Vote yellow, get blue

Having received a Liberal Democrat leaflet with one of their now-legendary dodgy bar charts, one of our members wrote to the County Times which was printed last week.

The Liberal Democrats are notorious for producing bar charts that will distort scales, use results from different electoral bases or just compare apples with pears to overstate their support.  Chris Conibear wrote this letter to express her opinion on the lastest one, which used results from the recent county council elections as they are kinder to the Lib Dems that the last general election results.

In the County Times (March 19) Morwen Millson, leader of the Liberal Democrats on West Sussex county council, called for politics to be cleaned up.

If she is really sincere in this wish she should look at the literature which her local party is currently issuing prior to the coming general election.  Just prior to the last general election they published misleading figures quoting results in the district election.

Now, in an imminent general election situation they are quoting county council election results. In neither case do their figures reflect the general election situation, and it is a rather underhand trick to mislead voters in this way.

Surely Liberal Democrats of conscience must feel some shame that they allow this to happen.  In fact Labour does well in this constituency in general elections and it makes no sense to vote tactically in the general election.

So if you are a Labour supporter, when the time comes don't be mislead.

Our Chair has twice 'phoned the Liberal Democrat candidate asking him to cease using his dodgy bar chart, but so far we are still waiting for a response.  The BBC programme More or Less has asked the electorate to send in any dodgy bar charts they receive during the election and they are planning to publish their own bar chart at the end of the election to highlight which party is the dodgiest.

In the spirit of the season, to show the Lib Dems how it feels to be on the receiving end, and to make sure they don't win the BBC competition by too large a margin, here is our very own dodgy bar chart on the national position.

Of course, one advantage of Labour's promise of a referendum on introducing the alternative voting (AV) system is that tactical voting will all but disappear and along with it the need for anybody to consider dodgy bar charts at all.