North Shropshire by-election

Betfair trading & Punting on politics. Be aware there is a lot of off topic discussion in this group centred on Political views.
deestar
Posts: 178
Joined: Thu Feb 20, 2020 6:17 pm

Another roller coaster of an election market. When i went to bed the Cons had steamed back into odds on after drifting all day - based largely i think on a couple of Newsnight quotes. A fun ride but not for the fainthearted if you were playing big.

As for BJ and his corrupt chums Pat Quinn about sums it all up for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVXzsKl ... lAvedikian
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Derek27
Posts: 23471
Joined: Wed Aug 30, 2017 11:44 am
Location: UK

Nice looking MP as well. :)
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Derek27
Posts: 23471
Joined: Wed Aug 30, 2017 11:44 am
Location: UK

It's emerged the senior civil servant charged with investigating the Tory Christmas parties was at one himself - you couldn't make it up. :lol:
PapaShango
Posts: 85
Joined: Thu Apr 29, 2021 2:41 pm

So after the dust has settled, always good to go back and look at a market, see what mistakes you made, and see what you could have done better.

I certainly won’t be betting in a by election again ( or anything that involves a public vote ! ) Though, if you are, it’s clearly very important to find out who you are betting against. If the Lib Dems are off, then you are betting against them, for sure.

So the first thing you need to do, if it’s an expected conservatives hold, is find out which ones of the progressives are off. The Lib Dems were clearly off for their lives in this ! They were all on lol . This can be found on the internet. It’s clear it was the Lib Dems.

There is clearly an agreement, at high office level, how much effort each party will make. Labour didn’t pull out, though it was the horse racing equivalent of just being out for the run. Nice bit of Shropshire fresh air, never put in the race.

However, the big trouble I have with this, is that they need to tell their local people on the ground this. They should really withdraw their candidate, but at the very least, they should be telling their people on the ground ( local, elderly volunteers ) that they are not really trying, and they might want to think twice before trudging round in storm Arwen getting a shed load of abuse from young over enthusiastic Lib Dems from London.

The labour lady my canvasser spoke to on polling day could point to her house from the station. She had been out every day, mostly in bad weather. She even had to make her own badge, that’s how little support she received. Yet everyday, she faced abuse from angry Lib Dems ( most who had travelled down on a £50-£100 train ticket from London, reading, Chelmsford, Guildford etc ), and then at night, even more online.

These are just elderly local volunteers, what you would expect at a local by election. They were massively outnumbered, Lib Dems pumped hundreds of activists in daily.

Labour were claiming online to be backing their candidate. Though all they were doing was drawing attention to the tactical voting. The Lib Dem troll farm jumped on every tweet , hammering home the message, the labour troll farm had clearly agreed to back off. Leaving a few local , elderly, non computer savvy campaigners to try and defend themselves both online, and more disturbingly, out on the ground, when clearly outnumbered.

Either back your candidates, or pull them out. Or at least let the people on the ground at local level know what is really going on. They all fought very hard, and genuinely thought they were trying. They had no chance in the circumstances, and were basically thrown to the wolves just for the sake of the “progressive alliance”.

Maybe labour were caught off guard too ? Maybe they didn’t realise quite the extent that the conservatives vote had collapsed.

The Lib Dems are also very organised at this. They must treat a by election like it’s the general election, they throw everything at it. It’s very data driven. They have names, addresses, ages all from the electoral register, phone numbers from the phone book, and mobile phone numbers from somewhere too ( ? ). Foot soldiers are sent out to gather data, as soon as you show any interest you’re straight in the database.

On polling day they are at the stations trying to get polling numbers and phone numbers. This is so they can tick people off their database, and send their footsoldiers to specific addresses where they know there may still be votes. They do this right up until late in the evening. It surely shouldn’t be allowed, residents have been pestered enough, they don’t need people knocking on their doors at tea time on the day of the vote begging for votes. It’s quite intimidating, my canvasser had heard of elderly people too scared to answer their doors. All campaigning should stop on the day of vote, in my opinion. If a resident wants to go and vote, they will.

They are not just wondering around town aimlessly asking for 20 p, they are deliberately targeting residents using data profiling methods. They were out well into the evening knocking doors on vote day, and they were not just knocking at random.

Also, how many of them had bet on themselves ? They have a lot of very enthusiastic highly motivated activists. On a campaign based on betting odds, where they constantly used bookmaker branding, and posted charts , graphs, odds, virtually encouraging betting. With canvassing reports suggesting some of these youngsters running round the north Shropshire towns were clearly on , you have to ask exactly what was motivating them to spend probably over £100, maybe even £200 if they were staying over, to travel down in December to campaign ?

Though maybe they all do it. Maybe if it’s labour that is off for the progressives they do exactly the same.

Reading all the narratives around brexit and people moving to the Lib Dems over labour just seems crazy.

The people of north Shropshire did send a message. They sent a message by not turning out to vote for the current government. For a whole variety of different reasons, the electorate of north Shropshire decided not to turn out for the conservatives.

The idea that people want the Lib Dems instead in fanciful, and created purely by the agreement of the progressive alliance. If it was labour who spent the money and stuck their branding everywhere and sent all the activists in, it would be a labour victory instead.

To be honest, given that the conservatives either weren’t trying themselves, or are just now so incompetent that they were, I think with that kind of spending and aggressive campaigning, the greens could have taken that !

Though I suppose time will tell, be interesting to see what happens at general election. Whether Lib Dems spend entire budget on defending north Shropshire, or whether their hundreds of activists decide to stay a bit more local, and fight for other seats instead. Depends what the odds are I suppose lol

Like Owen Paterson before me, I too shall now be retiring from the cruel world of politics.


All that expense, just so they could pop a big balloon !
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