participation by arranging to automatically send all eligible members a ballot paper. 3. Paying the political levy has switched to being opt out not opt in under the 2025 Employment Rights Act.
So the outcome could depend a lot on whether the left wing leadership of Unite and Unison engage actively in the process, campaigning for a particular candidate.
If I were Kemi I’d be very relaxed about Zahawi going.
The more the discredited old guard go, the easier it becomes to move forwards with a new proposition.
Kemi this morning, 'Oh dear, I have lost Zahawi, Nadine Dorries, Gullis, Kruger, Berry, Andrea Jenkyns. Who next will follow them to Reform? Liz Truss? I will keep the champagne on ice!'
I’m rather surprised La Truss hasn’t moved over yet. The only reason I can think she hasn’t is that:
(a) she really wants a big press conference with Farage, and he knows that he literally can’t be pictured anywhere near her and retain credibility so he’s telling her where to go; or
(b) she thinks she can time it for maximum “impact” (eg after the local elections).
What poor Liz probably doesn’t get is that any announcement of which party she’s in will immediately lob a hand grenade at that party’s fortunes. Champagne corks would be popping at Tory HQ if she went to Reform.
Thanks for this, Ben, and "Ho, hum" for my predictions.
Does anyone get the impression that there seemed to be very little reviewing of 2025 both on PB and across the wider media? If ever a year slipped into history unloved and unmarked, 2025 was it, and perhaps it is a wider malaise than simply Starmer or Trump or any one of the news stories this year.
And yet, and this is true for most years, and is an important corollary to the go and vote / politics is vital brigade: how often does politics directly turn the course of somebody's life on here? Despite Trump, despite Labour, despite war and refugees and all, most years and last year, the effects of politics on my life were very much at the margins and I think most people can say the same. So, however mad it gets out there, remember it remains a niche and peripheral interest.
Perhaps politics will come for me this year, and perhaps it is naive to be complacent about it, but more likely "They'll burn down the synagogues at 6 o'clock, and we'll all carry on like before".
A really interesting post, for which many thanks.
2024 was always going to be a hard act to follow for this site - having both a UK General Election and a US Presidential election in the same year is basically two trips to the buffet on the same day and it's fair to say many on here didn't like either result. A world with Sunak as Prime Minister and Harris as President would be a very different place, you'd imagine.
As to the day-to-day impact of politics, what happens locally affects me more than what happens nationally in the short term (the longer term is different). We have in 2026 local elections here in London and that will have an impact even though I imagine barely a third of those who can vote will vote.
We are all political or politics enthusiasts - we wouldn't be here otherwise. Sometimes, we like to see change before it manifests more broadly and spot trends before they become obvious -the betting part of the site plays to that.
We all have our agendas, our teams and our flags and the debates/arguments reflect those. Too often we revisit old battles simply because we can but as the annual prediction contest shows, trying to read the runes of the future - well, I'd have more chance of going through the card at Lingfield this afternoon.
A world with Sunak as PM still and Harris as US President would have been better for Ukraine, better for the UK economy and business owners, wealthy pensioners and property owners and farmers, better for woke in the US, worse for Putin and Netanyahu, worse for UK train drivers and GPs and those claiming lots of welfare and better for the global free market which would still be largely tariff free and better for tackling climate change. It would have been good for trans in the US, not so good for trans in the UK.
It would also have been a better world for those who like slick and articulate leaders, which Sunak and Harris were clearly more than Starmer and Trump. Most of the white working class and lower middle class in both nations though clearly rejected Sunak and Harris for what they thought would be straightforward common sense with Starmer and Trump
I’m not sure Harris would be better for the economy. Her plan to tax unrealised gains as wealth was stupid.
The US economy is forecast to grow at 5.4% in the final quarter. Harris woilent achieve that.
California is about to propose something similar on unrealised capital gains, which is likely to result in good news for Texas and Florida.
The Minnesota fraud story would be rather interesting now, if Tim Walz was the sitting Veep. I suspect there’s a lot more to come on that front in the next few weeks, and not restricted to the one state. There’s billions of federal dollars distributed by States, easy to see how it gets passed out to favourable groups who make campaign contributions, with little oversight to auditing.
Given the Minnesota fraud story is being led by a MAGA propagandist, and now to be investigated by the ... Dept of Homeland Security, I'm sure you're right about it getting "interesting".
about Reform's need to recruit high calibre in high quantities.
Zahawi is too careless. Anyone of course can make careless errors with the HMRC that leads to having to pay £5,000,000 following investigation. It happens to me all the time. But it does mean you are not quite what the Reform team are looking for. The lack of high quality, transparently decent and credible recruits is a big problem for them, unless they are hiding a lot of lights under a lot of bushels.
My 6th place - thank you Ben Pointer - inspires me to repeat that by the end of 2026 Reform will not have a commanding poll lead. And in the next GE they will come second or third in votes and seats.
Who do you forsee replacing them in the running? Labour seem to be continuing unchanged on a straight line decline in the polling which presumably has to flatten off somewhere, but it's a stretch to imagine a way back up for them from here. Every week it's another u-turn or an unforced error, their coalition splinters a fraction more, and every week their numbers decline further.
The LDs have been consistently useless, uninteresting, and have no narrative or answers.
The Tories are just about treading water, despite Kemi's best PMQs performances (barring her terrible showing last week) in ages. But that's the problem with a pitch which boils down to "Farage is right, so vote for me". She demolishes Starmer easily, but gets herself no credit, because of his endless chant back of "fourteen years".
So barring a second coming of the SDP, or "Your Party" suddenly discovering hitherto unknown levels of organisational ability (like agreeing if they actually are a party or not), the only rising star left in town is Zac. He's clearly eating up the left end of the labor vote at a rate of knots, but once that's been consumed, where does he go then? He's not going to appeal to many Tories, probably not many LDs. And I think Farage's populists probably for the most part prefer Farage's populism to Zac's.
Which leaves the only other possibly being for Farage to do or say something so beyond the pail his voter go off to DNV. But I think he's pretty good at not doing that.
Good question. My present answer:
By the end of 2026 Reform will not have a clear, consistent or commanding lead. This will be contested between Tory and Reform. By the next GE the first three places in votes and seats will be Labour, Tory and Reform. Reform will be second or third. I think Tories will be first. Labour therefore second or third.
Reasons in a nutshell for the GE prediction:
I agree with the view (stated on PB a few times by someone, to whom my thanks) that the next GE will be, rather obscurely both: 'Anyone but Labour' and 'Reform v Not Reform'.
The LDs can't and won't expand their real support beyond 100 or so top seats. Reform can't get beyond about 30% and in the end will get less once they are closely examined. PC and SNP will do well. In England, 543 seats, outside the LD domain, the only Not Reform and Not Labour choice to form a government is Tory.
Thanks for this, Ben, and "Ho, hum" for my predictions.
Does anyone get the impression that there seemed to be very little reviewing of 2025 both on PB and across the wider media? If ever a year slipped into history unloved and unmarked, 2025 was it, and perhaps it is a wider malaise than simply Starmer or Trump or any one of the news stories this year.
And yet, and this is true for most years, and is an important corollary to the go and vote / politics is vital brigade: how often does politics directly turn the course of somebody's life on here? Despite Trump, despite Labour, despite war and refugees and all, most years and last year, the effects of politics on my life were very much at the margins and I think most people can say the same. So, however mad it gets out there, remember it remains a niche and peripheral interest.
Perhaps politics will come for me this year, and perhaps it is naive to be complacent about it, but more likely "They'll burn down the synagogues at 6 o'clock, and we'll all carry on like before".
A really interesting post, for which many thanks.
2024 was always going to be a hard act to follow for this site - having both a UK General Election and a US Presidential election in the same year is basically two trips to the buffet on the same day and it's fair to say many on here didn't like either result. A world with Sunak as Prime Minister and Harris as President would be a very different place, you'd imagine.
As to the day-to-day impact of politics, what happens locally affects me more than what happens nationally in the short term (the longer term is different). We have in 2026 local elections here in London and that will have an impact even though I imagine barely a third of those who can vote will vote.
We are all political or politics enthusiasts - we wouldn't be here otherwise. Sometimes, we like to see change before it manifests more broadly and spot trends before they become obvious -the betting part of the site plays to that.
We all have our agendas, our teams and our flags and the debates/arguments reflect those. Too often we revisit old battles simply because we can but as the annual prediction contest shows, trying to read the runes of the future - well, I'd have more chance of going through the card at Lingfield this afternoon.
A world with Sunak as PM still and Harris as US President would have been better for Ukraine, better for the UK economy and business owners, wealthy pensioners and property owners and farmers, better for woke in the US, worse for Putin and Netanyahu, worse for UK train drivers and GPs and those claiming lots of welfare and better for the global free market which would still be largely tariff free and better for tackling climate change. It would have been good for trans in the US, not so good for trans in the UK.
It would also have been a better world for those who like slick and articulate leaders, which Sunak and Harris were clearly more than Starmer and Trump. Most of the white working class and lower middle class in both nations though clearly rejected Sunak and Harris for what they thought would be straightforward common sense with Starmer and Trump
I’m not sure Harris would be better for the economy. Her plan to tax unrealised gains as wealth was stupid.
The US economy is forecast to grow at 5.4% in the final quarter. Harris woilent achieve that.
Not her tax and spend plans no, though Harris would not have imposed the tariffs on US imports Trump has which are increasing US prices
No they’re not. Evidence is most of the costs are being absorbed.
Behind a paywall, but here's the gist: As rules currently stand, trade union affiliate members (who are not otherwise Labour members) are going to be more influential than hitherto in electing the next Labour leader because: 1. Labour membership is plummeting, so Labour members are becoming a smaller part of the eligible selectorate which also includes members of affiliated trade unions who pay the political levy (Unite, Unison, GMB etc.) 2. Since 2021, union members who pay the political levy no longer have to register themselves as Labour affiliate members in order to be entitled to a vote, and unions could (if they wish) facilitate participation by arranging to automatically send all eligible members a ballot paper. 3. Paying the political levy has switched to being opt out not opt in under the 2025 Employment Rights Act.
So the outcome could depend a lot on whether the left wing leadership of Unite and Unison engage actively in the process, campaigning for a particular candidate.
Sharon Graham the leader of Unite is impressive and not 'especially' left wing. She is very much not Blairite progressive - comes over to me as more Blue Labour than anything else.
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
"D'Hondt" was a Belgian civil servant who gave his name to a particular formula often used to calculate the number of seats according to the propoortion of votes cast. The D'Hondt Formula is the one used to calculate the seats in an STV election. STV is the D'Hondt process in action.
STV is a bastardised version.
One vote for one party. Party lists. Happy days.
I rather like STV because it gives you as a voter a real say over the candidates as well as the party. Say party X will definitely win one member and maybe two in a five member seat and puts up three candidates. Those candidates will put more effort into being the first ranked candidate within the party slate than competing with candidates from other parties.
This sort of thing is going to vary by constituency, but in a geographically large constituency like Cork South-West what tends to happen with multiple candidates is that they will work different parts of the constituency.
So you might have one candidate who was better known on the eastern end of the constituency and would concentrate on campaigning in Bandon and Clonakilty, while the other candidate focused on the Western end around Bantry and Castletownbere. Though sometimes the intra-party rivalries can be very strong.
RTÉ did a great series of podcasts on every constituency before the last election in Ireland and I'd recommend listening to at least a few of them to gain a sense of how the local party politics plays out.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright says the U.S. taking ownership stakes in oil companies is a real possibility, signaling a major shift in energy and national security strategy. https://x.com/zywiremedia1/status/2010387313931813070
about Reform's need to recruit high calibre in high quantities.
Zahawi is too careless. Anyone of course can make careless errors with the HMRC that leads to having to pay £5,000,000 following investigation. It happens to me all the time. But it does mean you are not quite what the Reform team are looking for. The lack of high quality, transparently decent and credible recruits is a big problem for them, unless they are hiding a lot of lights under a lot of bushels.
My 6th place - thank you Ben Pointer - inspires me to repeat that by the end of 2026 Reform will not have a commanding poll lead. And in the next GE they will come second or third in votes and seats.
Who do you forsee replacing them in the running? Labour seem to be continuing unchanged on a straight line decline in the polling which presumably has to flatten off somewhere, but it's a stretch to imagine a way back up for them from here. Every week it's another u-turn or an unforced error, their coalition splinters a fraction more, and every week their numbers decline further.
The LDs have been consistently useless, uninteresting, and have no narrative or answers.
The Tories are just about treading water, despite Kemi's best PMQs performances (barring her terrible showing last week) in ages. But that's the problem with a pitch which boils down to "Farage is right, so vote for me". She demolishes Starmer easily, but gets herself no credit, because of his endless chant back of "fourteen years".
So barring a second coming of the SDP, or "Your Party" suddenly discovering hitherto unknown levels of organisational ability (like agreeing if they actually are a party or not), the only rising star left in town is Zac. He's clearly eating up the left end of the labor vote at a rate of knots, but once that's been consumed, where does he go then? He's not going to appeal to many Tories, probably not many LDs. And I think Farage's populists probably for the most part prefer Farage's populism to Zac's.
Which leaves the only other possibly being for Farage to do or say something so beyond the pail his voter go off to DNV. But I think he's pretty good at not doing that.
I listened to a New Statesman podcast with a friend of this site the other day, making the point that fugures like Boris and Corbyn had a core vote that meant their VI had an effective floor. Starmer has no core vote - therefore his Government has no effective floor.
Thanks for this, Ben, and "Ho, hum" for my predictions.
Does anyone get the impression that there seemed to be very little reviewing of 2025 both on PB and across the wider media? If ever a year slipped into history unloved and unmarked, 2025 was it, and perhaps it is a wider malaise than simply Starmer or Trump or any one of the news stories this year.
And yet, and this is true for most years, and is an important corollary to the go and vote / politics is vital brigade: how often does politics directly turn the course of somebody's life on here? Despite Trump, despite Labour, despite war and refugees and all, most years and last year, the effects of politics on my life were very much at the margins and I think most people can say the same. So, however mad it gets out there, remember it remains a niche and peripheral interest.
Perhaps politics will come for me this year, and perhaps it is naive to be complacent about it, but more likely "They'll burn down the synagogues at 6 o'clock, and we'll all carry on like before".
A really interesting post, for which many thanks.
2024 was always going to be a hard act to follow for this site - having both a UK General Election and a US Presidential election in the same year is basically two trips to the buffet on the same day and it's fair to say many on here didn't like either result. A world with Sunak as Prime Minister and Harris as President would be a very different place, you'd imagine.
As to the day-to-day impact of politics, what happens locally affects me more than what happens nationally in the short term (the longer term is different). We have in 2026 local elections here in London and that will have an impact even though I imagine barely a third of those who can vote will vote.
We are all political or politics enthusiasts - we wouldn't be here otherwise. Sometimes, we like to see change before it manifests more broadly and spot trends before they become obvious -the betting part of the site plays to that.
We all have our agendas, our teams and our flags and the debates/arguments reflect those. Too often we revisit old battles simply because we can but as the annual prediction contest shows, trying to read the runes of the future - well, I'd have more chance of going through the card at Lingfield this afternoon.
A world with Sunak as PM still and Harris as US President would have been better for Ukraine, better for the UK economy and business owners, wealthy pensioners and property owners and farmers, better for woke in the US, worse for Putin and Netanyahu, worse for UK train drivers and GPs and those claiming lots of welfare and better for the global free market which would still be largely tariff free and better for tackling climate change. It would have been good for trans in the US, not so good for trans in the UK.
It would also have been a better world for those who like slick and articulate leaders, which Sunak and Harris were clearly more than Starmer and Trump. Most of the white working class and lower middle class in both nations though clearly rejected Sunak and Harris for what they thought would be straightforward common sense with Starmer and Trump
I’m not sure Harris would be better for the economy. Her plan to tax unrealised gains as wealth was stupid.
The US economy is forecast to grow at 5.4% in the final quarter. Harris woilent achieve that.
Not her tax and spend plans no, though Harris would not have imposed the tariffs on US imports Trump has which are increasing US prices
No they’re not. Evidence is most of the costs are being absorbed.
I didn’t say costs hadn’t increased just that most of the increase had been absorbed.
We cannot on the one hand bemoan Reform's lack of Government experience, and on the other complain when they get some. Zahawi isn't a top flight signing, but he knows how things work for better and worse.
Thanks for this, Ben, and "Ho, hum" for my predictions.
Does anyone get the impression that there seemed to be very little reviewing of 2025 both on PB and across the wider media? If ever a year slipped into history unloved and unmarked, 2025 was it, and perhaps it is a wider malaise than simply Starmer or Trump or any one of the news stories this year.
And yet, and this is true for most years, and is an important corollary to the go and vote / politics is vital brigade: how often does politics directly turn the course of somebody's life on here? Despite Trump, despite Labour, despite war and refugees and all, most years and last year, the effects of politics on my life were very much at the margins and I think most people can say the same. So, however mad it gets out there, remember it remains a niche and peripheral interest.
Perhaps politics will come for me this year, and perhaps it is naive to be complacent about it, but more likely "They'll burn down the synagogues at 6 o'clock, and we'll all carry on like before".
Thanks for this, Ben, and "Ho, hum" for my predictions.
Does anyone get the impression that there seemed to be very little reviewing of 2025 both on PB and across the wider media? If ever a year slipped into history unloved and unmarked, 2025 was it, and perhaps it is a wider malaise than simply Starmer or Trump or any one of the news stories this year.
And yet, and this is true for most years, and is an important corollary to the go and vote / politics is vital brigade: how often does politics directly turn the course of somebody's life on here? Despite Trump, despite Labour, despite war and refugees and all, most years and last year, the effects of politics on my life were very much at the margins and I think most people can say the same. So, however mad it gets out there, remember it remains a niche and peripheral interest.
Perhaps politics will come for me this year, and perhaps it is naive to be complacent about it, but more likely "They'll burn down the synagogues at 6 o'clock, and we'll all carry on like before".
Nice Del Amitri reference.
I picked up several podcast and Youtube commentator reviews; my usual for decades has been R4 "The Correspondents Look Ahead", which I used to record on cassette to relisten before the next one.
Probably the best from for me were Mallen Baker, Anne Applebaum and I think Legal Eagle.
I think we will see an upswing in podcasts that are 30 minutes rather than an hour.
So.....you plan to cheat in the next competition? Well done!
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
"D'Hondt" was a Belgian civil servant who gave his name to a particular formula often used to calculate the number of seats according to the propoortion of votes cast. The D'Hondt Formula is the one used to calculate the seats in an STV election. STV is the D'Hondt process in action.
STV is a bastardised version.
One vote for one party. Party lists. Happy days.
I rather like STV because it gives you as a voter a real say over the candidates as well as the party. Say party X will definitely win one member and maybe two in a five member seat and puts up three candidates. Those candidates will put more effort into being the first ranked candidate within the party slate than competing with candidates from other parties.
This sort of thing is going to vary by constituency, but in a geographically large constituency like Cork South-West what tends to happen with multiple candidates is that they will work different parts of the constituency.
So you might have one candidate who was better known on the eastern end of the constituency and would concentrate on campaigning in Bandon and Clonakilty, while the other candidate focused on the Western end around Bantry and Castletownbere. Though sometimes the intra-party rivalries can be very strong.
RTÉ did a great series of podcasts on every constituency before the last election in Ireland and I'd recommend listening to at least a few of them to gain a sense of how the local party politics plays out.
Yes. The degree to which voters influence the ranking of candidates under STV depends on how much attention they are paying (not much). But the fact candidates are assessed against each other does raise their game a bit I think.
Off thread - I saw this on facebook the other day. It's actually quite a good shorthand for 'what does the electorate think about the rest of the world'.
In short, we like New Zealand, Canada and Australia, and also Scandinavia, and also Spain.
@Gardenwalker may be interested given his recent article and his antecedents.
The US number is a sad reflection on how Trump has tarnished his country's reputation. It is viewed less favourably than Mexico and its score is notably weak when compared to other Anglophone countries. The other interesting number is Japan, that is a country that Brits seem to have warmed to significantly over my lifetime.
Thanks for this, Ben, and "Ho, hum" for my predictions.
Does anyone get the impression that there seemed to be very little reviewing of 2025 both on PB and across the wider media? If ever a year slipped into history unloved and unmarked, 2025 was it, and perhaps it is a wider malaise than simply Starmer or Trump or any one of the news stories this year.
And yet, and this is true for most years, and is an important corollary to the go and vote / politics is vital brigade: how often does politics directly turn the course of somebody's life on here? Despite Trump, despite Labour, despite war and refugees and all, most years and last year, the effects of politics on my life were very much at the margins and I think most people can say the same. So, however mad it gets out there, remember it remains a niche and peripheral interest.
Perhaps politics will come for me this year, and perhaps it is naive to be complacent about it, but more likely "They'll burn down the synagogues at 6 o'clock, and we'll all carry on like before".
A really interesting post, for which many thanks.
2024 was always going to be a hard act to follow for this site - having both a UK General Election and a US Presidential election in the same year is basically two trips to the buffet on the same day and it's fair to say many on here didn't like either result. A world with Sunak as Prime Minister and Harris as President would be a very different place, you'd imagine.
As to the day-to-day impact of politics, what happens locally affects me more than what happens nationally in the short term (the longer term is different). We have in 2026 local elections here in London and that will have an impact even though I imagine barely a third of those who can vote will vote.
We are all political or politics enthusiasts - we wouldn't be here otherwise. Sometimes, we like to see change before it manifests more broadly and spot trends before they become obvious -the betting part of the site plays to that.
We all have our agendas, our teams and our flags and the debates/arguments reflect those. Too often we revisit old battles simply because we can but as the annual prediction contest shows, trying to read the runes of the future - well, I'd have more chance of going through the card at Lingfield this afternoon.
A world with Sunak as PM still and Harris as US President would have been better for Ukraine, better for the UK economy and business owners, wealthy pensioners and property owners and farmers, better for woke in the US, worse for Putin and Netanyahu, worse for UK train drivers and GPs and those claiming lots of welfare and better for the global free market which would still be largely tariff free and better for tackling climate change. It would have been good for trans in the US, not so good for trans in the UK.
It would also have been a better world for those who like slick and articulate leaders, which Sunak and Harris were clearly more than Starmer and Trump. Most of the white working class and lower middle class in both nations though clearly rejected Sunak and Harris for what they thought would be straightforward common sense with Starmer and Trump
I’m not sure Harris would be better for the economy. Her plan to tax unrealised gains as wealth was stupid.
The US economy is forecast to grow at 5.4% in the final quarter. Harris woilent achieve that.
Not her tax and spend plans no, though Harris would not have imposed the tariffs on US imports Trump has which are increasing US prices
No they’re not. Evidence is most of the costs are being absorbed.
I didn’t say costs hadn’t increased just that most of the increase had been absorbed.
We cannot on the one hand bemoan Reform's lack of Government experience, and on the other complain when they get some. Zahawi isn't a top flight signing, but he knows how things work for better and worse.
For himself, maybe!
I woud say there doesn't look to be much quality control at Reform. They just seem to be intent on offering the wort of the 2024 Tories...
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright says the U.S. taking ownership stakes in oil companies is a real possibility, signaling a major shift in energy and national security strategy. https://x.com/zywiremedia1/status/2010387313931813070
Shades of Nixon's (other crooked socialist) price controls.
Trump telling Raytheon how to manage their finances and credit card companies how much interest they can charge are FAR left positions.
The Constitution doesn’t give the Executive that power.
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
More correctly the number of seats a party wins is influenced by how the voters react to the number of candidates the party fields, and the qualities of those candidates.
No other electoral system gives the voters as much power to select the party affiliation and individual qualities of the politician they wish to represent them.
Short of banning political parties I can't think of an electoral system that more effectively minimises the power of political parties. Whereas party list PR puts the party bureaucracy even more in control than with FPTP.
The 2 downsides of STV are the time it takes to count and the fact parties can game the system by just standing the number of candidates they expect to win as candidates.
Which means that a political party who does unexpectedly well (say Sinn Fein in the last set of Irish elections) end up winning only the seats they've put candidates up for when they could have won another 10-20 seats.
I don't think time taken to count the vote is a downside if it leads to a more representative/better result.
It is true you optimally want to stand the number of candidates that you might win on a good day, but not more than that. I would count that as an undesirable quirk of the STV method - ideally you wouldn't be penalised for providing more candidates - but no-one's gaming the system. Everyone understands the calculation. In general you want to stand as many candidates as you might win. Sinn Fein miscalculated. It was their fault.
So you agree that the number of SF members elected was not a true reflection of the level of support for SF under this so-called "proportional" system?
Thanks for this, Ben, and "Ho, hum" for my predictions.
Does anyone get the impression that there seemed to be very little reviewing of 2025 both on PB and across the wider media? If ever a year slipped into history unloved and unmarked, 2025 was it, and perhaps it is a wider malaise than simply Starmer or Trump or any one of the news stories this year.
And yet, and this is true for most years, and is an important corollary to the go and vote / politics is vital brigade: how often does politics directly turn the course of somebody's life on here? Despite Trump, despite Labour, despite war and refugees and all, most years and last year, the effects of politics on my life were very much at the margins and I think most people can say the same. So, however mad it gets out there, remember it remains a niche and peripheral interest.
Perhaps politics will come for me this year, and perhaps it is naive to be complacent about it, but more likely "They'll burn down the synagogues at 6 o'clock, and we'll all carry on like before".
A really interesting post, for which many thanks.
2024 was always going to be a hard act to follow for this site - having both a UK General Election and a US Presidential election in the same year is basically two trips to the buffet on the same day and it's fair to say many on here didn't like either result. A world with Sunak as Prime Minister and Harris as President would be a very different place, you'd imagine.
As to the day-to-day impact of politics, what happens locally affects me more than what happens nationally in the short term (the longer term is different). We have in 2026 local elections here in London and that will have an impact even though I imagine barely a third of those who can vote will vote.
We are all political or politics enthusiasts - we wouldn't be here otherwise. Sometimes, we like to see change before it manifests more broadly and spot trends before they become obvious -the betting part of the site plays to that.
We all have our agendas, our teams and our flags and the debates/arguments reflect those. Too often we revisit old battles simply because we can but as the annual prediction contest shows, trying to read the runes of the future - well, I'd have more chance of going through the card at Lingfield this afternoon.
A world with Sunak as PM still and Harris as US President would have been better for Ukraine, better for the UK economy and business owners, wealthy pensioners and property owners and farmers, better for woke in the US, worse for Putin and Netanyahu, worse for UK train drivers and GPs and those claiming lots of welfare and better for the global free market which would still be largely tariff free and better for tackling climate change. It would have been good for trans in the US, not so good for trans in the UK.
It would also have been a better world for those who like slick and articulate leaders, which Sunak and Harris were clearly more than Starmer and Trump. Most of the white working class and lower middle class in both nations though clearly rejected Sunak and Harris for what they thought would be straightforward common sense with Starmer and Trump
I’m not sure Harris would be better for the economy. Her plan to tax unrealised gains as wealth was stupid.
The US economy is forecast to grow at 5.4% in the final quarter. Harris woilent achieve that.
Not her tax and spend plans no, though Harris would not have imposed the tariffs on US imports Trump has which are increasing US prices
No they’re not. Evidence is most of the costs are being absorbed.
I didn’t say costs hadn’t increased just that most of the increase had been absorbed.
We cannot on the one hand bemoan Reform's lack of Government experience, and on the other complain when they get some. Zahawi isn't a top flight signing, but he knows how things work for better and worse.
Behind a paywall, but here's the gist: As rules currently stand, trade union affiliate members (who are not otherwise Labour members) are going to be more influential than hitherto in electing the next Labour leader because: 1. Labour membership is plummeting, so Labour members are becoming a smaller part of the eligible selectorate which also includes members of affiliated trade unions who pay the political levy (Unite, Unison, GMB etc.) 2. Since 2021, union members who pay the political levy no longer have to register themselves as Labour affiliate members in order to be entitled to a vote, and unions could (if they wish) facilitate participation by arranging to automatically send all eligible members a ballot paper. 3. Paying the political levy has switched to being opt out not opt in under the 2025 Employment Rights Act.
So the outcome could depend a lot on whether the left wing leadership of Unite and Unison engage actively in the process, campaigning for a particular candidate.
Sharon Graham the leader of Unite is impressive and not 'especially' left wing. She is very much not Blairite progressive - comes over to me as more Blue Labour than anything else.
She was left wing enough to get the support of the SWP and the Socialist Party when standing for election.
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
"D'Hondt" was a Belgian civil servant who gave his name to a particular formula often used to calculate the number of seats according to the propoortion of votes cast. The D'Hondt Formula is the one used to calculate the seats in an STV election. STV is the D'Hondt process in action.
STV is a bastardised version.
One vote for one party. Party lists. Happy days.
I rather like STV because it gives you as a voter a real say over the candidates as well as the party. Say party X will definitely win one member and maybe two in a five member seat and puts up three candidates. Those candidates will put more effort into being the first ranked candidate within the party slate than competing with candidates from other parties.
Internal bunfights should all be settled in primaries, not in the General Election.
IF you want to influence the order of candidates on the party list, join the party and vote in the primaries.
Internal bunfights should all be settled in primaries, not in the General Election. Why?
Party List systems give too much power to the activists (who are an odd lot - I should know) and remove power from the ordinary voter.
You don't have to be an activist to vote in a primary. The majority of members who keep their heads down can also vote with a few clicks of the mouse.
Off thread - I saw this on facebook the other day. It's actually quite a good shorthand for 'what does the electorate think about the rest of the world'.
In short, we like New Zealand, Canada and Australia, and also Scandinavia, and also Spain.
@Gardenwalker may be interested given his recent article and his antecedents.
The US number is a sad reflection on how Trump has tarnished his country's reputation. It is viewed less favourably than Mexico and its score is notably weak when compared to other Anglophone countries. The other interesting number is Japan, that is a country that Brits seem to have warmed to significantly over my lifetime.
The upswing in Japan's rep is probably a combination of the WW2 die off ('very cruel race' to quote Bridget Jones), good quality electronics and cars but - thanks to the 80s crash - no consummate perceived rise in threat.
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
More correctly the number of seats a party wins is influenced by how the voters react to the number of candidates the party fields, and the qualities of those candidates.
No other electoral system gives the voters as much power to select the party affiliation and individual qualities of the politician they wish to represent them.
Short of banning political parties I can't think of an electoral system that more effectively minimises the power of political parties. Whereas party list PR puts the party bureaucracy even more in control than with FPTP.
The 2 downsides of STV are the time it takes to count and the fact parties can game the system by just standing the number of candidates they expect to win as candidates.
Which means that a political party who does unexpectedly well (say Sinn Fein in the last set of Irish elections) end up winning only the seats they've put candidates up for when they could have won another 10-20 seats.
I don't think time taken to count the vote is a downside if it leads to a more representative/better result.
It is true you optimally want to stand the number of candidates that you might win on a good day, but not more than that. I would count that as an undesirable quirk of the STV method - ideally you wouldn't be penalised for providing more candidates - but no-one's gaming the system. Everyone understands the calculation. In general you want to stand as many candidates as you might win. Sinn Fein miscalculated. It was their fault.
It's better for the voters if the parties stand one more candidate than they are likely to win, so that the voters can choose between candidates for a party. Some of the STV elections for Scottish councils have been a poor advert for the system when each party has stood one candidate because they all expect to only elect one councillor, and there's been very little choice for the voters.
But I think back to some famous FPTP elections and I think that GE 1997 would have been a lot better for the Tory voters of Tatton, who would have been able to vote much more decisively to dump Neil Hamilton without having to rely on the shenanigans of parties standing aside for an independent candidate.
Off thread - I saw this on facebook the other day. It's actually quite a good shorthand for 'what does the electorate think about the rest of the world'.
In short, we like New Zealand, Canada and Australia, and also Scandinavia, and also Spain.
@Gardenwalker may be interested given his recent article and his antecedents.
The US number is a sad reflection on how Trump has tarnished his country's reputation. It is viewed less favourably than Mexico and its score is notably weak when compared to other Anglophone countries. The other interesting number is Japan, that is a country that Brits seem to have warmed to significantly over my lifetime.
...as the ones who fought them in WW2 have died, perhaps?
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
"D'Hondt" was a Belgian civil servant who gave his name to a particular formula often used to calculate the number of seats according to the propoortion of votes cast. The D'Hondt Formula is the one used to calculate the seats in an STV election. STV is the D'Hondt process in action.
STV is a bastardised version.
One vote for one party. Party lists. Happy days.
I rather like STV because it gives you as a voter a real say over the candidates as well as the party. Say party X will definitely win one member and maybe two in a five member seat and puts up three candidates. Those candidates will put more effort into being the first ranked candidate within the party slate than competing with candidates from other parties.
Internal bunfights should all be settled in primaries, not in the General Election.
IF you want to influence the order of candidates on the party list, join the party and vote in the primaries.
Except if you support a party but think their candidate is a dick, you have no alternative but to vote for the dick. Bearing in mind how small political parties are, it seems that giving the voters rather than a few dozen party members the power to choose between candidates is no bad thing.
In a multi-member d'Hondt constituency you'll have hundreds of party members, or even a couple of thousand. I would anticipate, for example, the whole of the Bradford MDC area forming a single constituency.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright says the U.S. taking ownership stakes in oil companies is a real possibility, signaling a major shift in energy and national security strategy. https://x.com/zywiremedia1/status/2010387313931813070
That'll larn 'em not to invest in Venezuela.
Although the political risk of developing projects in the US is now highly elevated.
Congratulations to @Driver on the win, and to @Benpointer for organising.
Sets reminder to self, to remember to enter the competition this year!
We're just finalising the questions.
We've got some proper elections to predict in 2026.
There were national elections in Germany, Canada and Australia last year.
This year the only major national elections are the US midterms and the New Zealand election
Q1. Will the 2026 US midterms be free and fair? A1 Yes 0 :No 10 points.
They probably will overall, it is state governments that run them not the Federal government anyway
US elections are never that fair, because gerrymandering is so embedded.
Has anyone done a list of who controls the process in the competitive districts? It shouldn't matter, but unfortunately it might.
I’m always shocked at the amount of political micromanaging that goes on around US elections, with town mayors deciding things such as the location and opening hours of ballot boxes.
Which of course they engineer to make sure their opponents’ voters face long queues, it’s all quite nakedly partisan.
The US House is now so Gerrymandered that only a couple of dozen seats change hands, even when there’s a relatively large swing in the vote.
Even attempts to tighten up rules such as voter ID, are fought along party lines.
Downside of the "direct electoral accountability for everything" model that the USA tends towards.
Some things are better done by technocrats working to explicit and democratically-agreed mandates.
Yes, for all that we critisise politics the UK is actually very good at organising elections themselves.
We generally wake up in the morning after a general election, with a pretty good idea of what’s happening. Only 2010 comes to mind as being up in the air for a few days, at least since the ‘70s.
I don't think Ireland, with a fully proportional system takes much longer, does it?
Generally speaking Ireland takes two days to get most of the count completed, though everyone has a pretty good idea of the overall result by the first lunchtime because the party workers observing the count (called tallymen) come up with very accurate tallies much more quickly. This is probably why they don't simply double/triple the number of counters in order to get the count completed in one day.
It took quite a long time after the last election to finalise the coalition deal, nearly two months. I think in the end they only felt the need to get it done so that a government was in place before Trump was inaugurated.
Ireland's system is STV, which is slower to count than a simple, directly proportional system, would be.
STV is a shite system. The number of seats a party wins in a constituency is influenced by how many candidates they field.
No such nonsense with D'Hondt. The gold standard system for multi-member constituencies.
"D'Hondt" was a Belgian civil servant who gave his name to a particular formula often used to calculate the number of seats according to the propoortion of votes cast. The D'Hondt Formula is the one used to calculate the seats in an STV election. STV is the D'Hondt process in action.
STV is a bastardised version.
One vote for one party. Party lists. Happy days.
I rather like STV because it gives you as a voter a real say over the candidates as well as the party. Say party X will definitely win one member and maybe two in a five member seat and puts up three candidates. Those candidates will put more effort into being the first ranked candidate within the party slate than competing with candidates from other parties.
Internal bunfights should all be settled in primaries, not in the General Election.
IF you want to influence the order of candidates on the party list, join the party and vote in the primaries.
You are not explaining why it's actually bad for voters to have a say over which candidate gets elected.
It's no secret that SNP will win a whole bunch of members under any electoral system in Scotland (we have three four different systems to choose from depending on the type of government, so we're kind of experts). But at least with STV I can suggest we get Mary rather than Jim.
The issue about the number of candidates fielded impacting the number elected is a disadvantage of the system.
Also, the counting is less than transparent. Surplus votes. Which votes? This pile here, or that pile there?
Comments
"Zahawi said he felt the UK had reached a "dark and dangerous" moment, which was why he had decided to join the party."
I mean, sure, lean into it.
I'm more than eight years a grandorphan.
It also puts him very much into the I'm alright Jack / do as I do not as I say set of people who should be avoided at all costs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inYaXCHl6is
about Reform's need to recruit high calibre in high quantities.
Zahawi is too careless. Anyone of course can make careless errors with the HMRC that leads to having to pay £5,000,000 following investigation. It happens to me all the time. But it does mean you are not quite what the Reform team are looking for. The lack of high quality, transparently decent and credible recruits is a big problem for them, unless they are hiding a lot of lights under a lot of bushels.
My 6th place - thank you Ben Pointer - inspires me to repeat that by the end of 2026 Reform will not have a commanding poll lead. And in the next GE they will come second or third in votes and seats.
Shows him to be an opportunist and chancer but without any sense of loyalty, He got his Stratford on Avon seat in the first place over a loyal hardworking Tory councillor because he made a showy speech, they should have selected the decent but dull councillor not the flashy Nadim.
Farage is welcome to him!
Which means that a political party who does unexpectedly well (say Sinn Fein in the last set of Irish elections) end up winning only the seats they've put candidates up for when they could have won another 10-20 seats.
One vote for one party. Party lists. Happy days.
Also, this whole circus is about trying to ram a genie back into a bottle into which it's not going to go. They'll be "Pornification" apps running locally on people's phones inside a couple of years, Online Safety Act or not. I don't like the shape of the future very much, but it's coming, like it or not - Ofcom are merely a more leadfooted King Canute, not so much standing on the beach telling the tide not to come further up as wading into the sea at low water and commanding it to go further away.
On the (minor) plus side, it will make all the problems with stolen/illicitly shared nudes much smaller, as everyone will plausibly be able to claim any given image or video of then is a fake,whether it is or not.
What you should do is create a derivative of your Granny - Elderly Relative Debt Obligations - with physical delivery in a no-tax location. And sell that, on an OTC market in ERDOs
voter a real say over the candidates as well as the party. Say party X will definitely win one member and maybe two in a five member seat and puts up three candidates. Those candidates will put more effort into being the first ranked candidate within the party slate than competing with candidates from other parties.
As might have been said before, Reform do need to get a team together to shadow at least the key ministries, so someone with Treasury experience is undoubtedly going to be useful.
The current Irish President left the Labour party when the party refused to stand her as a second candidate in her constituency, so she stood as an independent and was eventually elected as an independent despite the party's decision.
There are lots of similar examples of how STV weakens the hold the party machine has over candidate selection.
Edit: That's not to say that it isn't a weakness in the system, or that it doesn't have other weaknesses. No election system is perfect, but I think STV prioritises the things that I think are important - even though it results in the election of a bunch of right eejits in Ireland.
When the market goes south, we dump grannies on anyone stupid enough to buy.
Buy again at the bottom. We lose on the crash, but make a fortune on the rebound.
Full detail and background here: https://brilliantmaps.com/positive-opinions-uk/?fbclid=IwY2xjawPRvq1leHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeg7_zc_JD8Fa0IKqcSdmDUJgE6DMha0roODZ8AbKZfcHgC6pkdnL5ubhkhAA_aem_Ow7KFARYWADhrWc16eezmA
In short, we like New Zealand, Canada and Australia, and also Scandinavia, and also Spain.
@Gardenwalker may be interested given his recent article and his antecedents.
Stand 2 candidates and it's possible with first choices split across both candidates, both could be eliminated before either win a seat.
So it becomes a gamble, 1 guaranteed win or risk the vote and potentially win 2 seats (or the wrong candidate wins 1 seat).
But as you can see it does allow independent candidates to thrive, because they win on personal / none of the above votes, the issue getting enough first choices to not be eliminated early on.
The more the discredited old guard go, the easier it becomes to move forwards with a new proposition.
Starmer Vs Farage:
🌹 Starmer: 36% (+1)
➡️ Farage: 29% (+1)
Starmer Vs Badenoch:
🌹Starmer: 28% (-2)
🌳 Badenoch: 28% (+8)
Farage Vs Badenoch:
🌳 Badenoch: 31% (+10)
➡️ Farage: 21% (-2)
Via
@YouGov
, 6-7 Jan.
Changes w/ 3-4 Aug.'
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/2010674640532746643?s=20
If you mean Powell he has stood up to Trump. Just by not bowing to his demands.
Powell really isn’t anyone’s darling. He’s not been great and neither has the fed. Too slow to react to inflation which he thought was transitory, it wasn’t.
SKS, great negotiator he is, will give it them.
Labour seem to be continuing unchanged on a straight line decline in the polling which presumably has to flatten off somewhere, but it's a stretch to imagine a way back up for them from here. Every week it's another u-turn or an unforced error, their coalition splinters a fraction more, and every week their numbers decline further.
The LDs have been consistently useless, uninteresting, and have no narrative or answers.
The Tories are just about treading water, despite Kemi's best PMQs performances (barring her terrible showing last week) in ages. But that's the problem with a pitch which boils down to "Farage is right, so vote for me". She demolishes Starmer easily, but gets herself no credit, because of his endless chant back of "fourteen years".
So barring a second coming of the SDP, or "Your Party" suddenly discovering hitherto unknown levels of organisational ability (like agreeing if they actually are a party or not), the only rising star left in town is Zac. He's clearly eating up the left end of the labor vote at a rate of knots, but once that's been consumed, where does he go then? He's not going to appeal to many Tories, probably not many LDs. And I think Farage's populists probably for the most part prefer Farage's populism to Zac's.
Which leaves the only other possibly being for Farage to do or say something so beyond the pail his voter go off to DNV. But I think he's pretty good at not doing that.
This is Max Moore, charismatic leader of the Britons First Party, and he has no more intention of resigning just because the voters rejected him than Donald Trump did in 2016. Can Max Moore get away with it?
Written by Francis Beckett (Tom Lehrer is Teaching Math...), the nail-biting satire, It Couldn’t Happen Here, comes to the OSO Barnes from Thursday 15 to Sunday 18 January."
I've booked my seat.
'He recounts the story of two Jewish constituents coming to him because a local school had handed out biscuits with icing depicting the Palestinian flag on a "cultural day."'
https://x.com/PulaRJS/status/2010496093189292111?s=20
IF you want to influence the order of candidates on the party list, join the party and vote in the primaries.
It is true you optimally want to stand the number of candidates that you might win on a good day, but not more than that. I would count that as an undesirable quirk of the STV method - ideally you wouldn't be penalised for providing more candidates - but no-one's gaming the system. Everyone understands the calculation. In general you want to stand as many candidates as you might win. Sinn Fein miscalculated. It was their fault.
Cheats.
Excellent progress for Kemi especially in regard to Farage
May she continue her progress
Though my kids would still have to grow up in the society around us so maybe I'd resist.
ETA big thanks for the competition Ben - I'm pleasantly surprised I wasn't last.
The US economy is forecast to grow at 5.4% in the final quarter. Harris woilent achieve that.
Internal bunfights should all be settled in primaries, not in the General Election. Why?
Party List systems give too much power to the activists (who are an odd lot - I should know) and remove power from the ordinary voter.
I think your scoring system a little harsh on the economy questions. +- 0.1% on GDP growth is a very narrow range, whilst within 2% points on polling (especially for parties polling under 20%) is quite a wide band.
I would also have been tempted to give a point or two credit to anyone who predicted Australian victory in the Ashes.
https://osoarts.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/1173669099?utm_source=OSO+Arts+Centre+Friends&utm_campaign=14e27b6fa2-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_10_09_10_07_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-0006db46a7-176529295&mc_cid=14e27b6fa2&mc_eid=53df8cdc1a
It's no secret that SNP will win a whole bunch of members under any electoral system in Scotland (we have
threefour different systems to choose from depending on the type of government, so we're kind of experts). But at least with STV I can suggest we get Mary rather than Jim.There’s still a strong chance they’re overturned.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-united-states-is-eating-trumps-tariffs-2025-10-13/#:~:text=Imported goods have become 4%,domestic products rose by 2%.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2026/01/union-members-decide-next-labour-leadership-starmer-streeting-burnham
Behind a paywall, but here's the gist:
As rules currently stand, trade union affiliate members (who are not otherwise Labour members) are going to be more influential than hitherto in electing the next Labour leader because:
1. Labour membership is plummeting, so Labour members are becoming a smaller part of the eligible selectorate which also includes members of affiliated trade unions who pay the political levy (Unite, Unison, GMB etc.)
2. Since 2021, union members who pay the political levy no longer have to register themselves as Labour affiliate members in order to be entitled to a vote, and unions could (if they wish) facilitate participation by arranging to automatically send all eligible members a ballot paper.
3. Paying the political levy has switched to being opt out not opt in under the 2025 Employment Rights Act.
So the outcome could depend a lot on whether the left wing leadership of Unite and Unison engage actively in the process, campaigning for a particular candidate.
The Minnesota fraud story would be rather interesting now, if Tim Walz was the sitting Veep. I suspect there’s a lot more to come on that front in the next few weeks, and not restricted to the one state. There’s billions of federal dollars distributed by States, easy to see how it gets passed out to favourable groups who make campaign contributions, with little oversight to auditing.
They found that imported goods have become 4% more expensive since Trump started imposing tariffs in early March, while the price of domestic products rose by 2%.'
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-united-states-is-eating-trumps-tariffs-2025-10-13/#:~:text=Imported goods have become 4%,domestic products rose by 2%
(a) she really wants a big press conference with Farage, and he knows that he literally can’t be pictured anywhere near her and retain credibility so he’s telling her where to go; or
(b) she thinks she can time it for maximum “impact” (eg after the local elections).
What poor Liz probably doesn’t get is that any announcement of which party she’s in will immediately lob a hand grenade at that party’s fortunes. Champagne corks would be popping at Tory HQ if she went to Reform.
By the end of 2026 Reform will not have a clear, consistent or commanding lead. This will be contested between Tory and Reform.
By the next GE the first three places in votes and seats will be Labour, Tory and Reform. Reform will be second or third. I think Tories will be first. Labour therefore second or third.
Reasons in a nutshell for the GE prediction:
I agree with the view (stated on PB a few times by someone, to whom my thanks) that the next GE will be, rather obscurely both: 'Anyone but Labour' and 'Reform v Not Reform'.
The LDs can't and won't expand their real support beyond 100 or so top seats. Reform can't get beyond about 30% and in the end will get less once they are closely examined. PC and SNP will do well. In England, 543 seats, outside the LD domain, the only Not Reform and Not Labour choice to form a government is Tory.
So you might have one candidate who was better known on the eastern end of the constituency and would concentrate on campaigning in Bandon and Clonakilty, while the other candidate focused on the Western end around Bantry and Castletownbere. Though sometimes the intra-party rivalries can be very strong.
RTÉ did a great series of podcasts on every constituency before the last election in Ireland and I'd recommend listening to at least a few of them to gain a sense of how the local party politics plays out.
https://www.rte.ie/radio/podcasts/series/41642-know-your-constituency/
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright says the U.S. taking ownership stakes in oil companies is a real possibility, signaling a major shift in energy and national security strategy.
https://x.com/zywiremedia1/status/2010387313931813070
Many thanks to @Benpointer for the quiz and results.
I woud say there doesn't look to be much quality control at Reform. They just seem to be intent on offering the wort of the 2024 Tories...
Trump telling Raytheon how to manage their finances and credit card companies how much interest they can charge are FAR left positions.
The Constitution doesn’t give the Executive that power.
You can make all the excuses you want, but you know that’s true
https://x.com/johncardillo/status/2010544143903158403
Nixon at least went through Congress with some of his shit.
But I think back to some famous FPTP elections and I think that GE 1997 would have been a lot better for the Tory voters of Tatton, who would have been able to vote much more decisively to dump Neil Hamilton without having to rely on the shenanigans of parties standing aside for an independent candidate.
Although the political risk of developing projects in the US is now highly elevated.
Also, the counting is less than transparent. Surplus votes. Which votes? This pile here, or that pile there?