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With the NHS going through a particularly difficult period it is perhaps no wonder that punters rate the Health Secretary Steve Barker as having the best chance of being the next cabinet exit. Some of the front pages this morning focus on the struggling service with suggestions that it won’t get back to “normality” until after Easter. What this means is that people who urgently need treatment are going to have to wait a bit longer. People will die prematurely….

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Can Sunak’s Tories reverse the trend in the polling which appears to have swung a bit back to LAB. The final surveys of 2022 are in the Wikipedia table above with the two newbie firms of People Polling and Omnisis both having Starmer’s party 26% ahead. There used to be a theory that the best tests of public opinion were in the first surveys of a new year. The view was that this was getting voting responses after a period…

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Several papers pick up the the comments by a senior health chief above the impact of delays in the NHS at the moment which could be causing 500 excess deaths per week. Politically this is hugely damaging for the government and is possibly going to stick. The comments come from an interview on Times radio with Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM). He is not someone who can easily be dismissed. He said: “We…

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I am publishing the above simply because it is useful to have a reference point about where the betting stood in the key markets at the start of the year. I am far from convinced about the American bets because there is such a long way to go and normally at this stage we have no idea who might be putting themselves into the frame. As to the next UK General Election I think that Starmer will be the prime…

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This piece originally started off as a 2023 predictions thread but then I realised the 2024 presidential election and the next UK general election featured heavily then it dawned on me that is very likely that both these elections may happen within weeks if not days of each other which represents some challenges for punters. Only the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots would hold a UK general election in January (2025), it would be an election…

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I’ve been posting for a while, as has Mike Smithson, about why we have our doubts about Labour winning a majority at the next election. One of them is Brexit, another is headline voting intentions generally strip out don’t knows, and if they do vote at the next election then as the above poll shows it could prevent a Labour majority. Considering where we were just over 18 months ago and Labour had just lost Hartlepool then and now Labour…

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The last year has seen 6 parliamentary by-elections of which just two saw a change in the party holding the seat. The first at Southend West wasn’t contested by the main parties and was filling the vacancy created by the murder of Sir David Amess. Three – Birmingham Erdington, Chester and Stretford & Urmston – saw LAB defending solid majorities and there was very little betting. The other two were on the same night in June when LAB took Wakefield…

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The split based on party supported