PB Predictions Competition 2026 – update – politicalbetting.com
PB Predictions Competition 2026 – update – politicalbetting.com
As we pause for breath between the excitement of the local elections and the Coronation of King Andy / Complete humiliation of Labour by Reform (delete as appropriate), there is time to focus on the really important question of the day.
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There's a chance my outlier pro-Democrat prediction might prove less inaccurate than it initially seemed
No, it'll mean when it gets hacked then it'll affect every damned thing. As you well know, you tinker.
As a collective punishment upcoming threads will feature pictures of politicians wearing shorts.
Perhaps the government should outsource the digital ID work to Apple.
Q3. Number of MSPs won by the SNP at the Holyrood election? Answer 58
PB median 57
Q4. Number of AMs won by Plaid Cymru at the Senedd election? Answer 43
PB median 35
Q6. Labour’s Projected National Share of the vote based on the 2026 local elections according to the BBC? Answer 17%
PB median 18%
Also Andy Burnham’s antics could have major impact on the winner of the competition.
Also we should salute the genius who asked if Andy Burnham will be an MP on the 31st of December 2026.
https://bsky.app/profile/greenparty.org.uk/post/3mmduytlnl42g
Within the next few months people will be experts in fertiliser production.
But I've scoured the header and can find no reference to Streeting being Labour's demolition man,
Barney Frank was an historic figure in a lot of ways, but I will primarily remember him for this very funny string of insults he lobbed at one of his own constituents
https://x.com/matt____rice/status/2057096899870548457
It's reasonable to anticipate the largest migration of people in history as a result. Needless to say, that will have consequences.
If you think this year is going to be bad, it’s going to be a walk in the park compared to next year. 1876-8 was the Great Famine of India and guess when the last big El Niño was?
shitfertiliser on it...@malcolmg The drop is nearly all in gross immigration. This isn't about more people emigrating.
“Ed Miliband advising Andy Burnham on how to calm bond market fears”
Next: Fred West is appointed Keir Starmer’s new Proper Patio Tsar
I think he’ll initially do very well.
The words vpl and Trump should never be seen in the same sentence.
I think we can expect immigration to remain a major political issue even if people were to have an accurate understanding of the statistics, because the voters have consistently demonstrated a preference for much lower rates of migration and politicians haven't advocated for higher rates.
Anyone who doesn't like Labour should vote for the candidate most likely to defeat him.
Oh well, at least we managed to spend £100,000,000,000 on the world’s slowest railway which won’t become operational for another 450 years
One Russian paper says Russia's “on verge of recession” & warns of “a large-scale bank liquidity crisis.” After Putin & Xi failed to reach a deal on the 'Power of Siberia 2' pipeline, another paper writes: “Chinese media ignored the topic of the gas pipeline.”
https://x.com/bbcstever/status/2057355685302595671
It all had to be torn up pretty quickly didn't it?
Your "near miss" number is slightly too small.
Restore are essentially a fascist party who have pledged to "remigrate" up to ten million people. Lowe is Mosely to Farage's Orban.
They would be shouting about something else, were that done.
My only hope is that my current score is enough to avoid relegation
Still, it’s the taking part that counts.
Xi doesn’t care about the new pipeline unless Russia is paying for it, and Putin still thinks that himself and Xi are close to equals.
Trump & Co are proud to have forced several million people out of the country, or so they claim.
Serious analysts are starting to look at whether the population of the USA is turning to decline.
Are we still in the calm before the storm? Are our futures markets not functioning? Or are we just buying from Putin again?
What I found odd was that amidst all the pb pearl clutching, no-one remembered that both parties tried something similar in the 1960s and 70s. Prices and incomes policy was one of the things Mrs Thatcher was reacting against.
There's been a desperate attempt to move the goalposts so that reducing net immigration from the hundreds of thousands to the hundreds of thousands is all that needs to be done.
When net migration goes negative then governments will have something to boast about and even then there will be issues about who is immigrating and who is emigrating.
There isn't political consent for net migration above 100k a year. I'm not sure if net migration at ~50k per year, sustained for a long period, would be enough to defuse it as an issue. It might be. Shifting baseline syndrome would suggest it is at least possible.
But there definitely isn't consent for >100k per year, and you would need a very courageous and very persuasive politician to successfully convince a majority of the public they were happy with it.
ETA scooped by sandpit!
Most people really didn’t notice the Eastern European migration until the numbers were large enough that a shop catering for them appeared in the town
Instead of one day, no tanks, they substituted with anything they could find, refurbished rusty crap from 1953 etc etc. And *gradually* ran out. Today, Russian tanks are rarer than politicians delivery of promises.
At the moment, with the oil, the deliveries have stopped. Stocks in the supply chains are running down. Frantic buying is starting to increase prices. Demand destruction has begun. Putins oil is just another part of this.
This will escalate. And get worse, faster and faster
Xi has Putin over a barrel, both figuratively and literally.
/If/ Labour allows inflation re-indexing of assets, so that the cost basis for capital gains tax is scaled with inflation then this is a sensible idea. If not, it will be the stupidist tax in the UK, even worse than stamp duty: A non-indexed high rate of CGT is a > 100% tax on long term gains & destroys private investment at a stroke, it’s an enormous incentive for the government to shadow tax assets by printing £ & makes incentivising employees through share options impossible.
Labour should, in fact, impose CGT at the sellers marginal income tax rate after inflation re-indexing & use the income to cut income taxes & reward work.
Failure to index the cost basis to inflation for the CGT calculation will destroy the economy: If you think we’ve got low growth now, wait till you see what happens when the real tax on capital gains is > 100% !
(Ironically, this represents a return to Tory orthodoxy: Nigel Lawson introduced almost exactly this system back in 1988 or so, I’m not sure why it was subsequently abandoned.)
Good luck delivering the public only what they consent to.
Obviously there's also lots of upping the ante in the rhetoric on the Right as the different parties compete for votes and a distinctive policy.
Yesterday at the GP the NHS National Data Opt-Out service was prominently featured in the rolling screen display. This allows us to opt out of our medical records being shared for research, and came in 2018, following on I assume from the various campaigns and conspiracy theories that were being made about privatisation around 2014-2016.
It's not something I have been opposed to ideologically, as more data leads to better research and is a GOOD THING (using Sellars & Yeatman categories). But we are now seeing Palantir developing a role, and the USA has law in place ("Cloud Act" 2018) which allows the Govt to instruct US companies to give them all data stored in the cloud, even if in foreign countries. The UK Govt restrictions against that are only contractual afaics.
I am having second thoughts, even though it undermines a common good. I do not trust the USA, and do not wish to help them in any way whatsoever until I know they are sane.
Here's the national dashboard, and a graph of the current rate. 3.5 million are opted out.
https://digital.nhs.uk/dashboards/national-data-opt-out-open-data
I assumed for a while it was just because petrol stations had bought a big stock at a price that allowed them to sell at around 190p/l, but prices have come down a bit recently. Could just be local competition I guess, but it still seems odd if we're approaching the cliff edge...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeRtf1walXw
https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/05/20/farage-5m-gift-tax/
Dan Neidle's TPA outfit has published a very long document which I've not read but that's the headline.
It’s going to take two years to build (Wal-Mart can do a massive warehouse hypermarket in six months), is going to be staffed by Union staff on $40 an hour for a 35 hour week, time-and-a-half outside 9-5 and double time nights and weekends, has very little buying power, and is likely to be a massive target for shoplifting and looting, neither of which Mamdani currently sees as bad things.
It’s going to cost many millions and be a total failure. I know this because it’s been a total failure costing millions every time it’s been tried before.