The world may be going to hell in a handcart and it can sometimes it can feel as if contemplating the future is a pointless exercise but here is your chance to show some faith in that future. Yes, it’s time for the 2026 PB Predictions Competition! To enter you simply need to post your answers to the following 12 questions onto the site before the end of January with the hashtag #competition somewhere in the post to help the…
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. As someone with family in this part of Wales, it became ingrained that these were Labour areas (for example, I know many people didn’t actually want the Senedd but voted for it…
Matthaeus Loder – The Card Layer – Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg 2025’s competition proved to be a very tough year to predict, or perhaps a tough set of questions to predict against. But look on the bright side, everybody scored some points. And we do have a clear winner! Congratulations to @Driver for beating the cream of PB punditry with a top score of 170 points, 40 points clear of the nearest challenger. The top entries were: A few other thoughts…
The Manhattan Institute has done a detailed poll of Republican Party supporters and the different groups they might fall into. The whole thing is worth reading, but one result that jumps out is on conspiracy theories. Republican voters are markedly more likely to believe an array of these, including 41% saying that 9/11 was an inside job, 37% endorsing Holocaust denial and 33% that vaccines cause autism. If we just focus on Holocaust denial and look at demographic groups, the report reads:…
Scenario: Three hundred meters below the North Atlantic In the icy darkness, an autonomous glider—a torpedo-shaped drone the size of a kayak, drifting on programmed currents—suspends its descent. Its acoustic sensors detect something: a faint anomaly in the background hum of current and marine life, barely distinguishable from the ocean itself. The onboard algorithm processes, classifies, hesitates. Three hundred miles southwest, in the operations room of HMS Somerset off the coast of Ireland, the data arrives as a flicker on…
It’s a truism of pop history that wealthy “civilised” states are always at a disadvantage, when fighting against poorer but tougher adversaries, whether those enemies are steppe horsemen, desert tribes, guerillas, or religious fanatics. In more modern times, the weakness of democratic nations (attempting as they do, to adhere to the Law of Armed Conflict, and being wary of heavy casualties), is contrasted the strength of dictatorships (who don’t need to worry about such things). There is a belief that…
UK finances are in a mess. Traditionally, the debate has been between the right, which favours a small-state but low-tax model like the US, and the left, which favours a Scandi-style high-tax but high level of services model. It feels like we are falling between 2 stools with high taxes and poor public services. Some numbers from the ONS (September 2025): All chancellors have their own special rules to pretend they have the finances under control. Reeves has clearly lost…
Since the 2024 general election the popularity of the Labour government has not followed the path generally expected of one elected with a landslide majority, plumbing depths only previously reached by the Truss government. The reaction to this in some quarters has been a mixture of bewilderment, disbelief and complacency. The polling is a mirage created by BBC bias in favour of Farage. The government always becomes unpopular and then recovers as the general election approaches. The voters have no…