Here’s A Worked Example Why You Should Never, Ever Trust Newspapers Giving Advice On ‘Tactical Voting’

Today’s Daily Telegraph decided to jump on the ‘tactical voting guide’ bandwagon.

If you thought they would be any more objective than The Guardian or any of the other adult comics masquerading as newspapers in the UK, you’d be wrong.

Here’s what they had to say at the start:

Which seats are there where the Tories haven’t won since 1992 or ever AND where they finished behind a Kipper on over a fifth of the total vote cast AND where the Tories got less than 30% in 2017 (ie. where the Kipper vote wasn’t all disgruntled Tories and where a lot of the locals will never, ever vote Tory)?

Crunched the numbers and the answers are three – Houghton and Sunderland South, held by Labour with 59.5% of the vote; South Shields, held by Labour with 61.5% of the vote; and Rotherham, held by Labour with 56.4% of the vote.

In other words, seats where you can put a Labour rosette on a tin of Pedigree Chum and still no one else has a hope in Hell of winning – ever.

This almost makes the Liberal Democrats ‘electoral pact’ with the Greens and Plaid Cymru look fair and unbiased.

It makes no allowances for Hartlepool having not only a Brexit Party MEP, but nine councillors in an area where the Labour hegemony has collapsed over the Brexit issue (70% of the vote) and where most locals would sooner shoot themselves than vote Tory – a common electoral phenomena north of the Pennines where the legacy of Margaret Thatcher and the Deindustrial Revolution will haunt Conservatives for a century.

It also goes against the bookmakers own predictions – where the Brexit Party are second.

(Source: Paddypower – who did the best at predicting the various constituency results at the last general election).

The Daily Telegraph has told its readers to vote Conservative in every general election since the 1930s. But that won’t have affected their criteria for telling Brexiteer voters to back the Conservatives in all but two impossible seats.

If this is what a pro-Brexit paper is advising its pro-Brexit readers to do, you can guess for yourselves what their ‘tactical advice’ for Remain voters will be like.