Vote yellow get blue, a tale as old as, er, 2010 or so.
Depends on the constituency. In this case yes…but plenty of others it is vote red get blue as LD are more palatable
But as they showed in 2010, if they become king makers they’ll side with the Tories.
As someone who was foolish enough to agree with Nick, I’m still bitter about just how much stuff they enabled the Tories to do in that first term.
They had no choice LD plus labour would have been some 20 seats short of majority so would have been even worse than Mays minority con government relying on dup. A coalition if at least 4 parties would have been a nightmare to work. Their only option was Tory coalition. Maybe if people had given a swing of 10 more seats from Con to LD or Lab things might have been different.
They always had the choice of not doing it.
Clegg, some years afterwards, said that they had prioritised stability of government over things like student loans. Their subsequent wipe out showed that their voters disagreed.
The AV referendum was foolish (because it wasn’t needed, they could have demanded the change itself) and while I don’t expect people to have a crystal ball, the confidence the Tories gained from that decisive result, and then the Scottish IndyRef, laid the groundwork for Cameron to be overly confident towards Brexit.
The worst bit is that they actually got quite a lot of their manifesto enacted. That ended up making the Tories not seem quite so bad, even with austerity turbo-fucking the economy, as the Lib Dem’s provided a sort of calming influence on the Tories more batshit insane policies like having a Common’s vote on bringing back fox hunting.
The thing people forget is that the 2010 election was more a rejection of Labour - after 13 years of government, a global financial crisis, and the continued legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan - than an embrace of the Conservatives. A hung parliament had not occurred for quite some time, and a sizable amount of the Lib Dem vote - especially among millenials - was as a third option being neither labour or the tories.
Unfortunately, what we got was still the Tories.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
On a sunny morning in the village of Barton-le-Clay, Emma Holland-Lindsay, the Liberal Democrat candidate in next month’s Mid Bedfordshire byelection, is arguing that her party is best placed to overturn the huge Tory majority in the seat.
In this sprawling constituency, which is home to small towns, farms, new-build estates and dozens of villages, it is clear that support has flooded away from the Tories since Nadine Dorries, the outgoing MP, secured almost 60% of the vote and a majority just shy of 25,000 at the last election.
Complaints about access to GPs, the cost of living and Dorries’s alleged lack of presence in the seat regularly come up as the Labour and Lib Dem contenders knock on doors.
Yet the moment Dorries indicated she was resigning back in June, Labour’s high command saw it as a chance to show that Starmer’s new-look party could also compete for supposedly safe Tory seats.
They say there is considerable demographic change, with younger families moving into a significant amount of new-build housing, and lots of them commuting to the likes of London, Luton, Bedford and Milton Keynes.
Peter Kyle, the increasingly influential shadow cabinet minister who is overseeing the campaign, says the data he checks every morning suggests Labour is clearly the better-placed party – though he acknowledges the Tories could end up benefiting from a split vote.
The original article contains 1,038 words, the summary contains 227 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I’ve already received the usual lib dem leaflet showing a graph proving that only they can beat the Tories here. It’s almost exactly the same as I got in the last general election, which was in a completely different constituency. A bar graph with Tories high, Lib Dems slightly below and then Labour near the bottom with a massive graph.
It might very well be correct but it really just puts me off them, especially as the constituency candidates they put on there are two roads over and not ours. I’m sure I’ll get another one for this constituency at some point of course, with the same graph but different names.
I am really struggling as in my last constituency, I voted for them to remove the Tory and their hard line brexit but they took just enough off Labour for the Tories to win whilst being a very distant third place, so completely different to what they were suggesting. Of course it’s hard to know if any of those voters would have gone Labour instead but I certainly did so am guessing others did. Plus Labour were not anti hard brexit and non committal which didn’t help them.
F this FPTP system, really wish we voted for the alternative vote
If Labour is so desperate to beat the Tories, maybe they should consider not backing them on every terrible policy. Honestly, I can’t think of a single issue I care about that Labour hasn’t adopted the same Tory messaging on.
As an American I can not understand most of the words in the title. What language is this?
A “gift” is where you give something to someone without demanding payment. In the US you would be denounced as a communist if you were to do this.
Nadine Dorries’ seat is up for by-election. There is a lot of tactical voting going on in by-elections to keep the conservatives out. LD and Labour are neck and neck in the polls. If neither side give way then conservative could take the seat back.
I can see why both are standing firm. At least this way they get a proper feel on which party is the most favoured between LD and Lab. This will make it an easier choice on who will give way at the general election proper, which could be less than a year away. This seat will be ran again when a GE is announced.
“The Liberal Democrats (a centrist political party) will demolish this whole place”: Mid-Bedfordshire by-election duel could lead to a Conservative win.
If the Liberal Democrats could encourage their supporters to vote Labour strategically, they might prevent handing the election to the awful Conservative Party. But parties in first-past-the-post systems rarely manage to swallow their pride for the greater good.
It’s English, but not as we know it, Jim.
Translated it reads: “The Liberal Democratic Party will ruin everything” competition between two left-wing parties in mid-Bedfordshire by-election could split votes and result in a win by the Conservative Party.
Lib-Dems are centrist but otherwise yes
