As Jo Swinson says, tactical voting is the way we can fight back against an unfair electoral system

All that is needed to force Boris Johnson out of No 10 is for the Conservatives and Democratic Unionist Party to lose seven seats between them compared with the 2017 result. And the Lib Dems are currently best placed to win most of those seven

Saturday 23 November 2019 18:36 GMT
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General election: Registering people to vote in the street

Jo Swinson has scaled back her ambition. She says in her interview with The Independent today that voting for her is the best way to stop a Tory government gaining a majority – rather than proclaiming she could be the next prime minister.

In which case, instead of being accused of arrogance, she should be accused of being rather slow to adjust to shifting public opinion. It was in July that Labour, the Conservatives, the Brexit Party and the Liberal Democrats were each on about 20 per cent in the opinion polls.

Since then there has been a gradual return to a more familiar political pattern, ending in the dramatic collapse of Brexit Party support since 11 November, when Nigel Farage announced his candidates were standing down in half of the seats in Great Britain.

Ms Swinson’s pitch now is that her party is better placed to win seats from the Conservatives than Labour is. This has the advantage of being both true and realisable. All that is needed to force Boris Johnson out of No 10 is for the Conservatives and Democratic Unionist Party to lose seven seats between them compared with the 2017 result. And the Lib Dems are currently best placed to win most of those seven.

The party is most excited about the possibility of winning in Esher and Walton, a Remain-voting seat bordering Greater London. Ms Swinson hopes people will be asking themselves on 13 December: “Were you up for Raab?” Being up in the early hours to watch the unseating of the foreign secretary – and first secretary of state – would be a triumph to rival New Labour’s shock defeat of Michael Portillo, the defence secretary, in 1997.

The paradox of Ms Swinson’s new, more realistic strategy, however, is that she needs Labour to raise its game. The parties that promise a new EU referendum need each other to do well if they are to deliver their objective. That means Ms Swinson must be privately willing Jeremy Corbyn to close the opinion-poll gap with Mr Johnson, so that more marginal seats come into play and depriving the Conservatives of a majority becomes more achievable.

And it means that she needs Labour supporters to vote tactically for Lib Dem candidates in the seats that count – which makes her hostility to Mr Corbyn a risky gamble. We can see what she is trying to do: she is trying to avoid putting off Conservative-inclined Remainers in her target seats by looking as if she is preparing to prop up a Corbyn-led government.

But the voters have to take the electoral system as they find it, and use it as best they can to achieve the outcome they want. Those voters for whom stopping Brexit is the highest priority should look at the tactical situation in their constituency, and cast an intelligent vote for the candidate best placed to secure a Final Say referendum.

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