The experience of last time is that they won’t A long-time PBer sent me an email last night: It can’t take long to sort out – once you have filled you car, you can’t panic buy anymore. Whereas you can buy months of loo roll! At least, that is my hope – if I can’t fill up by the end of the week, my daughter can’t go to uni! (Or at least, she can’t take much stuff! I am not so…
Interesting polling from Opinium on who/what is to blame for the ongoing situation. Clearly everything is in the context of the pandemic which gets the most blame – but it is not that far ahead of the government, Brexit and Johnson. The big question is how long this is going to take to sort out. Theoretically, it is nothing like the September 2000 fuel crisis where the issue was that refined fuel was blocked from leaving the refinery. Here the…
One of the hard things about running a website about political betting is that for large parts of each year there is nothing to bet on which will be resolved within a week or so. I am sure that Shadsy, ex-political man at Ladbrokes who is now with Smarkets, feels the same and it is no surprise that we have seen an uptick in activity with his new firm since his arrival. A recent Smarkets market was on whether LAB…
Above is a screenshot of this week’s PMQs and one thing stands out. On the government benches hardly any MP is wearing a mask while amongst opposition party MPs the vast majority are. This week has been the first since the pandemic began when the previous social distancing rules were relaxed and many more MPs were packed into the chamber. Given what we know about COVID being close to other people indoors could be dangerous and you wear masks not…
The Greens have a leadership election on, in fact they are already counting the votes. Most of the voting was online, so the winner is probably already known to the IT guy at Green Party HQ. With the official announcement waiting for the final postal votes to arrive, the leadership prospects have plenty of time to ponder: Will the Greens ever gain supporters over an election campaign? Six months ahead of the 2019 election the Greens were polling roughly 5%,…
Back in mid July I wrote here that backing LAB to get a poll lead during the remaining part of 2021 looked like a good bet. First amongst my reason was there was always the possibility of an outlier. The context for the post was a then new Smarkets market on when Labour would next get a poll lead. At the time I was flush with my winnings on the LDs in the Chesham and Amersham by-election and placed what…
Remember the polls in September 2000 Dramatic things can happen politically when motorists are unable to buy the precious liquid that enables their cars to move. September 2000 was a case in point when after years of Blair’s LAB totally dominating politics there was the brief period when Hague’s Tories found themselves in the lead. It didn’t last – the dispute got settled and we could fill up our cars again. I am not saying this will happen now and…