"Only the Conservatives..."

Having just got back from the hustings for the Lewisham mayoral elections I am feeling all civic minded and thought I would blog about the outrageous graph abuse in the election booklet (not circular) I got in the post for said mayoral election at the weekend.

The booklet helpfully contained a page from each of the candidates on why you should vote for them. In all honesty I was never likely to vote for the Conservative candidate, Simon Nundy, anyway, but I had a scan through his page and my eyes hovered briefly over his obligatory "CAN'T WIN HERE" graph, seen below:


In case you can't quite read, it says "2008 Mayoral election: How Lewisham voted". Apparently, how Lewisham voted was 37% Labour, 24% conservatives and 9% Lib Dems, leading to the logical conclusion that "only the Conservatives can stop Labour on May 6th". Thanks, Mr Nundy!

So, I continued my merry way through the booklet and thought no more about this, until I got to the Lib Dem candidate's page, and saw this graph:


I spent a good minute or so flicking back and forth between these two graphs, reading the small print and trying to find out if there was any possible way they could be reconciled, and eventually gave up in bafflement.

Fortunately, I have my personal research assistant (aka Mark) on hand to solve life's little mysteries. He looked into it today, and it turns out that Lewisham didn't have a mayoral election in 2008. The Conservative candidate's graph was, in fact, a visual representation of 'how Lewisham voted' in the London mayoral election. That's right, folks, in a totally different election. I'm sure the Boris/Ken showdown has some intangible relevance to my vote for Lewisham mayor that I have yet to fathom. That or Simon Nundy is a weaselly duplicitous git.

As it turns out, the Conservatives haven't been in clear second place in Lewisham in any election for some time. The Greens were second in the most recent local elections, and in the last general election, the Lib Dems came second in my constituency, and in the other Lewisham constituency there was very little to choose between the Tories and Lib Dems (both way behind Labour). So the only way for the Tory candidate to suggest that 'only the Conservatives can stop Labour on May 6' is to present us with results from an arbitrarily chosen election in which they did come second.

I know this isn't exactly an unusual tactic, but whenever I've seen someone do it before, they at least tend to own up to the fact that they're showing, say, local election results in a campaign leaflet for the general. This was specifically designed to make you think it was giving you information about the election you were, you know, actually voting in. And if it hadn't been for the Lib Dems' graph (which seems to have been broadly accurate), I might never have realised. In terms of sheer contempt for the electorate I really do think this one takes the biscuit.