politicalbetting.com

From a political betting perspective 2024 was an epic year, a UK general election, a US presidential election with the incumbent quitting the race in July, a Tory leadership contest, a French legislative election, and the betting on the date of the UK general election which has gotten some people in real trouble. Regretfully 2025 is going to be a fallow year for election betting as the only major bettable* elections are in Germany, Canada, Ireland, and Australia, the latter…

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Best Prime Minister polling is something that has a strong incumbency bias and it is only worth noting when the leader of the opposition starts winning this metric consistently as it usually heralds a change of government What is truly intriguing about this polling is that Nigel Farage leads Kemi Badenoch on this metric which will help Farage as he is trying to set up the next general election as a straight fight between Labour and Reform which would see…

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The Taliban has issued its latest pronouncement on women. Women must not be visible from house windows. If they’re in a kitchen with a window, they must stay away from it. On no account must they be seen from the outside. Not content with depriving them of all political and civic rights, imprisoning them from head to toe in cloth, preventing them from being outside at all, other than with a male relative, forbidding their voices from being heard –…

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Since becoming Chancellor, Reeves has gone out of her way to emphasise the need for growth and how important it is that the City plays its part. Not just those working there but the regulators. The FCA has certainly got the message. In July 2024, it proposed relaxing the current rules so that directors of listed companies who make misleading profit projections in prospectuses will not be liable if they have only been negligent rather than reckless or deliberately dishonest….

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…so said Niels Bohr.  Or Karl Kristian Steincke, or a Danish proverb – take your pick.  In any event, PB posters found it rather tough to make accurate predictions this year.  In January 2024 we launched a PB Prediction Competition with 10 questions and a scoring scheme that generally allocated 20 points for a correct answer and 10 points for a near-miss.  We had 82 entrants.  Here are the questions with their answers and some commentary where appropriate:    1….

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Yesterday saw the Reform Party claim they had overtaken the Conservative Party’s membership total although Kemi Badenoch has accused Reform of manipulating their figures in a lengthy thread on the social media plaform formerly known as Twitter. As the Tweet by Ben Harris points out there’s no automatcity that having more members leads to electoral victory, just ask Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and 2019, or the SNP earlier on this year when they were reduced to a single digit number…

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“They slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.” Those words from the poem, High Flight by John Magee, were said by President Reagan on the afternoon of Tuesday 28 January 1986. They ended his address to the nation after the Challenger Shuttle exploded barely 2 minutes after its launch earlier that day. The seven astronauts on board did not disappear into the sky. As described in Adam Higginbotham’s magisterial, detailed and gripping account of the tragedy and…

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Political Crossword Clues 2024 Across 1.) Former mayor in Germany’s capital rejected by minister (6) 5.   President or Prime Minister represented in slow motion (6) 9.   Tory has upset stomach and the runs (9) 10. Brown reflected over political alliance (4)  11.  Political thinker bonds with opponents around a table (6)  12.  Imperialist suspicious over America being taken in (3,5)  14. Pardon minister’s assistant spinning over a message (8)  16. Red or nearly Blue (4)  18. Dictator for a…

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