…look like they’re going to be the biggest load of old toss in four decades.

But we can stop that, ladies and gentlemen.

And the tactic is hardly new, I’m sure it’s been used in many an election prior to now.

It’s just that, when we need it, we seem to forget about it.  I know I did, until I was reminded of it by a friend on Facebook.

It’s called Tactical Voting.

Current polls (remember these fluctuate hour by hour), show that YouGov predicted a whopping 27% share of the UK vote for Nigel Farage and his new party, The Brexit Party.  That’s extraordinary for a party that launched just a couple of weeks ago.  And it shows how quickly people can unite behind a party that seems to speak immediately and clearly to their core values, even if those core values are fundamentally xenophobic, neo-fascist and whatever other professorial-sounding term can be applied to these people who are so short-sighted that they cannot seem to think beyond their own island mentality – all this self-governing, sovereign state, independent nation shit.

Twenty-seven percent – that’s extraordinary.  That’s put the 100-year-old Labour Party into second place and the 200-year-old Tories into third – possibly even fourth, behind the Green Party, depending upon the exact outcome, of course.  That’s over a quarter of the vote for one country.

This blog is basically a plug for this site: https://www.remainvoter.com/.

This web site tells you why tactical voting is important, both mathematically and logically, and tells you whom you might like to consider voting for, based upon the area that you live in.

That is presuming, of course, that you voted to Remain, as I did, in the 2016 Referendum, or have changed your position (as many hundreds of thousands have, indeed there are some, to give a balanced and fair analysis, who have gone the Other Way) since the Referendum.

People say to me, what do you prefer, feet & inches or metres & centimeters; I say, feet & inches, because that’s what I grew up with.  Ha!  They say, but you still voted to Remain, and the Tories have kept us out of the single currency, out of km/h over mp/h, etc. etc.  Yes, they have, but we’re still an EU state – we’ve had a soft Brexit since 1993, and here are a so-called ‘majority’ of Leavers wanting to kick all that away, tear up those agreements, and instead of telling the EU to fuck off, we tell them to fuck right off instead, and to another planet as well.

If you are reading this and you voted Leave, I would encourage you to change your position; but the whole point of a democracy, which I hold dear above all else, is that you are freely entitled to vote as you please.  The most important thing is to vote.  Just vote.

I hold democracy dear, yet at the same time I join the calls for a Second Referendum.  I must admit, after the result was announced, and Remain lost, Cameron went, I thought that a second referendum was undemocratic; we should not go down that road.  But, the more information that came out about the Referendum, the more I thought that the whole thing was mismanaged from the start.  It was, if you like, undemocratically organised.  Just as a for example: I thought a simple 50-50 split of the vote was far too lenient for a vote as fundamentally important to the people of Britain such as this one.  It had to be at least a two-thirds majority one way or the other for it to carry any authority with Parliament, who could then justifiably act ‘on behalf of the people of Britain.’  Every time I hear Theresa May say that she is carrying out the wishes of the people of Britain, I want to vomit.  No, she is carrying out the wishes of a little over half of the people of Britain, who are currently desperately clinging on to the democratic card because they can see their beloved Brexit running down the plug hole of this dirty sink we call politics.

I can admit that Leave won by a simple majority, I accept that, but at 1.9% difference, it’s not enough; not enough for it to be used as ‘the wishes of the country’ or of ‘the people of Britain.’

So, to make the vote democratic, it needs to be predetermined as a necessary two-thirds (or some other figure clearly in the majority) figure one way or the other to be a clear win.  If Leave won that, I would be deeply unhappy about it, but I would accept it and that would be that, except that I would continue to campaign for Britain to rejoin the EU, if first of all they will have us, and second if we could get that majority to swing the other way.  That, my friends, is democracy.  It was not democratic for Mr Cameron to hold a Referendum and not have a plan for what to do if the ‘majority’ voted to Leave.  That’s what happened, and no-one was prepared for it; you’ve ended up with three years of chaos, with nobody truly getting their way at all.  Is that what you Leavers voted for?  Of course not!

For a party to have a clear majority in Parliament, they cannot simply have more seats than the nearest opposition.  No, sir.  They have to have more seats than the rest of the parties combined, so that they can act like a government and push through their policies in the form of Bills, etc.  That’s called democracy, because it was predetermined before any election.  We understand that that is what we need to do.  Why not, then, for a Referendum?  Oh, no, because that would be undemocratic; a Remain Prime Minister held a referendum with all the arrogance of a dictator, suddenly finding he lost it (the referendum, that is), and not having any idea what to do.

If you want to discuss democracy, I think you have to have those thoughts in mind, and I’ll happily discuss it with you.  Nigel Farage tried to argue the democracy card on The Andrew Marr Show a couple of weeks back, forgetting (and not reminded by Marr) that, in June 2016, he argued that, if Leave were to lose by, say, 49% to 51, Leave would not get a recommendation for a Second Referendum agreed by Parliament.  No sign of “Of course not, it would be an affront to democracy!”, but “well, we could do, but Parliament would never agree to it anyway.”  That’s Nigel Farage for you, a proven liar and one whom you expect to lead your Leave charge for you.

So, please, consider tactical voting; it is the one way that we have – in the context of the EU elections, at least – to kick Farage and all who sail in his Brexit ship with him into touch.  I’m not a violent person; Farage must be stopped peacefully and democratically, but he has hinted at violent protest should Leave’s No-Deal Brexit desire not get through.  I would hope that, should Remain lose and we do end up leaving the EU, our fellow Remainers do not go down the road to violence just the same.  Just vote, and vote tactically, following the best advice that you can from the site that I linked to above.  Try, as much as possible, to deny Farage the mandate from the UK to crow about democracy, immigration and all his other favourite topics.  Because, I’m sorry, whatever a Leave voter tells you, that’s what it is essentially about, otherwise why would an entire nation become so het up about lines on a map and trade deals?  That’s not democracy.

Thank you for reading this far.  If you did, please type “Olivia Newton-John has the voice of an angel!” in the comments, just for my statistics you understand, so I can see if this style of rant is working for the reader. x