Ignore the doubters – tactical voting is the only way to stop Brexit and secure a better future for Britain

Some have accused my voting advice website of being flawed but people must recognise that blind adherence to party politics is partly to blame for the mess we are in

Sir Lindsay Hoyle said when he was elected as the new speaker that he wanted to preside over a kinder, gentler House of Commons. In the current climate I wonder if this is an entirely realistic aspiration.

It’s a measure of the McCarthyite times in which we live that we’re hearing potential prospective parliamentary candidates have had their Twitter feeds forensically examined to see what they had to say during the EU referendum. As a result, too many potentially great political careers have already been ended before they began.

I fear that there is a real danger Sir Lindsay will preside over a uniquely remote, narrow-minded and toxic chamber when it returns after the election, where MPs leave their morals at the doors of the chamber and instead become nodding dogs. Politicians are supposed to represent us at our best, not at our very worst. It dismays me how many honourable, hardworking MPs – tellingly, many women with very promising careers – are just giving up on the whole idea of politics.

This miserable situation has galvanised me once again to set up an independent tactical-voting website, remainunited.org. It has one objective only: to stop a Tory majority from transforming our country into an isolated island laboratory for a nationalist, right-wing ideology that will inevitably lead to a more divided, intolerant, unjust and economically broken country.

I know my team and I have our critics – even The Independent was among them last week – but I genuinely believe we have the best possible methodology, respected experts and a winning track-record in the last three elections: the 2015 and 2017 general elections and this year’s EU elections. Our lead analyst is a renowned expert in algorithms, models and data, with 20 years’ experience, and lectures at Cambridge on mathematics and statistics.

We appreciate voting intention is more volatile than seen in modern times, and that no tactical-voting methodology can provide a 100 per cent guarantee, but we can smooth out the anomalies and cure many polling ills. Although it is very resource and finance heavy, our data size and approach mean we can be nimble and react in real time by taking trends and news into account – for example the Brexit candidates stepping down, and constituency voter trends and feedback.

As a life-long transparency campaigner, I was determined our independent analysts and pollsters should be as open as possible, and, as such, Remain United is the only tactical-voting website to publish our data files. In addition, as we believe in a United Kingdom, we are also the only ones conducting MRP (multilevel regression and post-stratification) analysis, and have commissioned polling across the whole United Kingdom, including Northern Ireland.

There are those, of course, who have more or less given up hope, but to them I would say that, across the whole population, people have not given up hope with our findings showing that 51 per cent of Labour voters, 52 per cent of Lib Dem voters, 37 per cent of Green voters and 46 per cent of SNP/PC voters are all planning on voting tactically on 12 December.

Let’s be clear about what is at stake. The endlessly repeated mantra “let’s get Brexit done” or Boris Johnson’s “oven-ready deal” that his government would put in the microwave as soon as parliament is opened will lead to a half-baked Brexit that will be the beginning of an arduous and no doubt acrimonious phase in this whole sorry saga that will go on for years, if not decades.

This winter election poses challenges when it comes to tactical voting, and, as ever, there must be compromise. It has been necessary for us in some circumstances to choose Remainer Labour candidates even if their party’s position is, to put it mildly, ambiguous. But one battle at a time. The goal for this one must be to stop a Tory majority government. The more than likely coalition government of Labour, the Lib Dems and SNP will then have the opportunity of resolving Brexit in the first half of 2020.

There are, in contrast, some Tory Remainers that we may well admire, but whom we cannot recommend because of their party and what it has clearly become.

We must now think outside of the box and recognise that blind adherence to party politics is in many respects to blame for the mess we’re in. I know from experience that a genuinely independent tactical-voting website does not win you friends, but as we face the most momentous election since the 1940s, there is no place for emotion or sentimentality. The only thing that matters is winning. All that matters is the national interest – anything else is deflection and distraction.

Gina Miller is a transparency campaigner and businesswoman