Forget about tactical voting and follow your heart in General Election - Yorkshire Post letters

From: Natalie Bennett, Green peer and former Green Party leader, Sheffield.
Will you be voting tactially? Photo: Rui Vieira/PA WireWill you be voting tactially? Photo: Rui Vieira/PA Wire
Will you be voting tactially? Photo: Rui Vieira/PA Wire

Gina Miller offers on your pages some advice on tactical voting (The Yorkshire Post, November 27). In response, I’d like to offer the cautionary tale of 2017.

In that election, the Electoral Reform Society calculated that 25 per cent of voters made a tactical choice. But of course the result was very different to the polls projected, so most of them didn’t get the impact with their vote they were hoping for.

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The pollsters are even more confused this time, not even pretending any certainty about what is going to happen.

And this is going to be very much a seat-by-seat election, with vastly different results in apparently similar seats. So what is a voter to do?

Well, my proposal is that there’s one approach that will ensure you can feel good walking out of the polling station and know on December 13 that the nation understands what you think. That is to vote for what you believe in, the party who best represents your views and the candidate you are most comfortable with.

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That won’t be a mistake, won’t be misinterpreted. This is the climate election. If we are to get on the path that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says is essential, this Parliament has to act.

It is also, of course, a decisive Brexit election. If you understand this is a climate emergency, if you want to democratically stop the Brexit chaos by giving the people the final say (and back a party that will campaign for remain in that referendum), then Green is the way to vote.

Every Green vote will increase the impact of the Green MPs in parliament (through short money) and will increase the media coverage Green Party representatives get.

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It will push other parties in the direction of our policies, as the 1.1 million votes we won in 2015 did.

It will also be a powerful argument for finally getting rid of this antiquated, broken, failed political system – to get a democratically elected House of Commons and Lords where, as the Make Votes Matter campaign says, the number of seats matches the number of votes.