Many thanks to all those who entered the PB Predictions Competition this year. I have tried to capture all the entries with the help of a PB database scan from TSE. The 66 entrants we have found are listed below and every entry is detailed in the linked spreadsheet. If you think you entered and your entry is not listed please Private Message me with the date and time you posted your entry – if can find your valid entry…
A moment I remember from the 2015 election is when a TV interviewer was asking a series of vox pops and one respondent replied he was deciding between UKIP and the Greens. I recall this as we tend to think of politics as being organized along two axes: one economic, between capitalism and socialism, and the other cultural, between Remainers and Brexiteers. I would argue for a third axis of insider vs. outsider parties. I would define these as follows:…
There’s argument this row is political smokescreen, make fuss of postponements to obscure more important issues voters are upset about. Let’s explore what’s really going on. What bothers voters even more than postponements? I argue it’s cuts to their services at same time as their council tax’s getting hiked. Councils of every colour are doing exactly this – cutting services whilst hiking taxes. In the old days local authority elections were based on: we will give you decent services you…
In the absence of recent polling on the outcome of a contest as to who will replace Starmer, this Survation polling from September is probably the best decent ball park guide. The sample is of Labour List readers who said they are Labour members (link here) Of interest now is not the top line polling including Burnham, but the polling of who might be preferred when the contest is limited to a choice between sitting MPs only. 1st preferences only:…
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:…