London, 21 November 2019 -Leading Labour campaigner, author and journalist, Owen Jones, joins Labour’s parliamentary candidate, Gordon Nardell QC and a throng of supporters later today in a bid to unseat the Tories in the General Election on Thursday 12 December.

Controversially, voters in the iconic seat of Cities of London and Westminster have been snowed with leaflets by the Liberal Democrats. These have included their notorious bar charts with dubious claims of being the only party able to defeat the Conservative candidate, Nickie Aiken, currently leader of Westminster City Council.

Gordon Nardell said:

“The Tories used to romp home in this seat.  But things changed in 2017 when Labour slashed the Tory majority and made the seat marginal.  The LibDems have always come a poor third here. They would need an extra 14,000 votes to take this seat.  That isn’t going to happen. Every vote for the LibDems is one less vote for the only party who can win this seat from the Tories.  The LibDems will never be forgiven if they hand the seat to a Tory MP who will support Boris Johnson’s disastrous hard Brexit.”

Since the election was called, Labour has mobilised hundreds of activists to knock on doors and talk to local voters in a determined bid to overturn the Tories 3,148 majority and help evict Prime Minister Boris Johnson from 10 Downing Street.  Labour was boosted last week when its candidate in a City Corporation byelection won the seat with 47% of the vote.

Tactical.Vote is encouraging voters to back Nardell. Meanwhile the local Labour Party has lodged a complaint with the Electoral Commission and Liberal Democrat Head Office, condemning the Liberal Democrats’ misleading statements about polling data in their election literature – statements that have continued even after the pollster Flavible, the source of the data, disowned the Liberal Democrats’ misuse of it. 

On background:

The Cities of London and Westminster Parliamentary constituency is one of the key marginal seats in December’s General Election.  The seat has been held by the Conservatives in every general election since it was created, with Labour coming second. The Liberal Democrats (and the former Liberal Party) have never come higher than third.  In the 2017 general election the seat became a marginal for the first time, with Labour coming a close second to the incumbent Conservative MP Mark Field. The votes were as follows:

Mark Field (Con) 18,005
Ibrahim Dogus (Lab) 14,857
Bridget Fox (LibDem) 4,370
Conservative majority: 3,148

The Liberal Democrats have been heavily criticised for distributing material in the constituency containing bar charts which misrepresent the main parties’ actual performance in Parliamentary elections: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/16/lib-dems-criticised-for-selective-use-of-polling-data-on-leaflets.  The LibDems claim to have based their material on data supplied by the polling company Flavible. But Flavible has criticised the misrepresentation of its data: see https://flavible.co.uk/statement.