Tactics

At reference 1 I reported a softening of my attitude towards tactical voting. Maybe I did not like it much, but if that was the price of keeping out a Tory of the far right...

In this, I may well have been influenced by two things. First, an assumption that in this suburban constituency - Epsom, Ewell and Leatherhead - the Liberals were a bigger threat to the Conservatives than Labour. Second, an assumption that the Liberal candidate would be more or less honest about such a matter, so I remembered the graphic in her leaflet snapped above, below and right.

But this lunchtime, BH cracked out her stash of leaflets and we found a rather different graphic in the Labour leaflet snapped above, above and left. So who was to be believed? Next step was to ask Bing about polls and I looked at a small sample of those offered. One or two were disqualified by being impossible to snap.

One. Polling report UK. I pass on describing the Conservatives as vacant, content to put it down to a Freudian slip on the part of some IT person.

Two. Election polling.

Three. Election maps.

And lastly, four. The YouGov quoted in the Liberal leaflet. From all of which I deduce that candidates use the poll which suits them. I suspect that it is going to cost me serious time to make an informed judgement about the quality of these polls - bearing in mind that the pollster might have an agenda too. And that is not going to happen.

It would all be so much simpler if we had provision for second preference votes, but we don't. And the Liberals have not done a deal with Labour here. So who knows?

At least if I vote Labour and the Tories come in just ahead of the Liberals, I will have been wrong but I will have backed my own horse. I might add, that I like the Labour candidate more than the other two. 

PS: you might think that a wealthy suburb like Epsom would be immune to Farage and his kind, but sadly this does not appear to be the case. I am reminded that Leatherhead, now in the constituency, was once a place for London overspill. So while it is a very rich area overall with lots of fancy residential property, that might not be the whole story.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-new-face-of-epsom.html.