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A tale of two seats: Maidstone and Macclesfield – politicalbetting.com
A tale of two seats: Maidstone and Macclesfield – politicalbetting.com
Like many on here, I have spent some time sifting the constituency markets looking for value bets. Boundary changes mean that Ordnance Survey’s excellent Election Maps site is required in addition to Wikipedia. I’ve generally stayed away from the Conservative-Labour battlegrounds and focussed on seats where it’s not clear who will be the main challenger to the Conservatives or the SNP. However, I have found two seats that provide interesting case studies for how our politics have realigned in the last decade.
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Videos which have racked up hundreds of thousands of views have promoted unfounded rumours that a major scandal prompted Rishi Sunak to call an early election and the baseless claim that Sir Keir Starmer was responsible for the failure to prosecute serial paedophile Jimmy Savile.
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Other AI-generated videos share misleading claims about [Sunak's] national service pledge for 18-year-olds, suggesting young people would be sent to current war zones in Ukraine and Gaza.
Some of these are described as satire or parody in captions, but the comments suggest some users are confused about which claims are factual.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1ww6vz1l81o
Russian trolls? Bored boys in bedrooms? Party-aligned activists? They don't say. One thing mentioned that we have seen on pb is people missing satire or parody labels. Even if these are not used for plausible deniability, there is a problem.
Macclesfield's greatest export.
Macclesfield is really interesting because the Conservative vote share has barely moved since 1997. In 1997 the got 49.6% by 2019 they had pushed it up to 52.5% which is sub par given the national switch in support. Maidstone and Weald the predecessor seat in part to Maidstone and Malling saw a much healthier growth in Tory share from 44.1 to 60.4.
That suggests to me that Macclesfield is a more difficult proposition for the Tories than Maidstone. May well lose both of course but the Kent seat would not keep me up as many nights as a Tory strategist.
The UK election is merely the dry run for the US election in November, which is going to be a total sh!t-show of fake news across both mainstream and social media channels.
But, wow, doesn’t it just show how hard it is to find value in this election? Those odds are disappointing.
(Basically lurking for 19 years!!)
Trying to hold back the tide.
Get those clowns at BBC Verify on the case.
But I don’t find either of those odds particularly attractive based on the % chances given by the third party sites mentioned.
I’d rather take the 1/20 on Keir Starmer being Next PM which is still widely available. You’re basically betting that he doesn’t die in the next 5 weeks.
On which subject, I’m back up to London for some more exhibitions.
Have a nice day all
xx
@ydoethur makes a good point about the vote in Macclesfield perhaps being stickier. We’ve heard a lot about how uniform the swing will be. I wonder if I’m a place like Macclesfield, the Tory vote may hold up better than elsewhere. But, it’s for that reason that the Tories could get an absolute drubbing as their vote goes from being very efficient to very inefficient.
Well it had to happen - it is Cocks in Frocks day in the election campaign.
I hope nobody from Labour says anything stupid or gets themselves tied in knots duringan interview.
Meanwhile the BBC have announced their programme of debates.
We talk about the north south divide a lot - and it does exist, but there’s an east west divide too.
https://x.com/realbenbloch/status/1797509563748639170?s=46
https://x.com/samfr/status/1797516017469669866?s=46
That's not how we usually think of things working. Some of it is down to a reaction to agriculture sucking in immigrant workers, and some of it is down to those areas becoming older as young people with get up and go... get up.and go where the good jobs are.
So it sort of makes sense, but it's not intuitive.
Kemi Badenoch seems to have been officially anointed minister for culture war. She’s supposed to be Secretary of State for business and trade but has said nothing on that brief during the campaign.
I am essentially looking at three types of seat:
(1) Where LDs are underpriced (affluent constituencies)
(2) Where Labour are underpriced (where they are nominally third behind the SNP, but could easily leapfrog the Tories to win)
(3) Where the Tories are odds against but more likely to win
I have bets in each category. What I have far fewer on is Labour in key marginals, or even longshot targets, where I'm not seeing huge value at the moment.
I can't imagine too many of the Tories core voters are.
Ooof. Kemi Badenoch accuses @StigAbell of inviting her on @TimesRadio breakfast under “false pretences” because he asked her about … social care. After asking her about equalities for 80 per cent of the interview. Asking Cabinet ministers about election manifesto policy definitely isn’t off limits… usually.
And, despite spending nothing, Reform are pummeling the Conservatives on FB..
As was seen repeatedly during the trial monetary penalties are of no effect. In fact Trump boasted in the same speech that his campaign had received $39m in the 24 hours following the conviction. Is he really to be allowed to make a profit on his conviction?
People have repeatedly said that others who are first time felons for this offence are not sent to jail. I think this is seriously misleading. Most, nearly all, of those had failed to declare some of their income and pay proper taxes. Trump is alleged to have conspired to win the Presidency of the United States and, in fact, did so. If that is the verdict of the jury then that verdict requires to be respected by the court.
Merchan may dodge this on causation, that there is no proof what he did actually changed the result of the election but it is absurd to pretend that Trump is the equivalent of a small time tax dodger (and, of course, he is a tax dodger as well as we saw in the civil case where he had deceived both the banks and the State as to values). Personally, I think he would be ducking his responsibilities to do anything other than sentence him to jail, especially after both the speech at the weekend and indeed immediately after the conviction. Trump is still setting himself above the criminal justice system. That is unacceptable and the challenge cannot be ducked.
But "false pretences"? Pompous nitwit, and definite shades of tetchy.
I don't think the Tories were doing it for fun (unless a particularly nasty kind of fun, akin to pulling the wings off butterflies).
The Tory client press who are only normally going through the motions on reporting the general election are lapping up the culture war stuff today. Badenoch will be pleased with that
Why is this peculiar bottle of wine so special?
Nulu googliniu!!
I'd say when looking for value, this might be the key stat.
I think this is the relevant link!
https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiOWUyNzNmM2ItYzVjMS00YWRlLWFmZDUtZjljMGQyMmI1YTczIiwidCI6IjFjZTZkZDllLWIzMzctNDA4OC1iZTVlLThkYmJlYzA0YjM0YSIsImMiOjh9
Whether she's ready to be leader is another matter.
Somehow they omitted to tell me this city was the scene of history’s most notorious Jewish pogrom - which changed the course of world politics in several ways (encouraging Zionism, moulding the nascent Russian communist party, affirming the Monroe Doctrine, uniting Jews and blacks in the USA in the NAACP, and more)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kishinev_pogrom
I also wandered round the Science Museum's Secret Life of the Home gallery before it closed forever. Anybody else a fan of the Tim Hunkin TV programmes when they were younger?
Who else can boast a similar hit rate ?
But it highlights a more general point. I would be reluctant to bet on the outcome of any constituency I did not know well. There is always more to learn.
If the polling is correct, the culture warriors have already abandoned them for Reform.
I remember being dumbfounded a few years back when discussing facebook with an outwardly intelligent family member - she's an academic at Cambridge University - who told me facebook was her main source of news: essentially like minded individuals whipping each other up into paroxysms of outrage. I don't think any one political bloc has a monopoly on this.
NEW: The Conservatives are pledging to rewrite the Equality Act, altering the protected characteristic of "sex" to explicitly mean "biological sex".
The party says this will protect services for women and girls, preventing "biological males" from taking part.
@PaulBrandITV
This sounds clear in principle, but the practicalities are rapidly unravelling this morning. The Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch can’t say what paper work (eg birth certificate) would define biological sex in such cases.
No need to divulge any secrets, James, but I assume you are a Cabinet Minister.
If Kemi Badenoch is the answer to the Tories’ deep crisis they are in even more trouble…In interviews this morning ..unprepared..no grip on detail of vague populist policy announcement..irritable..and no deftness.
That's not an entirely silly way for a party to go after a big defeat. As with Susan Hall in London, she probably has a highish floor and she stops further drift of voters to the right. It's not a winning strategy, but it might be the best survival strategy.
Important caveat though. A leader who does this has to be self-aware that their job is to keep the party on life support until an actual PM-in-waiting emerges. And humble enough hand over to someone different to themselves. Michael Howard is probably the best recent example of this. I'm not sure KB is like that, though she may surprise us.
For younger people I can imagine it's more TikTok.
Call me old fashioned but I read the papers (online), BBC News and (occasionally) Twitter bulletins.
There’s an interesting debate on TwiX at the moment which purports to show men are significantly cleverer than women, on average, because men are inherently more curious (there is much data to back this up). It makes sense from one perspective as curiosity is a form of intellectual risk - if you are curious you take a risk as you are going to encounter facts and news stories you do not like, which challenge your world view; men are known to take more risks, women are risk averse (for good evolutionary reasons) therefore women are less curious, therefore less intelligent and less well informed
I’m not sure I believe this proves men are smarter - I see evidence pointing the other way as well. But I do believe intellectual risk/curiosity is a crucial metric of intelligence. And a lot of apparently smart people lack it. They don’t want to know, they get all their facts from friends on Facebook. So they are much stupider than they appear
We see it here all the time. We see it also in people who refuse to travel. They are incurious about the world or scared of the risks entailed in seeing it. They are stupid in quite important ways
But our politicians fail to understand
It’s bad enough the rest of the time, with algorithms seemingly designed to keep people angry and engaged, but there’s going to be all sorts of people, including foreign state actors, with a keen interest in spreading disinformation in the run up to an election.
Remember that the Russians and Chinese really don’t care who wins, only that the polarisation is amplified and people see ‘the other side’ winning as an existential threat to the country. This is pretty much where the US is now, with freedom of speech protections being taken advantage of to spread lies, and two political halves of the country hating each other.
Badenoch is young and ambitious - almost 20 years younger than Howard was. That self awareness would be more difficult for her to manage.
Edit: ditto National Trust. When a Victorian mansion builder gets denounced 140 years later on PB for displaying a statue of a freed slave in a special alcove ...
So far, I haven't seen Labour say anything on them either, but that may just be because I've been busy.
The Liberal Democrats have been talking about sewage and doing press stunts.
This campaign really has been depressing for those wanting solutions to our problems.
Mr. Royale, while he also reads (digitally) the paper, my dad's on Facebook a fair bit. I suspect quite a few people get their news that way.
Here’s a clue: related bottles can be found in Georgia and (I think) Armenia
If (if) Trump is sentenced to jail, does it *have* to be stayed if he appeals under New York law, or can he just be 'taken down' straight away?