Could it be true?
Thanks to Ed Davey’s water slide shenanigans, the Liberal Democrats are having a good campaign. But are they playing fast and loose with figures? Many of the party’s leaflets extol the benefits of tactical voting: telling Labour and Green voters to back them to get the Tories out (or vice versa). Some have bar charts which – in several cases – are misleading. In Central Devon, a bar chart titled “Only the Lib Dems can beat the Conservatives” suggests the party held 34.4 per cent of the vote to Labour’s 27 per cent. But, as the BBC first spotted, the Lib Dem figure came from the 2010 election while the Labour one came from 2017. The chart also omitted the inconvenient truth that the Lib Dems came either third or fourth in Central Devon in the past three general elections. The Lib Dems said the leaflet made the “valid” point that the party had come closest to beating the Tories. They accepted that the point had been “clumsily made”.
