Monday, 4 November 2019

How on earth is Therese Coffey fronting the Tory general election campaign?


Compared to most people I'm a total politics nerd, after all, it's my job to study and write about politics, yet I'd barely even heard of Tory MP Therese Coffey until Boris Johnson suddenly put her in charge of hounding the disabled and further impoverishing the already destitute duties at the DWP.
 


Before this unexpected appointment to a senior government position, Coffey was most famous outside her constituency for the repulsive boozed up picture of her slobbering on a cigar like some bizarre female Ken Clarke tribute act.

But suddenly Coffey is sobered up and all over our TV screens, airwaves, and social media feeds, fronting up the Tory general election campaign.

Yesterday she was sent out to cynically pretend that nine years of relentless Tory wage repression and cuts to in-work benefits have been a good thing for ordinary working people, and today she's been wheeled out again to defend the Tory parliamentary candidate who said that people on benefits should be put to death!

Picking someone most of the public have never even heard of to front their election campaign seems like an extremely odd strategy for the Tories to adopt.

Yes, there's often someone like Barry Gardiner in 2017, who comes from nowhere to charm the public during an election campaign, but a charmless figure like Coffey, monotonously reading out scripted lies is never going to be able to enchant the nation is she?


It's interesting to look at the reasons someone as limited as Coffey is being pushed as the face of Conservatism.

Firstly Boris Johnson is in hiding.

He can't go out in public because he's getting booed and heckled wherever he shows his face, and his minders are keeping him away from as many interviews and debates as possible because they're all to aware that he's shockingly unprepared, utterly ignorant of stuff like facts and details, liable to make up absolute nonsense on the spot, or to just start spouting blatant lies.


Then there's the fact that most of the far-right Brextremist mob Johnson has surrounded himself with are freakishly unpopular with the public. 

Michael Gove with his coked-up, plastic-faced, right-wing goit act.

Sajid Javid, the reckless junk bond trader that Johnson has somehow decided to put in charge of the entire UK economy.

The haunted pencil figure of Jacob Rees-Mogg, like Lord Snooty but always with the sinister whiff of fascism about him.

Liz Truss, who is perpetually on the verge of another weird rant about imported cheese, or using barking dogs to scare away drones.

Priti Patel with her perpetual smirk, her open contempt for ordinary working Brits, and her liability to go off and collude with foreign governments again.

And then the absolute chancers who have been promoted exponentially above their abilities like Dominic Raab ('where's Dover?') and Gavin Williamson ('Russia should just shut up and go away!').

Rory Stewart was one of the very few sympathetic and relatable figures in the Tory ranks (to 'centrist dad' types at least), but he's been driven out of the party altogether because he wouldn't do as he was told, and Johnson simply can't bear to have anyone in the party who clearly has infinitely more eloquence and charisma than he does.

Amber Rudd was Theresa May's reliable and ever-willing dogsbody, always willing to step up when things got difficult, or take the fall for May's racist Windrush scandal, but she's quitting too, standing down from parliament in disgust at how awful the Tory party has become.

There's basically nobody left in the Tory ranks with any talent whatever, and of those actually capable of stringing a few sentences together without making an absolute tit of themselves, Coffey is the most human-looking specimen they've got!

And that's why a a slow-witted slob that virtually nobody has even heard of before has ended up fronting this Tory general election campaign!


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Meet the Tory candidate who wants to euthanise the unemployed


We all know there are a lot of right-wing people out there who secretly think that the Nazi concentration camps were a great idea, but that few of them are actually stupid enough to actually come out and promote Nazi-style eugenics in public, because they know the idea of state-administered murder of political non-conformists, ethnic minorities, disabled people, and so-called 'degenerates' fills most normal people with horror and revulsion.

One right-winger who is actually stupid enough to publicly promote the idea that people on benefits should be sent to death camps is the new Tory parliamentary candidate for the Gower constituency in Wales, Francesca O'Brien.

We're all aware of how "poverty porn" shows like Benefit Street were designed in order to whip up public hate against people who rely on benefits to survive, and to justify the Tory ideological agenda of vandalising the welfare state.

O'Brien is clearly one of the shows' target audience, because after watching an episode in 2014 she went onto Facebook to declare that the people on the show needed "putting down", and then endorse a reply proposing a "twat a tramp Tuesday".

Someone actually proposed a campaign of public beatings for homeless people, and instead of calling it out as vile vigilante nonsense, O'Brien responded "I'm liking that idea ... ha ha. Made me laugh"!

O'Brien has subsequently deleted the vile comments in the pathetic belief that the Internet will just forget the fact that she's some kind of hateful far-right ranter from the Britain First school of social media discourse.

And the Tory party have indicated how far they've moved to the extreme-right by continuing to endorse this vile woman as their chosen candidate.

yes they've spent the last nine years driving millions into absolute destitution with policies like sanctions, the benefits freeze, wage repression, disability benefit cuts, disability denial assessments ... but now they're unapologetically standing a candidate who says the state should go even further than systematically hounding disabled people and driving vulnerable people into starvation and suicide, and actually just kill them.


Let's hope the people of Gower have the good sense to reject this awful woman, and elect someone who has never actually proposed Nazi style eugenics, or laughed about vigilante violence campaigns against the homeless.

If she loses her bid to become an MP and then falls on hard times because of employers' understandable reservations about employing someone with such vile views, perhaps one day she might learn just a little bit of humility and decency?

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Friday, 1 November 2019

The Tory election campaign so far


The general election was only announced days ago, yet the Tory campaign has already degenerated into farce.

Johnson and Cummings could have picked pretty much anyone on the political right to draw up their election manifesto, but somehow they decided to hire a lobbyist called Rachel Wolf for the task. In her day job she lobbies on behalf of fracking companies and multinational tax-dodging corporations (so no glaringly obvious conflicts of interest there eh?)

The BBC and most of the mainstream media obliged Boris Johnson's minders by presenting his visit to Addenbrooke's Hospital in exactly the way they planned it, but the truth soon came out on social media. Johnson was booed out of the hospital by staff and patients alike, and hospital workers were prevented from asking him questions.

The day of Johnson's disastrous hospital visit was also supposed to be Brexit Day, but just like his predecessor Theresa May, Johnson ended up cobbling together such a shambolic, economically ruinous, and downright divisive bodge job of a Brexit proposal it had literally no chance of actually passing.

Despite having said he'd "rather be dead in a ditch" than extend Brexit again, that's precisely what he ended up doing.

Then it turns out that one of the Tories' election candidates was guilty of costing the public a fortune by deliberately collapsing a rape trial in a desperate bid to help his mate get away with raping a woman (his rapist mate was eventually jailed for five years after a retrial).

If Tory candidate vetting processes are so bad that they end up standing a rape trial saboteur, just imagine how many other unspeakably awful people they must be putting forward.

Then it was revealed that on the day the election was announced Tory ministers signed off on a scam to use public money to push a load of pro-Tory Facebook ads in marginal constituencies. Facebook eventually blocked this brazen Tory electoral fraud, but the Tories are steadfastly refusing to admit how much public money has been spent on this cynical election-rigging effort.

A softball interview with Laura Kuenssberg should have been the perfect tonic for Johnson, but he somehow managed to fluff the absolute "gimme" question he was asked about NHS privatisation: Would he rule out more NHS privatisation on his watch? Waffle, waffle, waffle, evasion, deception, whataboutery!

And then to top it all off, the Metropolitan Police finally handed their files on Vote Leave criminality to the Crown Prosecution Service after 16 months, meaning the Prime Minister and his most senior adviser could be facing criminal prosecution for their referendum cheating at some point in the next parliament, whether they're running the government or not.

If Johnson and the Tories can involve themselves in so many scandals in just a matter of days since the election was called, try to imagine how bloody awful they'd be if the British public are reckless enough to hand them a parliamentary majority for the next five years. 


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Meet the Tory rape trial saboteur


Meet Ross England, a rape trial saboteur who the Tory party somehow figured to be a fit and proper person to stand as their candidate in the Vale of Glamorgan in the upcoming Welsh Assembly election.

England was appearing at Cardiff Crown Court as a character witness for the accused when he decided to allege that the rape victim had engaged in group sex in the past, despite the judge Stephen Hopkins QC ruling the past sexual history of the victim inadmissible.

Bringing up the allegation of group sex (which the victim outright denies) was clearly a deliberate effort to unfairly prejudice the trial against the victim in order to get his mate off.

The judge was quite rightly infuriated by England's behaviour, responding "Why did you say that? Are you completely stupid? You have managed, singlehandedly, and I have no doubt it was deliberate on your part, to sabotage this trial. Mr England, as far as I am concerned, this matter so far as you are concerned, isn’t ended. I shall be writing personal letters to people who are politically close to you and I hope they take appropriate action. Get out of my court."

The trial was suspended, but England's rapist friend was eventually found guilty at a retrial and sent down for five years.

The victim told BBC Wales "It is completely shocking to me that Ross England would stand up in court and say these things, given that they are untrue ... For him to just blurt that out, proves to me that it was a formulated plan that he and whoever else conjured to try and derail the trial ... I think it was an absolutely deliberate attempt to sabotage the trial."


Amazingly, even after he cost the public a fortune by deliberately collapsing a rape trial, the Tory party decided to select England as one of their political candidates, only suspending him after public anger at his rape trial sabotage tactics became too strong for them to sweep the issue under the carpet.

So next time you hear some Tory politician posturing as if they're "the party of law and order" don't forget that besides slashing 21,000+ police jobs and closing down 600 police stations since 2010, they're also a welcoming home to people who deliberately collapse rape trials to try and help their mate get away with rape!


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The Lib-Dems love Tories more than they hate Brexit


Lib-Dem leader Jo Swinson has been rummaging through the political rubbish bin again to scavenge yet another Tory-reject to join her absolute shambles of a political party, bringing the number of ex-Tories in the Lib-Dem ranks to five, which means Tory defectors now make up a ridiculous 24% of the Lib-Dem parliamentary party!

One of the most amazing things about the Lib-Dem acquisition of so many Tory rejects is the absolute state of their voting records, and the latest recruit Antoinette Sandbach is no different.

Her voting record is absolutely vile, having loyally backed every piece of poverty-spreading Tory welfare vandalism, every rip-off privatisation scam, every attack on workers' rights and wages, every economically illiterate austerity measure, every tax cut and handout for corporations and the mega-rich, and every catastrophic cut to public services like the NHS, policing, the fire service, social care, local government services ...

But the mind really starts to boggle when it comes to Sandbach's voting record on Brexit.

  • When Labour and the other opposition parties attempted to prevent the Tories from using Brexit to attack workers' rights, environmental laws, food standards, and consumer protections, Sandbach voted the amendment down.
  • Sandbach voted 15 times to deny the EU citizens the right to reside in the UK after Brexit.
And how does the duplicitous weasel Jo Swinson welcome Sandbach into the Lib-Dem ranks? By going on about working with her to stop Brexit!

The fact that the Lib-Dems are welcoming another hard-right pro-Brexit, EU citizens rights denier into their ranks just goes to prove that the Lib-Dems love Tories an awful lot more than they actually want to stop Brexit.

And the expectation that their supporters will mindlessly accept the glaring contradiction between the Lib-Dems' anti-Brexit posturing and the red carpet treatment they afford to a bunch of Brexity Tory-rejects like Sandbach just goes to prove what a gullible and intellectually lazy bunch they imagine their own supporters to be.


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Thursday, 31 October 2019

Where do the parties stand on fracking?



What is fracking?

Fracking (hydraulic fracturing) is an incredibly inefficient process for extracting natural gas, with an extremely low Energy Return on Energy Invested.

The process involves pumping vast quantities of pressurised water and chemicals into shale rock in order to force out natural gas.

The process has been linked with extraordinary levels of environmental destruction, pollution of the water table, and earthquakes.

Aside from the environmental concerns it's also barely viable from a purely economic perspective. The costs of extraction are so high that fracking is only economically viable at all when energy prices are high, and when governments hand fracking operations vast subsidies and tax cuts to give them an artificial advantage over traditional energy sources, and environmentally sound renewable sources too.



Tories

The Tories have an utterly disgraceful record on fracking.

In 2013 they introduced a new tax break for frackers, slashing their tax rate in half, to give them a massive artificial advantage over other energy sources like North Sea Oil drilling, offshore wind farms, biomass, and solar energy.

In their bid to encourage fracking in Britain the Tories also decided to eliminate the payment of insurance bonds on fracking rigs (which they even have in the United States) which are meant to cover the cost of any potential environmental damage, and dissuade frackers from taking undue environmental risks.

In 2016 they overruled massive local opposition and the local council to force fracking on Ryedale, which lies just on the edge of the stunning North York Moors national park, and then later that year they attempted to define anti-fracking activists as "extremists" and "terrorists".

And now Boris Johnson has actually hired a fracking lobbyist called Rachel Wolf to draw up the 2019 Tory election manifesto (no obvious conflicts of interest there then!).



Lib-Dems

During the Austerity coalition the Lib-Dems voted through all of the Tories' pro-fracking legislation, including the vast 2013 frackers tax cut designed to create fake financial viability for the industry.

In recent years they've realised how unpopular it is, and posture as if they oppose it, whilst staying tight-lipped about all the legislation they previously voted through to encourage it.

You'd have to be intensely gullible to trust the Lib-Dems after all of their U-turns and betrayals on issues like tuition fees, electoral reform, hiking VAT, nuclear subsidies, and imperialist warmongering in the Middle East, so it's always worth looking a little deeper ... and it turns out that the Lib-Dem leader Jo Swinson is personally bankrolled by a fracking company director!



Labour

Labour have an unequivocal stance on fracking. They will outright ban it.



Hang on, other parties exist too you know!

The Green Party have the most long-standing opposition to fracking, as you'd expect from an environmentalist party. Green Party politicians and activists have been at the heart of  anti-fracking protests up and down the country.

The SNP government in Scotland is refusing to allow fracking in Scotland by not allowing any fracking licences, but campaigners say they should go further and legislate a permanent ban on the practice.

Plaid Cymru have a moratorium policy on fracking in Wales, under which frackers would be banned from operating unless they can prove that the practice is environmentally safe (which is essentially an outright ban, because they can't).


CUK (or whatever they're calling themselves these days) are a laughing stock of a  party that are polling at 0%. They're a wasted vote. If they had even bothered to develop any kind of energy policy, this bunch of pro-privatisation, pro-austerity, orthodox neoliberal clowns would probably have come out in favour of it.

Brexit Party don't seem to have any actual policies other than continually pushing for the most damaging hard-right interpretation of Brexit imaginable, let alone detailed strategies on specific issues like fracking. They have welcomed fracking supporters into their party as candidates though, so on that basis it seems likely they'd be in favour of it, if they even bother developing an actual manifesto for the general election.


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So how many of Jeremy Corbyn's policies do you actually disagree with?


A London School of Economics study into how Jeremy Corbyn is represented in the media found that only a paltry 11% of all newspaper articles about him bothered to accurately state a single one of his actual policies. In the hard-right Daily Mail and Express that figure was 0%.

Given this lack of unbiased political coverage, it's not difficult to understand why so many people are so unfamiliar with Jeremy Corbyn's actual policies, and tend to judge him as if politics is some kind of vapid personality contest.

So here are some of the Jeremy Corbyn policies that the mainstream media really don't want to tell you about, so you can judge for yourself whether you like them or not.


Labour Party policies

Ban companies based in tax havens bidding for government contracts
It's astounding that this isn't the case already. How on earth could anyone even attempt to justify taxpayers' cash being paid to companies based in tax havens for the purpose of dodging tax?

£10 minimum wage for all workers over the age of 18
The UK is the only country in the developed world where workers' wages are declining in real terms, while the economy is actually growing. A £10 minimum wage would help to reverse this scenario, and it would also significantly reduce the cost of in-work benefits like tax credits and housing benefit (most of which goes to working families these days).

The Tories have are trying to outflank this by saying they'll raise the minimum wage to £10.50, but that's only by 2024, Labour's would come in immediately.


All rented accommodation to be fit for human habitation
Again, astounding that this isn't the case already, but in January 2016 the Tories (over 1/3 of whom are landlords) deliberately voted down a Labour Party amendment to their housing bill to ensure that all rented accommodation is fit for human habitation.

Renationalise the railways
This is a very popular policy that is supported by an overwhelming majority of the public. Do you support rail renationalisation too, or are you one of the minority who think that the current rip-off profiteer-administered shambles is acceptable?

Renationalise the NHS
The Tory party have been carving up the English NHS and distributing the pieces to the private sector, Jeremy Corbyn has pledged to reverse this process. Are you one of the 84% of people who thinks the NHS should be run as a not-for-profit public service, or one of the 7% who agree with the ongoing Tory privatisation agenda?

Free school meals
The policy of providing free school meals to all school children between the ages of 4 and 11 is based on evidence based research showing that universal free school meals lead to significantly improved grades. It will be paid for by ending the generous tax breaks (public subsidies) for the 7% of kids who go to private fee-paying schools.

Create a National Education Service
Jeremy Corbyn believes that education is a right, not a commodity. He wants to create an integrated National Education Service to ensure that education is freely available to anyone who needs it, no matter their age, income, or background.

Scrap tuition fees
Thanks to the Tories (and their Lib-Dem enablers) UK students now face the most expensive tuition fees in the developed world for study at public universities, meaning students typically leave university with £50,000 of debt, and two thirds of them will never pay off their student debts. Labour would end this lunacy by getting rid of student fees.

Restore NHS Bursaries
One of the first things Theresa My did when she came to power in 2016 was to scrap NHS bursaries for nurses and other NHS workers. This removal of financial support for trainee nurses has caused a huge decline in the number of applicants to nursing courses. The NHS is facing a vast recruitment crisis, and restoring NHS bursaries and investing heavily in medical training is the only way to prevent even more than the 130,000 avoidable deaths already caused by Tory austerity cuts to the NHS and social care systems.


Increase the carers' allowance
Labour are proposing to increase the Carers Allowance for the 1 million unpaid carers in the UK. This would be paid for by scrapping the Tories' Inheritance Tax cut for millionaires. Unpaid carers save the UK economy an estimated £132 million a year, and they've been doing ever more work as a result of the £4.6 billion in Tory cuts to the social care budget.

Create a National Investment Bank
This is actually one of Jeremy Corbyn's best policies, but few people actually understand it. It's absolutely clear that allowing private banks to determine where money is invested ends up in huge speculative bubbles in housing and financial derivatives, while the real economy is starved of cash. A National Investment Bank would work by investing in things like infrastructure, services, businesses and regional development projects, and would end up becoming a kind of sovereign wealth fund for the UK.

End the public sector pay freeze
Under Tory rule UK workers have suffered the longest sustained decline in real wages since records began. The public sector pay freeze contributed massively to this. You'd have to be economically illiterate to imagine that repressing public sector wages with below inflation pay rises for year after year would not exert downwards pressure on private sector wages too. Ending the public sector pay freeze would actually boost the economy by putting more money in people's pockets, meaning an increase in aggregate demand.


End sweetheart tax deals between HMRC and massive corporations

David Cameron (the son of a tax-dodger) repeatedly lied through his teeth about how serious he was about confronting tax-dodging, whilst allowing HMRC to concoct sweetheart deals with corporations like Google, Vodafone and Starbucks. One of the main reasons the corporate press are so strongly opposed to Jeremy Corbyn is that they know that unlike David Cameron, he's serious when he talks about clamping down on tax-dodging.

Stop major corporations ripping off their suppliers
Major corporations are withholding an astounding £26 billion through late payment, which is responsible for an estimated 50,000 small businesses going bust every year. The scale of this problem is so massive that it should be a national scandal, and Jeremy Corbyn is absolutely right to align himself with small businesses to defend their interests. 

Reverse the Tory corporation tax cuts
Since 2010 the Tories have cut the rate of corporation tax for major multinational corporations from 28% to just 17% (by 2020) meaning the UK has one of the lowest corporation tax rates in the developed world. The global average is 27% and the G7 average is 32.3%. Corbyn is proposing to reverse this ideological race to the bottom madness and restore corporation tax rates back in line with the rest of the developed world.

Prevent No Deal Brexit chaos
Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party are absolutely committed to preventing the UK from crashing out of the EU without agreeing a sensible process first. With Labour the worst possible Brexit option of No Deal will be taken off the table, and the choice will be given back to the public between a "soft" least-damaging version of Brexit (that protects the interests of British businesses and British workers alike) against Remain in a final say referendum.

Zero Hours Contracts ban
Almost a million UK workers are now on exploitative Zero Hours Contracts. Last year the New Zealand parliament voted to ban them, and Labour is proposing to do the same. Long-term employees and workers doing regular hours would be protected from Zero Hours Contract exploitation.

End Tory disability persecution
Ever since 2010 the Tories have been brutally persecuting sick, disabled, and terminally ill people. Cutting their pitiful subsistence benefits to pay for even more tax cuts for the rich, confiscating their motability vehicles, forcing them through demeaning corporate-administered "fit for work" disability denial assessments, even making terminally ill people sign on if they survive for more than six months!

Labour would scrap all of this, and build a new, more compassionate system to actually help the most vulnerable and unfortunate people in our society, rather than abusing and impoverishing them, and making them feel like useless idle scroungers who should just go and kill themselves.

House building
Under the Tory government the level of UK housebuilding has slumped to the lowest levels since the 1920s, even though demand for housing is extremely high. Labour are guaranteeing investment in a programme of house building, and committing to ensure that half of the new houses are social housing. 


This wouldn't just alleviate the housing crisis, it would also stimulate the economy (creation of skilled jobs, demand for supplies and materials, less disposable income being wasted on rip-off private rents ...).

Combat inequality
Tory austerity fanaticism resulted in the longest sustained decline in workers' wages since records began and condemned an additional 400,000 children to growing up in poverty, meanwhile the tiny super-rich majority literally doubled their wealth. Labour is pledging to reduce the inequality gap and introduce progressive policies to reduce the gap between the incomes of the highest and lowest paid. There is plenty of evidence to show that the least unequal societies are more economically successful places where the people are happier.


Conclusion

So out of these 20 Labour Party policies, how many do you actually strongly disagree with?




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Footnotes: How would this be paid for?

A lot of people tend to ask how all of this is going to be paid for, so here's some answers.

It turns out that quite a lot of these policies are actually investments that would pay for themselves in the long-term because they would stimulate more economic activity than the investment cost (see my articles on fiscal multiplication and the marginal propensity to consume to get a better idea of how). 


Other policies could easily be funded if we had a government that was actually serious about cracking down on tax-dodging, which costs the country vast amounts per year. Just ending sweetheart deals between HMRC and major multinational corporations would generate £billions, which would pay for stuff like restoring the NHS bursary many times over.

If anyone is genuinely worried about how stuff is going to be paid for, the first thing on their mind should of course be the impending threat of Boris Johnson's Brexit bodge, which is set to cost the UK economy £79 billion (the equivalent of the entire economy of Wales), or even worse a No Deal Tory Brexit strop.

If the Tories manage to engineer No Deal the IFS have estimated a 6.3% -9.5% collapse in GDP, which would be an even bigger economic meltdown than the one that was caused by the 2007-08 global financial sector insolvency crisis (that our economy and our wages have still nowhere near recovered from)!

What do you think would happen to stuff like the tax take and the budget deficit if the economy tanked even worse than it did in 2009 thanks to Tory Brexit?

Is this the dodgiest Lib-Dem bar chart ever?



The Lib-Dems are absolutely notorious for producing absurdly misleading bar charts aimed at duping the gullible into voting for them, but this year the Lib-Dems in North East Somerset have absolutely outdone themselves by producing one of the most shockingly deceptive political bar charts ever.

The North East Somerset constituency is a Tory safe seat for Jacob Rees-Mogg on 54%, with Labour trailing almost 20 points behind on 35%, and the Lib-Dems in a distant 3rd on just 8%.


So in order to produce a favourable bar chart for themselves the Lib-Dems conducted an absurd push poll asking "Imagine the result in your constituency was expected to be very close between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat candidate, and none of the other parties were competitive..."

They created a scenario that doesn't exist in reality, purely in order to manipulate non-Tory voters into saying they would vote Lib-Dem.

To put what they're doing into perspective, it's useful to consider the biggest constituency swing of all during the 2017 General Election, which happened in Gordon, north east Scotland.

The swing in Gordon was 20.4%, representing just over 15,000 votes.

If Labour were to defy the odds to win North East Somerset from 2nd place, they'd need a huge swing of 19% (over 10,000 votes).

If the Lib-Dems were to take the seat from 3rd place they'd need an unprecedented swing of over 35% (24,500+ votes).

The Lib-Dems are absolutely desperate to trick people into supporting their hopeless lost cause.

And the method the Lib-Dems have come up with to con people into voting for them is to pretend that they're the second party (when Labour are), and that Labour are in a distant third (when that's actually where the Lib-Dems finished last time).

If you ever needed more evidence that the Lib-Dems simply can't be trusted to be honest about anything, this staggeringly dishonest abuse of statistics, polling, and observable reality 
is surely it.

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