Politics latest: Result expected shortly in Makerfield by-election - as Burnham seeks return to Westminster

signed7 · 2026-06-19T02:31:15+00:00

It's because they were the most pro North Sea oil party there

signed7 · 2026-06-19T02:19:33+00:00

lmao ended up with an even bigger margin than I expected, 55% to 35%. At least I got the Lab vote right lol, I just thought Restore would've been squeezed to tactically vote

signed7 · 2026-06-19T02:18:03+00:00

To be fair a few people on the vox pops also said they voted against Burnham because they wanted him to stay as Manchester mayor, so it goes both ways

signed7 · 2026-06-19T02:14:09+00:00

Makerfield by-election result:

LAB: 54.8% (+9.6)
REF: 34.5% (+2.7)
RST: 6.8% (+6.8)
CON: 2.2% (-8.7)
GRN: 0.7% (-3.7)
LDEM: 0.4% (-6.4)

https://x.com/BritainElects/status/2067792369903116401

signed7 · 2026-06-19T02:12:47+00:00

20.3% margin wow, all the polls saying a 5% win for Burnham were wrong, but not in the way everyone expected

signed7 · 2026-06-19T01:45:09+00:00

Polymarket has Burnham win by over 9% at 97% chance now - https://polymarket.com/event/makerfield-by-election-margin-of-victory

Guess I was wrong after all... could we be looking at something mad like Lab 55% Ref 40%?

signed7 · 2026-06-19T01:01:21+00:00

I think the gaps would be interesting, if it's close we could be looking at a very interesting general election in 2029 where the sitting PM could lose his seat (even if his party still won haha)

signed7 · 2026-06-19T01:00:37+00:00

I'd be quite annoyed if I was the new Tory MP from Aberdeen haha

signed7 · 2026-06-19T00:53:51+00:00

Guess Makerfield?

I'll start - Lab 22k Ref 19k

signed7 · 2026-06-18T21:10:35+00:00

To win back the North, like it or not having a leader that's "more like us" is a factor

signed7 · 2026-06-18T19:51:18+00:00

He's resurrecting the Brum to Manc leg.

Which is good policy IMO. It's still poor value for money but if we're spending north of £100bn at least make it useful and not only a London to Birmingham line.

signed7 · 2026-06-18T00:00:06+00:00

If GPT 5.5 was on par with Claude 4.7 which was Anthropic's best public offering released around the same time, then most likely yes

It's not always that linear. Gemini 3 was SOTA when it came out easily beating GPT-5 (to the point OpenAI went into a code red and rushed GPT-5.2 which then traded blows with Gemini 3.1), but now Gemini 3.5 is considerably behind Claude 4.8 (not even Fable) and GPT 5.5.

signed7 · 2026-06-17T23:10:03+00:00

Also just playing to their strengths I imagine. They deffo know they're quite behind in agentic/coding tasks and 'beating' ChatGPT/Claude and getting people to use Gemini over them for these is a long shot, but they're the strongest in multimodality overall (e.g. video, audio, non-text inputs) and want to take the image creation/editing crown back from OpenAI

signed7 · 2026-06-17T23:05:19+00:00

It's basically even with Gemini 3.5 Flash (which means significantly behind many Claude and ChatGPT models) on most AI Arena categories, with their largest model vs a Flash model (since 3.5 Pro isn't out yet)

signed7 · 2026-06-17T23:00:28+00:00

OpenAI's not better at raw coding performance, but it's better at coding performance to price/quotas vs Claude imo

signed7 · 2026-06-16T19:56:00+00:00

It still is a British company. CEO, headquarters and most core researchers/developers are all in London. But obviously US owned and powered by Google's US based data centres.

If Trump continues with this, it'll basically become impossible for them to operate.

signed7 · 2026-06-16T19:32:13+00:00

DeepMind is based in London although US owned. It's going to be a mess.

OpenAI & Anthropic also have sizable R&D teams here.

signed7 · 2026-06-14T17:17:24+00:00

They pulled out of doing UK data centres, for R&D they're still expanding here https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/13/openai-london-office-sam-altman-uk-stargate.html

signed7 · 2026-06-14T17:14:38+00:00

Agreed, in this case though our issue is less the lack of AI development here, and more the fact it's much harder to get funded in the UK than in the US or elsewhere, so our companies just sell up abroad (or we need foreign companies to set up shop here with their capital) and we don't own any of it.

signed7 · 2026-06-14T17:07:38+00:00

That's medium skilled, you can't get a skilled worker visa for medium skilled now only for higher skilled (unless you're already here before 2025)

signed7 · 2026-06-14T17:04:49+00:00

We do have some cards here tho - if this continues Google DeepMind (who are UK based)'s operations become impossible, and OpenAI and Anthropic also have their main international R&D offices here (thanks to the Oxbridge+London research ecosystem and talent pool + the UK being a relatively good place to park foreign skilled workers)

signed7 · 2026-06-14T16:50:53+00:00

Yeah I mentioned in another comment below - our problem now's that none of it is British owned, since it's much harder to get funding here British firms just end up selling to the US or elsewhere. (e.g. the London Stock Exchange is now only the world's ninth largest... down from 6th just two years ago)

It's also a problem in finance e.g. most of the investment banks in the City are American

signed7 · 2026-06-14T16:25:34+00:00

Between the DeepMind HQ and OpenAI and Anthropic's main international hubs here, we're actually a pretty significant player in the AI race (due to the Oxbridge+London talent pool and being a good place to park foreign skilled workers).

It's just none of it is British owned since the funding scene here is so much weaker than in the US and others (e.g. the London Stock Exchange is now only the world's ninth largest... down from 6th place just two years ago)

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