Election: How Stupid Do MPs Think We Are?

If you’ve actually looked at some of the election trail tripe that’s come through your letterbox in the last few weeks, you might have noticed a strange – and insulting – discrepancy. MPs have turned to the old-fashioned bar chart to manipulate and lie to voters.

Lib Dems

Take a look at Haringey’s Lib Dem leaflet (left) courtesy of Gavin Freeguard, head of data & transparency at the Institute for Government. He clocked that Dawn Barnes’s Abbott-worthy graph seems to think 51% and 32% are mere millimetres from each other while 9% is drastically different.

It doesn’t take long to realise there’s a 19% gap between Labour and the Lib Dems, and 23% between the Lib Dems and Tories. That is a mere 4% difference that’s been made to look five times as large to suit the Liberal Democrat agenda.

The Lib Dems struck again in Redcar when Labour candidate Anna Turley noticed this interesting bar chart (left). The amber party did indeed come second to Labour in the last election but notice they haven’t added in the percentages.

Labour won 43.9% of the votes while the Lib Dems got just 18.5%

Lib Dems

The Lib Dems are not the only guilty party. The two larger parties have also indulged in this ridiculous travesty.

Edinburgh has seen a dodgy bar chart bonanza. Labour’s South Edinburgh graph looks almost accurate but Twitter users saw through the numbers.

One user combined the Green, Lib Dem and SNP bars (left), which should total 20,569 – more than Labour’s 19,293 – but it didn’t come close to reaching the red bar.

The Tories have tried to fool nearby Edinburgh South West voters into believing that a 7.3% gap is more than twice the size of an 8.8% one.

SNP

The crown goes to the Stirling Conservatives. Their leaflet shows an extraordinary divide where a 19.7% gap between SNP and the Tories is represented as half the size of a 7.9% gap. Only Diane Abbott’s number-crunching skills could support that conclusion.

Tactics like these show how stupid political parties think their constituents are.

That breath-taking level of cynicism and deliberate misrepresentation should be a warning about everything else these candidates are asking us to believe.

Labour

That is a much larger gap than the chart suggests but the real manipulation concerns UKIP. The purple party came third but only by 0.1%.

If represented correctly you wouldn’t be able to see the difference between the Lib Dem and UKIP results but the Lib Dems have massively misrepresented the truth and declare that UKIP cannot win this constituency.

 

Don’t rely on dishonest candidates to give you the facts about the political terrain in your constituency. You can find the truth about your constituency’s 2015 vote here.  Fight back by having your voice heard on June 8.

 

 

 

by Jo Davey

The post Election: How Stupid Do MPs Think We Are? appeared first on Felix Magazine.