Please vote tactically against the Conservatives in today’s election. Go to getvoting.org and enter your postcode to find out who is most likely to beat the Conservative candidate in your constituency.
What this means in practice is that none of the parties will win. This is good news. None of them is fit to govern, but if they’re forced to muddle through in a coalition we might get somewhere.
Here are a few more in-depth reasons:
A vote against Johnson
When your vote can mean so many things on a local, policy and party dimension, it might seem simplistic to vote based on a leader alone. But Johnson is no typical leader.
- He is a pathological liar: see this heroic attempt to document his lies compiled by former Telegraph journalist Peter Oborne. He was sacked from The Times for fabricating a quote. He was sacked from the shadow cabinet by Michael Howard for lying.
- He totally lacks empathy and basic human emotions. He refused to even look at a picture of a Jack Williment-Barr, a 4-year-old lying on the floor of Leeds General Infirmary, and stole the phone of the reporter showing it to him rather than answer questions about it.
- He is a coward. How can you expect him to stand up to world leaders like Trump and Putin if he’s too scared to sit down for half an hour with Andrew Neil, and hides in a fridge to avoid scrutiny from Piers Morgan?
- He is a homophobe and a racist. He has described gay men as ‘tank-topped bumboys’, black people as ‘picaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’, and Muslim women wearing the burqa as ‘letterboxes’ and ‘bank robbers’.
- He has conspired with a criminal to have a journalist beaten up.
- He is debasing the fabric of our politics, lying to journalists and illegally suspending Parliament to avoid scrutiny.
- We don’t even know how many children he has. Wikipedia says ‘at least 5’.
Any one of these things should be enough to seriously damage a politician’s credibility or even end their career, and yet there is a serious chance of this man being our Prime Minister for the next five years. If you are thinking of voting Conservative, can you really endorse that with a clean conscience?
For moderate Conservative voters
Many of you are rightly uncomfortable about a Johnson-led government and the hard Brexit he wants to deliver. The latest polls show that a Conservative win will likely be with quite a small majority, which could mean that Tory right-wingers hold the balance of power. If you hold your nose and vote tactically, it’s highly likely that the Conservatives will still be the largest single party, which will give them a significant amount of influence in Parliament. Labour has such a vanishingly small chance of a majority that a vote for someone other than a Conservative won’t put Corbyn in Number 10 except in a coalition, which will stop him enacting the most out-there parts of his manifesto. If you are confident that Brexit is still the will of the people, then you should be confident to have it subjected to a second referendum on the details of the deal.
For Labour voters
There is no way Labour is going to win a majority in this election. Please hold your nose and vote Lib Dem/someone else if suggested by getvoting.org. In most constituencies you won’t have to. A hung parliament is far better than five more years of Conservative cuts to the NHS and Johnson’s hard, rushed Brexit.
For Lib Dem voters
I feel like this doesn’t really need saying, but there is no way the Lib Dems are going to win a majority in this election. Please hold your nose and vote Labour/someone else if suggested by getvoting.org. A hung parliament is far better than five more years of Conservative cuts to the NHS and Johnson’s hard, rushed Brexit.
For other voters
I’ve not covered Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland here, and there are a handful of constituencies in England where independent candidates or the Greens are best-placed to win. You can find out at getvoting.org.
You don’t need your polling card to vote. You don’t need ID to vote (except in Northern Ireland). Make a plan now for when you will vote tomorrow, tell a friend, and do it.
Once more: getvoting.org
This has been a party political broadcast on behalf of none of the parties because they’re all terrible, please vote so that none of them win.