Remain tactical voting in NW: vote Green or Lib Dem

The tl;dr version of this post is:

• If you want to vote Lib Dem, do that.
• If you want to vote Green, do that.
• If you want to vote Change UK, don’t. Instead vote Green or (if you can’t stomach them) Lib Dem.
• If you are pro-Remain and want to vote Labour, consider voting Green or Lib Dem instead.
• If you are pro-Brexit, spoil your ballot. None of the parties can give you the hard Brexit you know we all need. F*ck the system!

(This post assumes that you’re a voter in the North West England electoral district for the European Parliament elections on 23rd May 2019, and that your priority is to send the strongest possible pro-Remain signal, understood as electing the most MEPs for unambiguously pro-Remain parties. If you don’t want this, then this post is not for you.)

Remain United is recommending that all Remainers in England vote Lib Dem. The idea behind this is that everyone should simply vote for the predicted largest pro-Remain party in each region. This, however, is a bad strategy because it doesn’t take into account the electoral system. In an ideal world where all Remainers voted tactically for the predicted largest pro-Remain party, it would work fine. But this won’t happen, and sub-optimal tactical voting could seriously screw things up. In districts with several seats, as Heinz Brandenburg explains:

If, for example, tactical voting pushes one pro-Remain party close to 15% but reduces the two others to 5 or 6%, the bigger party will not have enough to win multiple seats ... while the others could both fail to win a single seat. That could reduce the pro-Remain parties to a single seat where three could have been won.

Indeed, Remain United’s own projections show that if 50% of all Remain voters in the North West vote in the way they suggest (Lib Dem), the distribution of seats would not change: 4 for Labour, 2 for the Brexit Party, 1 each for the Tories and Lib Dems.

It’s worse than that, in fact. In what follows I use the ComRes/Electoral Calculus estimates (also used by Remain United):

• Conservatives: 12%
• Labour: 36%
• Liberal Democrats: 10%
• Change UK: 8%
• Green Party: 7%
• Brexit Party: 24%
• Other: 3%

I assume that this is a good model in what follows. Using the d’Hondt method, the seats would be assigned as follows:

• 1. Lab
• 2. Brex
• 3. Lab
• 4=? Lab/Brex/Con (it's not possible to be more precise)
• 7. Lib Dem
• 8. Lab

All else being equal, in order for the Lib Dems to get 2 seats rather than 1 by soaking up votes from Change UK and the Greens, they’d have to get 18-19% of the 25% Remain party voters, virtually doubling their vote share. Realistically that won’t happen; and it isn’t possible for them to get 3 seats that way. The most that shuffling the Remain votes around like this can achieve is to win 2 seats, the second of which would be at Labour’s expense.

There is another way, however. The question to ask is: Starting from the projections, what is the minimal change that would need to be made in order to get 2 pro-Remain seats? The obvious answer is that Change UK are sitting on 8%, just below the 9-10% threshold they’d need to nab a seat from Labour. If they could grab another 1-2% from the Greens’ share, they could get that seat.

As a tactical voting recommendation, that’s probably not going to fly, however. A recent YouGov poll suggested that, of the three pro-Remain parties, Green voters are by far the least likely to compromise by voting for one of the others (and congrats if you’re a principled Green voter and have read this far). Change UK voters, on the other hand, are much happier to vote tactically, at least insofar as tactical voting is comparable to an anti-Brexit electoral pact. And in this connection it’s worth mentioning that the Greens have an established supporter base in the North West, and came very close to getting a seat in 2014.

The estimate puts the Greens on 7%, so if they can get another 2-3% from Change UK voters - or from Labour Remainers, who ought also to be shiftable - they could get a seat. To me, that seems the most achievable goal of the three.

It’s worth emphasizing, though, that all these scenarios involve the second Remain seat being pinched from Labour, not the Tories or the Brexit Party, who are the real hard Brexit flag-flyers. So at the end of the day it might not be worth it, depending on how you rank your personal principles. It’s also important that Lib Dems do get the seat they’re estimated to get, and that in itself is close. You wouldn’t have to massage the figures much for the Lib Dems to end up with no seats and the Brexit Party to pick up a third one (-2% Lib Dem, +2% Brexit Party would do it). So it’d be irresponsible to advise anyone who’s planning to vote Lib Dem to change their vote.

A special place in hell for who?

European Council president Donald Tusk has been getting a lot of stick from Brexiteers recently for this comment:

I've been wondering what that special place in hell looks like, for those who promoted #Brexit, without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.

— Donald Tusk (@eucopresident) February 6, 2019

Some on the Leave side have reacted angrily. Some on the Remain side have taken this reaction as a sign that they had no plan to begin with. For example:

He was only talking about the ones with no plan. Why are they all taking it so personally?

— James O'Brien (@mrjamesob) February 6, 2019

James O'Brien is right about many things, but I don't think he's right about this. The crucial question is whether Tusk is describing all Brexit-promoters as having no plan (which is how I read it), or pointing only to those Brexit-promoters who had no plan (which is how James O'Brien read it). That's a linguistic question, and it has to do with how the prepositional phrase (PP) "without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely" is to be interpreted.

PPs within noun phrases can be interpreted in two different ways, just like relative clauses. They can be either restrictive or non-restrictive. Restrictive PPs pick out a particular subset of the people (or things) described by the unmodified noun phrase. Non-restrictive PPs add extra information about the people described by the unmodified noun phrase. Compare the following examples:

1. The Brexiteers, who had no plan, are going to hell. (non-restrictive)
2. The Brexiteers who had no plan are going to hell. (restrictive)
3. The Brexiteers, with no plan, are going to hell. (non-restrictive)
4. The Brexiteers with no plan are going to hell. (restrictive)

The first two examples involve relative clauses, and the last two involve PPs. In both cases it's the commas that make all the difference, at least if your intuitions are anything like mine. In the restrictive (2) and (4), only those Brexiteers who didn't have a plan are going to hell. In the non-restrictive (1) and (3), on the other hand, all the Brexiteers are going to hell, and in addition they're all described as not having a plan.

Looking again at Tusk's tweet, he used a comma, which suggests to me that the intended reading was the non-restrictive one. We can't be sure that was what he intended, of course: punctuation is one indicator, but it's not a particularly reliable guide to anything, especially on Twitter. But in the video version there's a pause, which also suggests a non-restrictive interpretation.

What's particularly interesting is that Tusk didn't actually assert that all Brexiteers had no plan, even under the non-restrictive reading. Non-restrictive modification is tricky like that: the information introduced by the non-restrictive phrase is backgrounded, which is one of the things that makes them particularly annoying to argue against.

Anyway, it's pretty clear that the point is mainly an academic one, since no one actually did have a plan for Brexit, either on the Leave or the Remain side (unless you count the weirdos and supervillains who were gunning for a no-deal Brexit all along; and even that arguably counts as not having a plan how to carry it out safely). But the broader point is that syntax and semantics are interesting! And hopefully I'll see you in that special place in hell that's reserved for people who turn serious political issues into fun linguistics problems. :)