Leicester LDs tighten even further – now 4/11

With all bets you have to ask yourself – what is the risk and what is the return? If the potential winnings are greater than the risk then you have a good value bet. If not then don’t bet.

We’ve been calling the Lib Dems in Leicester South for weeks and we stick with that – but we do not believe that the current 4/11 , which it has moved to this evening, is good value. Hardly anybody is backing Labour in either Birmingham or Leicester which, given that the party had five figure majorities in 2001 is extraordinary.

With the Lib Dem price in Leicester South a winning £50 bet would produce a return of just £18.18 plus your stake and you have to be much more critical about whether they are going to do it.

George Galloway’s Respect have been campaigning hard in the Muslim areas and might attract enough anti-war votes that would have gone the Lib Dem’s way to affect the final result.

The Lib Dems are part of the coalition that’s now running Leicester Council providing Labour with lots of ammunition to attack them for unpopular decisions like on pensioners’ bus passes.

We have a nagging worry that the Tories will stay loyal. Almost all previous Lib Dem by-election spectaculars have seen large numbers of Labour supporters switch to defeat a Tory defender. Here’s it’s the other way round and we wonder whether there’s the same enthusiasm amongst Conservative supporters to get Labour out as there used to be amongst Labour supporters to get the Tories out.

Our call that the Lib Dems will do it is based on:-

The huge local election victory secured in Leicester South fourteen months ago – they can counter the Tory claim that about who is the real challenger

A good network of activists on the ground and they started the campaign with extensive canvas data so they knew where there supporters are.

Organisationally they are strongest of the three main parties and should get more of their support out to vote on Thursday than Labour, and possibly even the Tories.

Wednesday’s Butler report on Iraq weapons not being good for Labour but is likely to provide good coverage for the Lib Dems which refused to take part – a decision followed by the Tories a couple of weeks later.

We think that they will do it but that there will be only 3-4,000 votes between the main parties. At 4/11 on the Lib Dems we do not think there is betting value. At 4/6 we would bet.

Lib Dem Price tightens in Birmingham too

In our first post today on Birmingham Hodge Hill we noted that Labour have used the Lib Dem candidate’s job in the mobile phone industry as a stick to beat her. Just as being chairman of Jarvis was an albatross round Steve Norris’s neck in the London Mayor vote so mobile phone masts have been made into an issue that the Lib Dems have found hard to deal with. This morning we thought that at 8/13 Labour offered good value. But looking at the way the Betfair betting exchange is going today there has been a sharp move to the Lib Dems now at 1/1.

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