Labour become the favourites to win most seats at the next general election – politicalbetting.com
Labour become the favourites to win most seats at the next general election – politicalbetting.com
Five days later, Labour are now favourites to win the most seats at the next General ElectionLabour – 13/8Reform UK – 7/4Conservatives – 9/2Restore Britain – 12/1Green Party – 16/1Liberal Democrats – 40/1200/1 bar https://t.co/JRYlJV4Mfe
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Strange times when a party with a landslide becoming favourite for most seats counts as genuine news.
Amazon founder says the US is experiencing a growing divide between top earners and struggling workers
Jeff Bezos has attacked Donald Trump’s “crony capitalism” tax system and called for the bottom half of American earners to pay no tax at all.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/05/20/jeff-bezos-attacks-trumps-crony-capitalism-tax-system/ (£££)
punterspsephologists is whether Reform can keep its mojo and not implode as tired Tory retreads or social media embarrassments, leaving aside Farage's history of falling out with colleagues. It is surely Reform's odds that are most vulnerable to events.Reform Makerfield candidate: Russia ‘within their rights’ to take Crimea
Robert Kenyon compared Putin’s 2014 invasion to Britain’s action in Falklands
Reform UK’s candidate in the Makerfield by-election said Russia was “within their rights” to invade Crimea in 2014.
In an online forum, Robert Kenyon agreed with a post that described the annexation of Crimea as “democracy in action”.
Under a post titled “Hypocrisy of the West regarding Ukraine in the sin bin”, one forum member wrote: “The people of the Crimea want to be in Russia, for me that is democracy in action.
“The government should work for the people, not the other way round. The people have spoken and they have what they want. The Falklands and Gibraltar, they want to stay British, so be it.”
Mr Kenyon replied: “I agree totally, Russia are well within their rights to do what they have done, as we did with the Falklands. However, will Latvia be next?”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/05/27/reform-makerfield-candidate-russia-within-rights-crimea/
Yes, I know about the polls and the seat projections and the local election results. But:
1 Some of the stuff the government has done (on energy, say) has been slow-burn. Things will look different and (from their point of view) a bit better in 2029.
2 Thanks to being in government, Labour have buttons they can press that aren't available to other parties- including the one labelled "change the Prime Minister".
3 Despite everything- the tripping over their own feet, the rise of the Greens, the woodenness of Starmer, the inherent difficulty of being a government in 2026- Labour have remained in the top two in the polls. That may turn out to be too broadly-spread for their own good, but in very many places, that gives them a "Want to stop Farage? Vote for the twit with the red rosette." message which will be awfully potent.
Wealthy areas prosper. The rest don’t.
“ This is a brilliant piece of work by @tomelleryrees
Data shows Andy Burnham’s ‘Manchesterism’ boom has been largely confined to wealthy areas like the city centre
Towns on the outskirts like Wigan have seen GDP growth per head below the national average
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…”
https://x.com/alexwickham/status/2059529832883462287?s=61
https://x.com/jpft123/status/2059531562987696242?s=61
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2422y4ldymo
Today's Eid and I've not been able to get out of going to the mosque today.
It’s all pretty thin gruel now.
We have had parties in govt of both colours dancing to the Russians and the Chinese govts tune. That should be more of a concern.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx211r9nm3lo
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx211r9nm3lo
Alabonia geoffrella, the "Hedge Beauty". Been hoping to see this for an age.
... doesn't Blair look old in that photo? And quite sinister, come to think of it.
In a way that John Major doesn't.
My seat is (Penrith) is a nice example. Generally Toryish, went Labour in 2024, now projected safe Reform win. There are loads of these seats.
The likes of Paula Vennells will never be held to account in a court of law.
It's a paradox of politics that while there can be popular Prime Ministers, there are no popular living ex-Prime Ministers. At death, of course, it becomes very different and no doubt on that day hopefully far in the future someone will have something nice to say about Liz Truss.
Tony Blair joins John Major in the camp of former Prime Ministers we love to hate with his "intervention" this morning.
It's curious he's getting plenty of vitriol from all parts of the political spectrum which suggests he's probably talking some degree of sense. I'll have to try and read the whole essay when time allows.
Is this periodic intervention as practiced by Blair and Major different to the weekly sniping of Johnson in the Mail or Truss on one of her podcasts? I'm not sure - are there any true Blairites? Were there any at the time?
My recollection remains a missed opportunity of sorts in the first term and a second term delineated by events elsewhere and leading ultimately to a finaincial crisis from which the politics of economics has never recovered (along with growth)? That era of cheap food, cheap energy, cheap money and endlessly rising asset values was nirvana for "Middle England" which probably explains the two re-election victories.
Indeed, I'd argue the events of 2008 remain the seminal experience with which we are still coming to terms.
I greatly prefer him to the meretricious, self-aggrandising Blair.
Tony Blair tells Radio 4 that the £257 million his institute has received from a billionaire AI investor has absolutely nothing to with his lobbying for the AI industry
Blair could learn from him.
Blair could learn from him.
Further to Blair. Literally every honest sensible person in all the main parties privately agrees with all these propositions:
- welfare spending is too high and is throwing good people on the scrapheap
- defence spending is too low
- the triple lock is unsustainable
- without cheap energy we cannot exploit the AI revolution
- we should be investing in EVERY form of energy: renewables, nuclear and the North Sea
- migration needs to be controlled to boost social cohesion and because the boats look like a huge failure of the state
- any new relationship with the EU will be imposed on us until we are stronger and cannot involve the closeness some desire without freedom of movement
- we are deeply embedded with America in ways which the public does not understand and cannot be told and however joyous it makes us feel to hate Trump, disengagement at the deep state level is not only wholly unrealistic but also undesirable
- Whitehall needs a total overhaul so specific project expertise and political appointees can be brought in quickly
Blair basically says all that.
The one thing he doesn’t say and which the same group of people agree on is this and it’s something Blair left behind:
https://x.com/ShippersUnbound/status/2059540987995705567?s=20
If you look carefully TB is raising the same issues as that leftish outfit the New Statesman has been continuously, and rather boringly, going on about from the moment Starmer came to power.
The Guardian's take is typically useless:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/may/26/tony-blair-essay-labour-failings-unhelpful
Morning everyone.
I presume it's all about Maastricht and the marginalisation of those who would eventually come totake over the party such as IDS and others. Remembering the seaside picture of Tony Marlow, Theresa Gorman and those who stood with Redwood in 1995.
The critique of Blair seems strongest from the Labour side but also from the Conservative side. He will never be forgiven for Iraq by many and I suppose the counterfactual is had that never happened, he'd have won another huge victory in 2005 and perhaps, pace Thatcher, decided to "go on and on".
We can perhaps agree both Major and Blair did sterling work in Northern Ireland and that should be recognised.
Since it is universally agreed that AI is here, is here to stay, and the issues are how to use and regulate and avert disaster, the subject is bound to come up.
MAJOR COMPANIES ARE STARTING TO CUT BACK ON AI USE AS COSTS IN SOME CASES ARE NOW HIGHER THAN HUMAN WORKERS.
Anyway, enforced time off has cleared my head and now have productive work ideas pouring out of me. Marvellous. Today's lesson: worrk less to work more...
I can't help wondering if letting Maggie lose in 1992- defeat nature's way, rather than the artificial party process that happened- would have saved us all quite a bit of psychodrama in the following decades.
There’s so much more room for him to grow his career in grift.
➡️ REF: 30% (+1)
🌹 LAB: 20% (-3)
🌳 CON: 19% (+1)
🟢 GRN: 13% (+3)
🔶 LDEM: 12% (-1)
☑️ OTH: 3% (=)
I look at numbers like that and wonder about rounding - Labour could have gone from 22.5 to 20.4 and it would be a three point drop.
You could argue the brief pre-local election decline of the insurgents being reversed but it's more likely just noise.
Add the additional issue that as models have increased in size the number of tokens used also increases and it’s getting to the point that a human being is cheaper than AI for the same task.
That isn’t to say that AI is a dead end but it’s going to be a niche product that doesn’t justify the current optimistic valuations
Blair was a great politician and a good PM (ex Iraq) but he had such an easier task than a UK government has today. It'd be nice if he gave this weighty and undeniable fact a tad more recognition.
Around here when it gets very hot (which probably means high 20s), the dog walkers shift to 6am or mid-late evening.
I just don’t get this.
He wasn't unique in that- I don't remember anyone asking "what happens when the oil runs out and when all these boomer workers retire?", but with hindsight it was a blooming obvious question to ask. We needed an ant but voted for a grasshopper.
For example, the headlines say, "Blair tells Labour to ditch net zero and drill in the North Sea," but what the essay actually says is, "We must prioritise cheaper energy and electrification over net zero and use what is left of our North Sea oil and gas resources."
"Electrification" is the process of replacing fossil fuels with renewable electricity. It's the principle means by which net zero is delivered. The continued technological development of renewables makes them the cheap energy option in an age of geopolitical instability and fossil fuel supply disruption.
I wouldn't see this as abandoning net zero, but choosing a carrot-led approach - of concentrating on better technology to replace fossil fuels - rather than a stick-reliant approach - of restricting fossil fuel use to force adoption of other technologies. This is a long way from Trump's ideological opposition to renewables, for example.
I think Blair's Essay is weakest on Trump. He is in denial of Trump's weakness in relation to, and adulation of, Putin, Xi and other dictators, and the stark consequences this has for democracies. But I think that, as a starting point for a serious discussion about Britain's future it has a lot of merit, and is a more useful contribution than anything that has emerged from Labour's leadership wrangling, the Tories, or the Lib Dems.
By all accounts it is a serious and thoughtful document - no less than ~40,000 words.
The Grown Ups have arrived at the party.
Here's a thoughtful commentary which touches on it from Mallen Baker, whom I appreciate (16 minutes):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7cKK7R61Ts
Without Manchester's success, the whole region would look much worse.
The question is what can be done to revive regional towns. Transport infrastructure is surely part of that, and that might also make the task of remodelling town centres for living in (a significant part of Manchester's success) a slightly less Herculean task.
I have not posted much recently, probably because there is so much division and discourse I just cannot see a solution
However, Blair reminds me why I voted for him twice and everything he highlights is spot on
Instead of engaging with his thoughts we have labour going into a tailspin over Irag and Blair's millions/billions whilst seeking to drift to the left that will result in simply more failure
Blair at least has opened a debate that is long overdue and maybe listen to the message rather than deflect by raising Blair's failures as an excuse to dismiss his opinions
Blair was OK until Iraq, from which several of our present Middle Eastern troubles descend.
No need to get excited.
If their last poll put Labour 1.5% too high (well within MoE) and this one has Labour similarly low (still within MoE), you can get -3 without anything untoward.
Trying to find differences by subtracting one fuzzy number from another is a mug's game. But we do it all the time.
A rising number of businesses must re-evaluate their strategies as the technology’s costs mount
...
Uber’s chief technology officer, revealed in April that the ride-hailing giant had burned through its entire annual AI budget in less than four months as staff swarmed to programming tool Claude Code.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/17da6d6fb02383c1
Gift link so no paywall.
I don't see that those who rhetoricise about "Maggie" actually want to do what she said and did, and she is more of a marketing symbol for whatever they want to do of their own bat.
There are things that she was fairly clearly mistaken about, and the world has changed in ways that make some of it obsolete.
Were there people in the 1930s/1940s still dreaming of how they imagined Viscount Curzon dealt with India in the 1890s?
If I were to raise one point for now contra Maggie, it would be that we need urgently to adapt for a "post-Usonian" (clunky, but fairly clear as a term) age.
But a bubble does seem to be forming.
The race to be first has driven up margins on what was commodity hardware to unprecedented levels (Micron just became a trillion dollar company on the back of that), while manufacturers of the more advanced kit (TSMC, followed by Samsung and SK Hynix etc) are enjoying even higher gross margins on record volumes.
Chip manufacturing accounted for around 0.5% off global GDP at the beginning of the decades; it's now on the way to 2%.
That growth and those margins aren't sustainable for long, and a customer strike might pop the bubble in a similar manner to the previous internet one.
It's not a straight comparison, though, as unlike the first proliferation of overpriced dotcoms, these companies are generating large cash flows at the moment.
Attach that to the fact that most (well over 50%) of those applying will get asylum and every other option is worse because while it would remove the visible boats it will increase the total number of people arriving with valid claims.
So there is no fix without changing global asylum rules and while most of Europe agree the practical side is rather difficult
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s568yek7m8s
It then got forgotten about in the glow of the Thatcherite miracle.
Yes, I can see from the shocking state of those countries what a terrible disaster that would have been.
If you're talking the interaction between fast-changing technology and slow-changing people, then religious traditions have an awful lot to say, some of it pretty wise. No institution survives that long without applying some insight into the human condition.
You don't have to agree with all of this, but there are some good points clearly made in this official summary;
https://www.cbcew.org.uk/magnifica-humanitas-overview/
welfare spending is too high and is throwing good people on the scrapheap- I don't understand.
defence spending is too low - I don't agree. I think the "threat" from Russia is being overstated to create a climate in which increased defence spending (especially simultaenous with cuts in welfare) can be sold. Yes, we can move a little higher but whan I see 5% of GDP being mentioned, no, not sustainable.
the triple lock is unsustainable yes but as we all know pensioners vote and turkeys rarely vote for Christmas. It can be sold within the context of a general belt tightening.
without cheap energy we cannot exploit the AI revolution - we can do a lot with cheap energy but from where is that cheap energy coming? I'd argue if we could get back to the kind of energy pricing we enjoyed in the early 2000s we'd see economic growth resume. I'd also question the amount of energy wr use to store all the data we are creating and look at data de-carbonisation.
we should be investing in EVERY form of energy: renewables, nuclear and the North Sea - quite right.
migration needs to be controlled to boost social cohesion and because the boats look like a huge failure of the state
- like everyone else, he has no answer to the "small boats" but at least he isn't talking about wide scale deportation.
any new relationship with the EU will be imposed on us until we are stronger and cannot involve the closeness some desire without freedom of movement - I'm afraid those who want us to Rejoin miss this point. FoM and the Single Currency have never been popular and until they become so we will be outside the EU.
A further thought for a component of your alternative career - I think there may be a (possibly easier to manage logistically than something on the continental) niche for lead-walks on lesser known longish (several days to a week) UK routes. There are long distance paths everywhere. I think here we have a more intricate and interesting historical landscape than almost anywhere else. In Derbyshire one could be created around the well dressing calendar.
I can even imagine something interesting "long distance walk with your dog" as an added value, Though that could queer visits to local attractions (National Trust< English Heritage.
I constantly get adverts for such through, for example, Ramblers, National Trust, Cycling UK and other periodicals.
One thing I am itching to do as I get older is what in cycling we call "source to the sea" routes. Yes, I'd love to cycle the Rhine, but the Derwent will be just as good and is only a couple of days.
Musings.
Is that supposed to be a recommendation?
Appear to be updated daily.
Politicians/media only refer to them when they can use them to make a point.
My viewpoint is that hosting data centers for AI is a fools game unless you have sovereignty over the AI company (and we currently don’t).