Tuesday 17 December 2019

The Strange Case of 'Tactical Voting' in Wantage

Imagine a police officer chasing down a criminal (the criminal stabbed a bunch of homeless and disabled people by the way).

The officer is closing in on him, gradually getting nearer with each move, but then at the last second a security guard from the local shopping centre broadsides the officer, knocking him over because he wanted the credit.

Thanks to the officer's now twisted ankle and the security guard's general poor shape, neither of them have a chance of catching the criminal, who goes on to stab a bunch more poor and disabled people as well as set fire to a bunch of hospitals.

To be fair, he didn't sell it

And for some bizzarre fucking reason, all the papers have to say is how brave the security guard was for trying, how the officer failed, and how there should probably be an inquiry into his style of policing.

The officer in this metaphor is the Labour party, and the security guard is the Liberal Democrats. The papers are fucking idiots and Boris Johnson is the criminal, which is a statement that's true even outside of this opening metaphor.

Hello Disaster Britain


I'm going to put a caveat here in bold before I start; this is long, rambling and mostly for my own sake - I'm writing it to keep track of what I remember, and what I thought around the time it all happened.Putting it in a linear article helps because otherwise my brain has a habit of fucking off into tangents otherwise.

There are many disastrous outcomes of a Tory majority. I wrote about this shit back in 2017 and disappointingly, a lot of those issues are about the same as the problems we're dealing with in 2019 as well.

The chief one though is that Brexit is now all but certain. The tory rebels are gone. The Labour right are lining up to pull the party away from Corbyn's progressivism. The EU are sick of giving us extensions and Boris is already talking about trying to remove the authority of the courts and House of Lords. Bercow's gone. Barring a miracle, it's happening.

without comment

I'm sure you've seen plenty of headlines telling you which one weird trick put the Tories in power, or Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC crowing about the surging Tory majority (which if you look at the figures is less of a majority and more a searing indictment of how utterly bent our voting system is, but more on that later).

There were undoubtedly many things that went wrong. But I can show you two of the things I noticed at both a local and national level, and the figures that show how this wasn't so much as a Tory win as a remain split.

And it's all down to tactical voting.

The Plan


Tactical voting has been this election's big buzzphrase. In practice it means people voting for parties that they don't necessarily like or support, in the name of 'getting the Tories out' or 'getting Brexit done,' by the left and right-wing press respectively.

Well, it's had exactly the opposite effect for remain, and now we have a serious Tory infestation to deal with.

The Conservative and Brexit parties did have a tactical alliance - the Brexit party agreed to withdraw candidates from seats where there was a risk of the 'brexiteer vote' being split between BXP and Tory.

Honesty.

Initially both parties said there was no such arrangement, and then BXP quietly withdrew candidates from a number of seats later in the campaign anyway.

Wantage in Oxfordshire is one such constituency where the BXP candidate stood down, and no UKip candidate was selected. The leave vote went in it's entirety to the Conservatives.

I can't speak much for other constituencies, and I don't have the time or CIA/Russian funding to do a constituency-by-constituency breakdown, but I can use this one constituency as an example of how tactical voting appears to have absolutely fucked the remain vote across the country. 

The Problem


The brexiteer parties may have had a pact, but the parties in opposition to Brexit - the Lib Dems / Greens / SNP / Plaid Cymru - had no pact.

Combined, they had no chance of reaching a vote share that could have ousted the Tories. The Lib Dems claimed earlier in the campaign that they could achieve a majority, but dropped that stance shortly after the first debate.

They could have had enough voted for a coalition with Labour, because of Labour's nuanced stance on Brexit - a second referendum, but remaining neutral, knowing that the country was largely still split over the result and the only chance of healing the divide was to let the people decide.

There is a rampant batman bias in these captions

Remaining was still possible under a labour government. But Jo Swinson refused to work with Jeremy Corbyn. It's probable that she was influenced by the media shove over Corbyn's alleged unelectability / accusations of antisemitism, as well as the incredibly hostile media campaign against Labour, and ongoing bias from the state broadcaster which didn't even stop during purdah.

Labour were getting an absolute battering in the press - their stance was being misrepresented as unclear, where they were simply adapting to Conservative attempts to manipulate parliament into accidentally leaving without a deal. It wasn't going down well with the public and the Libs smelled blood in the water.

Ironically, a Lib / Lab alliance would have enabled remainers to first remove the Tories as an influence in parliament, and then campaign for remain in Labour's second referendum, winning them huge gratitude from moderates. And a second referendum under Labour would be infinitely preferable (from a so-called tactical position) to a near-guaranteed no-deal Brexit under Boris Johnson.

Yeah, this douche.

There were a number of times that a pact could have been established, most notably as part of the caretaker government proposed by Corbyn after a possible vote-of-no-confidence in Boris Johnson. However there needed to be a pact before the vote could go ahead, or one of the many extension deadlines could have meant Johnson calling a General Election and crashing out of the EU while parliament was closed.

It was all very complicated and relies on parliamentary fuckery nobody has the time to get into, but it was only one of many events that lead to Labour's stance having to adapt in order to stop a no-deal brexit.

Swinson however continued to insist that the Liberal Democrats (with 15 seats) had any right to tell the Labour party (with over 260 seats) who they should have as party leader, not just who should lead the pact. The other members of the pact seemed perfectly happy to ally over the greater threat of a no-deal brexit, but the Lib Dems were operating under the delusion that they could return to the 2010 days of playing kingmakers.

Sad trombone optional.

That's less the tail wagging the dog, and more like the dog trying to tell Godzilla which bowl's his.

Swinson should have stepped aside (and has thankfully now lost her seat), but these delusions of grandeur meant that the voting public were left to try and vote tactically, since no tactical alliance existed between the remain parties.

This was a terrible idea from a desperate remain base, since tactical voting cannot function without the support of the parties involved, and Swinson was continually stating that she would not ally with Corbyn. 

If you have a country divided almost 50/50 on Brexit, and the entire leave vote is united behind the Conservatives because of the electoral pact, it means the leave party gets 50%. Lets be generous and assume that the remain vote is split equally between Labour and the Lib Dems. That means that those parties get 25% of the total vote each.

hey guess who had to make this himself

Unless they have an electoral pact in advance agreeing to a coalition, that means both parties get decimated and the Tories gain the clear majority.

Remember that in British politics, a majority means you only have to control over half of the seats in parliament. You can't control parliament if you only have 25% of the vote, unless you have a coalition with another party that pushes you over 50%.

More importantly, an electoral pact means not spending your entire campaign slagging off a potential ally and reducing their support against a clear and united enemy.

It's a good policy, Karen (source)

Early in the campaign a number of Lib Dem candidates attempted to enter pacts with Labour on their own initiative, but were immediately replaced with fresh candidates or threatened with disciplinary action. This was absolutely a decision by the leadership, not the membership or the MPs.

Regardless of the lack of a pact between the parties, most voters ended up using tactical voting websites anyway, believing it would force the parties to enter into a coalition later on.

The problem with that approach is that firstly, the so called 'allied' parties have still spent the entire campaign bad mouthing each other and weakening each other's image; and secondly, there is no guarantee that Jo Swinson wouldn't have entered into a coalition with the Tories instead.

Tactical voting was probably a good idea if it had been implemented properly. Among the remain parties, it wasn't. 

The Tactics


The tactical voting sites seem to have pulled their information from combining the local council elections, the EU elections and previous general election results; then weighting them with the assumption that remain would be the key dividing issue.

Or rather; one or two of them did that, and the rest just copied the initial ones to make ad / data revenue.

The result was supposed to be websites where you entered your postcode, and it would tell you who was the best MP to vote for, based on who had the most support and the best chance of getting a larger share of the votes than the Conservatives.

The problem is that early in the campaign, the papers were misrepresenting Labour's position on Brexit as 'confusing,' and the Lib Dems were initially campaigning to revoke article 50 without a referendum.

Check out her voting record

As the intent was to tell people to vote tactically for remain, the options were most likely heavily weighted to favour the Lib Dems in any seat where it was theoretically possible for them to beat Labour. In the early campaign where the press were pushing Labour's position as 'unclear,' a pro-remain stance meant defeating Labour as well.

This was especially true in cases where the Labour candidate was alleged to have been pro-leave, or unwilling to take a hard-remain stance and lose their pro-leave seat. However this is only true if you assume that those leave voters would flip to the pro-remain Lib Dems, rather than the pro-leave Tories.

What's also interesting is that in the early campaign, this means that by opposing Labour, both the Lib Dems and Labour were fighting a battle on two fronts, against each other and against the Tories.

man corbyn looks shredded

Under normal circumstances, the Lib Dems 'creative' interpretation of the figures would just seem normal electioneering and futzing the statistics, until the discovery that at least one of the tactical voting sites was created by Lib Dem supporters to mislead the public, and was recommending the Lib Dems in clear Labour majority seats. 

This disinformation campaign ended up affecting legitimate attempts to advise remainers over tactical voting. It blurred the line between Labour's stance within pro-leave and pro-remain constituencies, making the national campaign appear inconsistent. 

Ultimately, it created a huge anti-Labour bias in the advice given to remainers. Labour were portrayed as either secretly pro-leave and not explicitly remain, or just 'unclear' because their position couldn't be reduced to a three-word-slogan.

Even when tactical voting sites later flipped to recommending Labour in the relevant constituencies, it was too late to alter the opinion of the copycat sites and low-engagement voters, who had already 'done their research.'

The Constituency


A good example of this is the mid-campaign article in the Guardian by Peter Kellner, disgraced former head of YouGov who failed to predict the 2015 Labour surge:

40 Wantage
Ed Vaizey, ex-minister and critic of Johnson, is standing down in a seat with a growing Lib Dem challenge
VOTE LIB DEM

The weighting of this study is based on leading questions that were roundly criticised when it was used by the Lib Dems in South East Somerset against Jacob Rees Mogg. Asking which party you'd vote for if one of the other parties wasn't an issue is just... Wow.

And yet it was shared and re-tweeted nonetheless, even quoted by the band Rage Against the Machine on Twitter, despite the previously established bias and remain-weighting.

The figures from the 2017 election do not support that position however:

Conservatives on 34,453 (+0.9% since 2015)
Labour on 17,079 (+10.8%)
Lib Dems on 9,234 (+1.5%)

Not only did Labour have almost double the votes in 2017, their support was rising 10 times faster than the other two parties. The Labour candidate Jonny Roberts was pro-remain, and pro second referendum.  

Previous GE performance is a far stronger predictor of success than EU elections or local elections. There was no reason to recommend the Lib Dems here, outside of a deeply flawed polling model and bias established in the previous section.

This election was unique, in that it was dominated by Brexit as an issue. But given that it was such unknown territory, the polling companies skewing in favour of the EU election and referendum results were at best engaging in guesswork in terms of how much it would affect things.

At the time the article was written, the Lib Dem party had changed their position from revoking article 50, to a second referendum - during which we were supposed to believe they'd negotiate a deal with the EU and then campaign for remain against their own deal (or possibly against Boris' deal, itself a redressed version of Theresa May's incredibly unpopular deal). 

That's four words, loser.
All aboard the gravy tra- WAIT THAT'S NOT GRAVY

As the article pointed out, the Conservative candidate Ed Vaizey had also stepped down, so there would also likely be a chunk of floating voters who - now unable to vote with the familiar name - would have to find a new candidate. 

If there were any other reasons for voting against Labour apart from the 'growing Lib Dem challenge' which didn't exist, Kellner doesn't make it apparent. 

The best assumption that can be made is that with 50 constituencies to look over, and Wantage near the end of the list, Kellner and the tactical voting sites recommended for the Lib Dems without considering the mid-campaign changes to Labour and the Lib Dems' stances, and the strength of Labour's pre-exisiting opposition.  

Once this flip happened, it meant that suddenly it was Labour who were fighting a battle against two enemies (three if you count the press) - The Lib Dems who were targetting remain votes, and the Tories targetting leavers. 

The Election


Labour should have been the clear choice, and yet the Lib Dem candidate for Wantage Richard Benwell went into the campaign still printing leaflets with the EU election figures, using them to mislead remain voters into thinking not only that the Lib Dems were the main opposition, but that Labour were the weakest opposition. 

Other Lib Dem candidates were making much worse claims across the country.

In Benwell's case, this was possibly a case of believing his own propaganda, or maybe he just thought running a campaign in an area with such a strong Labour opposition would be a fun gap year project (I still can't tell if he's 14 or 40). 

wInNiNg hErE!

Either way it's hard to argue that his campaign was anything other than an attack on Labour, and an opportunistic attempt to take their vote share by misleading the public.

Again, this is to be expected in a normal election. But if remaining in the the EU was actually Benwell's goal rather than backstabbing Labour out of political opportunism, he should have concentrated his campaign on bad-mouthing the Conservatives to weaken their vote, rather than attacking his supposed Labour remain allies. 

Wantage voted 54% for remain, which means that this was a seat with a lot of remain and leave voters who could have been pulled toward an already strong Labour party with a neutral stance on Brexit.

Former Wantage MP Ed Vaizey was a pro EU rebel, so his floating remain supporters could have gone to either the Lib Dems or Labour. Pro-leave voters could only have moved to Labour or stayed with the Tories.

Don't forget your three word slogan!

It would be a stretch to say Labour could have won in Wantage by themselves, but what chance they did have was much larger than that of the Lib Dems. There's an extremely strong possibility that Labour could have closed the gap to create a new marginal for the next election, had the Lib Dems supported rather than attacked them.

This certainly would have been the case, had a remain alliance been in effect: the falling Conservative share could, with the absence of Ed Vaizey, have been comfortably challenged or even defeated by a combined Lib/Lab voting bloc - especially if the Labour candidate hadn't been fighting against Lib Dem smears as well. 

But even clearer was the conclusion that the Lib Dems were not winning here by a long shot. 

The Result


Turnout was 73.9% (up 0.2% from 2017) so it's unlikely that there were many more undecided voters who could have tipped things over. 

In addition, issues with distribution of the Labour Party's leaflets meant many voters never saw one, while Lib Dem Benwell's frequent leaflets ramped up during the last week to include opinion polls on voting intention by YouGov (which we'll come back to later). 

Rumours abounded among the Lib Dem voters that this was a seat where Labour were unofficially 'stepping aside' for the Lib Dems. Even if this had been true, it would have been pointless without an electoral pact at the national level - unless all of the seats go to a remain coalition, you're just splitting the vote.  

This, along with both the national Labour and Momentum campaigns focusing their efforts elsewhere meant that the results ended up looking like this:

Conservatives: 34,085 (-3.4% since 2017)
Lib Dems: 21,432 (+17.4%)
Labour: 10,181 (-11.7%)

A disastrous reversal of the previous position. Even with Labour defeated, the Lib Dems were unable to defeat the Conservatives because they split the remain vote.

The Conservative vote share certainly didn't increase - in fact it was down by 3.4% from the last election. Their vote share should have increased because of the leave voters lacking UKIP / BXP candidates and shifting to the tories, but instead it actually fell. 

This wasn't a surge in support for the Tories at all, nor should it be counted as one. Less people voted Conservative here in 2019 than they did in 2017. That doesn't point to people voting 'for' the Conservatives by a long shot. 

The Conservatives lost votes overall in Wantage. This is worth bearing in mind.

Mood

It would be easy to put this down to a disappointing showing from a Labour party hindered by leafleting issues, and lack of support from a canvassing engine more focused on marginals elsewhere.

But the effect of the tactical voting advice cannot be disregarded in a constituency which voted 54% for remain, yet had this large a flip within the remain-leaning parties.

The tactical voting advice told remainers in Wantage to vote Lib Dem; then in the last week of the campaign the Lib Dem leaflets linked to a YouGov opinion poll telling them that remainers in Wantage were intending to vote Lib Dem, because they'd been advised to by the tactical advice.

Before the intervention of the tactical voting sites, Labour had the most compelling chance of opposing the Tories and a guaranteed Brexit; but thanks to a flawed polling model and the percieved importance of tactical voting, the remain vote swung in favour of the Lib Dems. Just not far enough.

The resulting feedback loop seems like an alarming case of polling influencing rather than advising the electorate. Whether intentional or not, the effect is deeply concerning. 

The Fallout


Whether you attribute it to the influence of the tactical voting bad advice or a stronger campaign by the Lib Dems, the fact remains that an immense chunk of Labour support in Wantage was drained by the Lib Dems. The leafleting disaster seems to have had a large role in that, but the effect of the hostile press and Lib Dem attacks can't be underestimated either.

The Lib Dems, who were starting from a base of 9,234 voters as opposed to Labour's 17,079. The Tories didn't gain any votes, but perhaps with a Brexit message that wasn't being attacked by the Lib Dems as well as the press, further votes could have been pulled from leave voters as well.

Had a remain pact gone to Labour, they might have had the numbers to seriously contest the Conservatives, and give them one less safe seat in their majority. If the story was similar in other seats, perhaps we could have seen a result more reflective of the popular vote nationwide.

Figures from the Guardian

It was never going to be enough to challenge the Conservative replacement for Vaizey, who ended up holding the seat. Not through any real virtue of his own, as shown by the static vote share and high turnout.

Instead it happened through the aforementioned monstering of the Labour party by a strategically deployed set of misrepresentations and attacks from (and on behalf of) the Lib Dems, boosted by the centrist press. And all it did was allow the Tories to get in.

This was not a seat won by the Tories, it was a seat lost by Labour because of Lib Dem wreckers. Again, tactical voting only works if the parties in question are co-operating.

Going to post it again because I made it


Jo Swinson was unwilling to do so because of a delusional belief that her 15 MP strong party could get a 320 seat majority, and set about attacking Labour, forcing them to fight a campaign on two fronts - three if you include the hostile press.

Because of this, she may have handed the election to the Tories. The only surprise is that it wasn't as part of the expected post-election coalition. 

The Country


I wonder how many other constituencies have similar stories? Well-meaning remain voters misled into splitting the anti-Conservative vote through opportunistic misinformation campaigns. Labour and Lib Dem voting blocs which could, if combined, have toppled or at least given pause to the Conservative candidate. Nonsensical Lib Dem recommendations in seats where Labour were best placed to absorb both remain and leave votes.

65 seats in the exit poll were flagged as 'too close to call.' How many of those could have been red or yellow if we'd had the alliance? If the Libs and Labour hadn't been fighting each other, and instead worked together?

To be fair, there were many seats where the Lib Dems were the strongest opposition, and the Labour party should have stepped aside - if there had been a coalition pre-arranged. Otherwise the right and centre just waste time weakening each other while the right stands united.



It's better than the one I made :(

10.3 + 3.7 = 14. And who knows how many of the 15.5m non-voters might have decided to vote, had the only remain options not looked like a pair of bickering idiots, unable to co-operate? How many might have gone green rather than Tactical Democrat?

For all their efforts the Lib Dems finished with 13 seats and 11.6% of the popular vote. Nowhere near enough to contest the tories, but enough to take a chunk out of Labour's chances of opposing the Tories.

Regardless of the figures, the media is currently trying to portray this as the result of a strong Conservative Brexit platform, or on Farage's maneuverings and withdrawal of candidates in key constituencies.

But if that's true, why did so many people remain Labour supporters in the face of a hostile media? Why did the 'Lib Dem Surge' lose two seats instead of gain hundreds? Why did they only get 11% of the popular vote as opposed to Labour's 32%? Why did so many people register and then apparently decline to vote, rather than vote for the Conservatives or Lib Dems?

or christmas

At a national level it's clear that it's not because Boris was a more popular than Theresa May - Boris' share of the vote was only 1.1% higher than in 2017, with a 1.4% overall drop in turnout. Less than half of two-thirds of registered voters chose the Conservatives.

At a national level as well, there was no overall increase in Tory vote, even with the expected leave voters moving from BXP / UKIP.  This was less of a win for the Tories, and more a loss for the remain parties.

The Blame


Many are trying to blame Corbyn, despite the popularity of his policies with the Labour membership. It's very likely that the media assassination on Corbyn got through to voters, though this would have been reflected in a much larger difference in the popular vote between Labour and the Conservatives.

We can however see a split in the popular vote which - like with the Brexit referendum - shows a country divided almost half and half. Half to leave, united under the Tories, and half to remain, split between an incredibly strong and popular Labour party, and a parasitic leech of a Lib party, draining just enough of it's support to fuck up any chance of any one Remain party winning.

The Labour result is miraculously high considering they were fighting propaganda from multiple sides - both in terms of the campaign literature on the doorsteps, and in the media. Not just from the right-wing rags, but also from supposedly left-leaning and moderate outlets which signal boosted it in the name of being 'fair to both sides' and boosting the 'both as bad as each other' message when the right wing showed us no such grace.

I'm not saying it's him, but it's him.

The Labour party weren't perfect. Their spread of policies were popular individually, but when combined into the sweeping changes in the manifesto, it's easy to believe that they were 'too much' for the public. But that isn't backed up by Labour's share in the popular vote, or the lack of a significant pro-tory movement.

You could blame low-engagement voters, too quick to turn to easy answers and quick slogans on the right, or tactical voting websites which promise to do the hard work for you, but proved to be based on guesswork and poll wonkery.

It's hard to blame the pollsters entirely either. This was an election walking into unknown territory with an unprecedented number of variables - the NHS, Brexit, the climate crisis, and the youth-quake of new voter registration.

 
Turns out they were mostly lib dems, or non-voters
John McDonnell has also admitted that Brexit cost them the election. Much has been made of the loss of the 'red wall' of pro-leave Labour seats. The problem there is that again, the national vote should reflect a Conservative gain proportional to the Labour loss. It doesn't - it reflects a gain for the Lib Dems, Greens and SNP.

Unless the leave voters in the red wall flipped to the pro-remain Lib Dems, their pro Tory movement in these constituencies has to have been offset by a massive anti-tory sentiment everywhere else.
 
While on the surface it seems like Labour were fighting a battle on two fronts, they were decimated trying to fight a battle on multiple fronts - not just at a party level, but in the debates where the Greens and Lib Dems chose to turn on Corbyn rather than Johnson.

but why didn't you stop brexit jeremey


 

And that's not taking into consideration that they were also trying to take on public utilities, the machinery of capital, US healthcare firms, the banks and tax dodging corporations; all of whom would have been donating heavily to parties and publications opposing Labour's plans.

And despite this overwhelming insanity against them, they still only got 10% less than the nakedly evil Tories.

The Outcome


The remain side was let down by Jo Swinson, because she wanted her face on a bus and pushed to achieve that without a clear, pre-arranged electoral pact with Labour and the other anti-brexit parties.

Should Corbyn have been the one to step aside to allow an alliance? Again, I remind you - Labour had over 260 seats, the Liberal Democrats had 15.

They now have 13, thanks to the way their increased chunk of the popular vote was distributed across constituencies that never would have given them a majority, but might have just scraped a Labour win. 

Jo Swinson and the pro-Lib voting sites absolutely fucked this for the remainers.

via @AzzaBamboo on twitter

Ironically, if she had allied with Corbyn, she'd probably be remembered as the leader who stopped the Conservatives, then went on to campaign for remain in a second referendum, instead of the squirrel murdering melt history will remember. 

So what's to come of all this? 

Probably nothing. Maybe I'll be lucky and Owen Jones will see it and nod or shake his head, before returning to Owen Jones type things. Maybe a few people will read it during a work break, and then scroll on to find out who won Celebrity I Have No Mouth And Yet I Must Scream.

I couldn't find a relevant image so here is a cute pig
 
Maybe people will be more wary of tactical voting in future, which is good because that only strengthens Labour's cause and drives the Lib Dems further into irrelevancy. But they'll still be there, chipping away at the Tory opposition, especially in places like Wantage where they can now claim to be the strongest opposition. That's one less seat Labour can hope to flip in future.

None of this is particularly shocking if you've been paying attention to the naked opportunism of the last few years of Lib Dem history. It's certainly not illegal, and there's no manager for enraged centrists to demand to speak to.

Nobody's going to check the statistics before making a choice next time. If I wasn't an extremely online person, I wouldn't have known how. Nobody's going to read this whole thing and get it in one go, it took me months of being obsessed with the election to pick it all up gradually, and I'm still pretty sure I'm missing or not emphasising a bunch of things.

Every. Fucking. Time.

I think I'm just writing it so I can try and make sense of it all, and collect all of the links and arguments before I forget them. I'm also writing it because a complex web of learning difficulties, depression and Thatcherite education have left me unable to memorise most of the figures involved, or hold together this kind of argument in person.

As an adult currently unable to rely on the nightmare the UK welfare system has become, I stand to get absolutely rat-fucked by this decision, so no - I'm not going to be able to 'get over it.'

It matters. It's on my mind.


Ultimately, I think if there had been a pact between Labour and the Lib Dems, we wouldn't be staring down the barrel of another five years of Tory austerity and a disastrous Brexit deal which will lead to the carving-up of the NHS.

We might not have had a Labour majority, but we might not have a Tory majority, which might have been enough to enable the Lib Dems, Labour and the SNP to work out some kind of last minute pact.

Instead, this Tory win is on the head of Jo Swinson and the Lib Dems for their campaign of misinformation, their attacks on Labour, and their refusal to help the remain voters unite against the Tories.

This is Centrism

The Libs should have thrown themselves into the fucking sea, where hopefully they'll choke on all the microplastic from the 10p plastic bags their precious 5p tax led to.All they exist for now is to weaken Labour's opposition to the Tories.

Lying fucking splitters.

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