Wipeout in Wales – could Labour get 0 seats in the Senedd? – politicalbetting.com
Wipeout in Wales – could Labour get 0 seats in the Senedd? – politicalbetting.com
Wales has long been a Labour fiefdom. Keir Hardie was first elected in 1900 in Merthyr Tydfil as Independent Labour and with three others became the party’s first official MPs in 1908. Many Valleys constituencies, such as Caerphilly, have an unbroken record of Labour winning at Westminster elections.
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Or maybe Reform.
This is their response to Elon Musk calling the UK government fascist.
https://x.com/steeve/status/2010463378289185098
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Sam Coates Sky@SamCoatesSky·1h
YouGov / Sky / Times weekly voting intention
CON 20% (+1),
LAB 19%(+2),
LDEM 16%(nc),
RefUK 24%(-2),
GRN 14%(-2)
Pollster note that the 24% - pre Zahawi defection - is the lowest for Reform since April. All usual caveats apply - it's one poll, wait to see if it's picked up elsewhere etc, this may just be an outlier. However, it is part of a broad downwards trend in Reform support since what appears to have been their peak around October. That coincides with the Conservative ratings starting some sort of recovery from rock bottom, and the salience of immigration starting to gradually decline on most important issue.
https://x.com/SamCoatesSky/status/2010957530479129035
Interesting ICE development. In Polk County, Florida the Sheriff's department hold a 24 year old native American in anticipation of ICE deporting her back from whence she came. Er...
Then I wake up.
"Rumours of a Labour defection to Reform"
Not me, despite what some of my comrades think of me!
As usual, we need more polls.
Entente Cordiale.
First step towards welcoming us back ?
I was going to put a £1 on Danczuk but I see he went ages ago
For maximum effect it needs to be someone credible at the heart of Labour. .... (Please let it be Glassman, please let it be Glasman, please ....)
In reality, as Gareth says, all votes won't transfer (STV) and/or some will be wasted on very fringe candidates, and hence the actual number the last person elected gets is usually somewhat lower.
"With 6 seats per constituency, the theoretical minimum vote percentage to get a seat is 17%, however, it is likely to be lower than that due to wasted votes."
Actually, with 6 seats per constituency, the theoretical minimum vote percentage that guarantees you a seat is a little below 14.29% - if 6 parties round up to the next single vote above 1/7 of the vote, the 7th party can only get 1/7 of the vote minus those rounded up bits and will thus lose to the 6 parties above them. This also informs STV thresholds.
Thinking back to the Euro elections, the NE England constituency elected three MEPs and that was far too low for d'Hondt to work properly.
Trump told NYT he wants comprehensive immigration reform that "possibly" includes path to citizenship
"If the Democrats would do it, I’d do it. I’d love to have a comprehensive immigration policy, something that really worked. It’s about time for the country to have it"
https://x.com/burgessev/status/2010817262836392447
Something that oddly doesn't occur to the NYT.
"Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time..."
Will a serving Labour MP join Reform UK during the current Parliament?
Yes - 4/5
No - 10/11
https://www.ladbrokes.com/en/sports/event/politics/uk/uk-politics/mp-defection-specials/252303340/main-markets
Fake D'Hondt was picked for the Euro Elections to benefit the Lib Dems but near the end it really did for them. This looks like Fake Fake D'Hondt. If you really don't want RefCon they you will have to vote Con and then at least you will have a ConRef Sennedd ... goes away and hides !
Those who live by gerrymandered voting systems die by gerrymandered voting systems - vide the Second Republic
Crossover would relly shake things up.
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Christopher Hope📝@christopherhope
The risk for Reform is that this is one way of looking at it! 👇
Quote
𝔱𝔢𝔠𝔥𝔫𝔬 𝔠𝔞𝔭𝔦𝔱𝔞𝔩𝔦𝔰𝔱@tcnoca·20h
Replying to @christopherhope and @GBNEWS
Vote @KemiBadenoch for 2029 Conservatives
Vote @Nigel_Farage for 2022 Conservatives
https://x.com/christopherhope/status/2010716261550788986
Implement the Treaty of Troyes.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cj691w2e840t
The French presidential voting system is the best in the world, we should adopt it for our general elections.
Only China of those should be too worried about the effect on US trade.
Not sure any of the alternatives are ideal though.
For 15 years, I’ve been studying 1960s civil rights protests with particular attention to how nonviolent and violent actions by activists & police influence media, elites, public opinion & voters. I'm thrilled some of that work was published last week...
https://x.com/owasow/status/1265709670892580869
Here's the paper:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/agenda-seeding-how-1960s-black-protests-moved-elites-public-opinion-and-voting/136610C8C040C3D92F041BB2EFC3034C
Bottom line:
..Running a variety of statistical tests on presidential elections from 1964 to 1972, I found counties close to nonviolent protests saw presidential Democratic vote share among whites increase 1.3-1.6%.
Protester-initiated violence (again, irrespective of police violence), helped move public towards concern for “social control.” In 1968, I find violent protests likely caused a 1.6-7.9% shift among whites towards Nixon’s “law & order” campaign and helped tipped the election. ..
The really neat bit is that he uses weather as a randomiser:
to try and approximate random assignment of violent protests, I use rainfall in April of 1968. Why April? Martin Luther King, Jr is assassinated on April 4 & 137 violent protests follow his murder. Prior work shows rainfall predicts uprisings (↑ rain, ↓ protest).
I use rainfall in April to predict protests & then voting in 1968. The week before Apr 4, rainfall does not predict voting. In latter half of April, also no effect. Only in week following King's assassination (with 95% of protests) does rain in April predict voting in November...
For me, the value bet is Labour to come second. That covers a multitude of outcomes, including a Reform implosion, a Lib Dem or Con rally, a Green surge taking votes off Plaid rather than Labour, and either Reform or Plaid coming out on top.
But I honestly think trying to predict an outcome in terms of seats would be a mug's game and you would be literally better off trying to stick a pin in a chart than making informed decisions.
If I had to guess, my guess is that there will be three parties jockeying within a few seats of each other. But I'm fully expecting that guess to be wrong. Heck, my predictions last year were so bad I couldn't even manage to come last as I intended.
Reform 242 MPs, Labour 120, Conservatives 90 and LDs 90
https://electionmaps.uk/nowcast/custom
Rhun ap Iorwerth is something of an exception, but looking at the rest of them I'm struggling to see where Plaid put a talented cabinet together from.
As for the Welsh Tories...
Chapter Three, the tale of David Mayot, springs to mind.
#pedantrycorner “whence” means “from where”, so you don’t need “from whence”. You want “deporting her back whence she came”.
The meaning has of course changed slightly since Lloyd George's time.
https://qweditions.com/the-disgust-of-one-of-ours-all-of-yours/
“One of Ours, All of Yours”
On January 8, 2026, the above slogan was displayed prominently during Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s press conference at One World Trade Center in New York City, the slogan appeared just one day after an ICE agent fatally shot 37-year-old U.S. citizen Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis...
https://x.com/WUTangKids/status/2010896567486787615?s=20
Well of course she was full of loot. Cash and weapons.
https://x.com/warmonitor3/status/2010976683214389576
If those were the final scores on the doors, RefCon works until the residual wet Conservatives defect. Presumably you end up with Farage ruling by decree (ministers can do an awful lot without passing new laws) and daring the Conservatives to oppose him.
If it was carrying cash and weapons, will it finally cause Trump to realise he's being had and stop dancing to Moscow's tune on Ukraine? Or will he continue to be used because Witkoff, Miller and Vance are all ultimately at best Putin's useful idiots?
Grok
@grok
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49m
Based on reports from BBC, CNN, NBC, RT, and TeleSUR, the tanker Bella 1 (aka Marinera) was seized by the US for violating sanctions on Venezuelan oil transport. It was reportedly empty or carrying oil, but no sources confirm Iranian drones or large sums of cash on board. The claim appears unverified.
I know we are a grassroots kind of organisation but we will need a well established local good party infrastructure to drive change.
We will see.
As things stand, knocking existing seats together - understandable to get it done quickly - has lost them one of the advantages of such a system (or indeed of STV, which would have been better still), which is the ability to adjust constituency size to match existing or 'sensible' geographical areas. Thus, taking the UK as an example, if we did the same, the big cities like Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, Manchester, would be seats on their own account, as would the larger counties, with the number of MPs chosen to match the population. For future reviews it then becomes a matter of changing the number of MPs, as populations rise or fall, rather than redrawing all the boundaries, which is a much less complicated proposition than our existing boundary reviews, which have to straightjacket our varying geography into a set of seats all (roughly) identically-sized.
As well as easier boundary reviews, such an approach carries the additional advantages of seats that more closely matching natural community identities, and aligning with other boundaries such as for local government, avoiding the current mess where councils and MPs have completely fragmented overlapping representation, requiring them each to deal with far more people at other levels of government.
For Wales to end up with a seat that tacks together the moorland villages of Brecon and Radnor with "Swansea East" is somewhat absurd.
(It seems improbable in the extreme that the Yanks, even under Aspirin Man, would spend all this time and trouble pursuing an empty or oil-filled tanker. But it is of course possible that their information was faulty. I won't say 'their intelligence was faulty' as that's a given.)
While Iranians are stuffed into body bags by the regime there, please remember that the bad guys are the US, UK, and of course Israel.
https://x.com/zarahsultana/status/2010800541274948037
2) Actually there is a logical correlation there and much of the travel from Radnorshire in particular heads towards Swansea rather than Cardiff (e.g. the only railway line runs to Swansea via Llanelli). I always thought of Swansea as the local city for Ystradgynlais as a child, which is in Breconshire. The Diocese of Swansea and Brecon is based in Brecon. It may look odd on a map but it makes fair sense on the ground. It's more sensible to pair Brecon with Swansea than either Ceredigion or Montgomery, which would be the alternatives.
The efforts put in by both US and Russia strongly suggest she wasn’t empty though.
Now what are NATO countries going to do about the dodgy vessels currently heading down the English Channel, one every couple of days, heading from the Suez for St.Petersburg? They really should all be intercepted.
After excelling in combat, the JF-17 flies off shelves, giving Islamabad’s export industry a major boost
...
Low in cost, high in performance, the jets were tested in combat against India as the two nuclear powers went to war in May. The JF-17 excelled against India’s French-made Rafales, and now other countries are lining up to buy their own.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/01/13/pakistani-fighter-jet-air-forces-want-to-buy/ (£££)
I know I am alone on here, but after years of Tory corruption in Westminster (which they seem to have largely got away with) I don't see the green shoots everyone else sees. Maybe that is simply wishful thinking.
Plaid could well be a depository for NOTA voters. They probably will be for this one.
"The images of body bags leave no doubt about the brutality of Iran’s repression, and a communications blackout is indefensible."
The real story is the inability of varying pollsters to tell the same story, MoE notwithstanding
This is a route to the Tories doing far better than is thinkable at this moment. Less so for Greens. But if Greens and LDs fight each other for vote share to a standstill taking 30% between them, leaving only about 20% for the rest of the left, it's catastrophic for Labour, great for the Tories.
Lucky chap.
IANAE and I doubt if I would understand an analysis of this. Any answers I might understand?
There's certainly a scenario where the oft-predicted youth wave fails to materialise.
On the other hand, I remember driving through London on GE day 2017 and seeing the crowds of young Corbynites in every street, and it isn't impossible to imagine such a scenario for the Greens at the next GE, fuelled also by social media, remembering also that by the next GE we're supposed to have votes at 16 - evidence is, the first time people get the vote at least, turnout and enthusiasm to participate is relatively high.
Given his background, however, it may lose them a few.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c394x4z8kpdo
The JF-17 is certainly cost effective, but is possibly over hyped.
Heaven forbid there should be a link between who they are attracting and that dip in the polls....