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How the political world has changed in the past twelve months With Gordon Brown due to make what’s being described as the speech of his career at Labour’s conference at Manchester GMEX centre today it’s perhaps worth underlining how the political world has been turned upside-down in the past 12 months. This is how things looked exactly a year ago today on September 25th 2005. On this day a year ago the prices on the Tory leadership on the Betfair…

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Meet the man who could decide the next Prime Minister With today’s YouGov poll in the Sunday Times reflecting a cut-back in the Tory lead and further unease amongst voter towards Gordon Brown a major hurdle in his campaign to get to Number 10 might be a film tomorrow night on Newsnight. Then he’s to feature in a controversial focus group conducted by the US pollster, Frank Luntz. The programme has the Chancellor being compared with Alan Johnson, John Reid,…

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So what will be at stake in next May’s elections? Next year, there will be local elections in 345 local authorities in England and Scotland. In total, around 12,000 council seats, more than half the total, are being fought. Year two of a Parliament usually produces worse local election results for the governing party than year one. In both 1999, and 2003, the Labour vote share was 2-3% lower than in the preceding year. If that is again the case…

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Why is it being unfriendly to the Chancellor? One of the problems of reading the newspapers online is that although the words might be the same the overall impact can be very different in the print edition. Yesterday’s reporting of the Guardian ICM poll was a classic example. Taking up almost the entire front page running across five columns the headline ran “Brown feels the Cameron effect”. The main numbers were featured nearly half an inch big and were overlaid…

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Could there ever be a Liberal Democrat Prime Minister? Ming Campbell talked bravely this week about taking the Lib Dems from a party of opposition to a party of government. A few rare Lib Dem loyalists aside, no-one seriously believes that the party might win the next general election. At Betfair, you can get odds of 75-1 against the Lib Dems being the largest party or winning an overall majority in the next election – and only £2000 has been…

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Can someone stop Roger reaching a milestone point for the THIRD time? Within the next two-three days the number of posts that have been submitted to PBC since we started in March 2004 will top the 300,000 mark. This is a major milestone and thanks to all of you for making the site what it – the UK’s leading political discussion forum. We got through the six figure mark on October 25th 2005 when Roger managed to make the 100,000th…

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