The Green Party is naive, statist and, judging by The Times reports of Read’s views on terrorists and terrorism, positively dangerous.

This is from your blog:

“Green support peaked strongly in their emerging stronghold of Norwich, where the Greens came out on top with about 25% of the vote, a tremendous achievement and one which shows that the Green Party and Dr Read will be a major force in the forthcoming coming by-election.”

But these figures are from 9 Norwich South wards and 4 in the North. Is proves nothing in relation to Norwich North as if you bas it on the last local elections the Greens came 4th.

The Department of the Environment, headed by a Green Party minister announced that the M3 road project, routed through the historic area of the Hill of Tara, would go ahead after all.

During the election the Green Party was ardently demanding the complete abolition of the incinerator project; however, once in office the Greens took a somewhat different approach to the issue of incineration.

You didn’t look very hard then.

I would refer you to the ‘Green View Election Special’ from Holywell Ward in April 2008 and the angled pie chart at the bottom right of the front page.

Isn’t this Rupert Read the same Rupert Read who tried to disrupt a Lib Dem event in Norwich at the last general election ? Clearly Rupert Read thinks that gatecrashing and disrupting events in fair game. Hypocrisy ? Well I think so.

I could call him all sorts of names if I want to resort to his “Fib” level of argument, but like the lies told by Greens on doorsteps in campaigns in Norwich, I think we all have to accept that in elections people use the messages that best win them votes. For right and for wrong.

Likewise though, people in glass houses shouldn’t thrown stones, even if they are Green houses.

Mr Read might like to label all UKIP people as not caring for the environment, however, electing a second UKIP MEP in the East elected a famer to the EU parliament, which is perhaps no bad thing. I’ve crossed paths with the Green Mr Read and the UKIP Mr Agnew (the new MEP), and I know which one I would prefer to represent Norfolk and the East in parliament .

We should all remember though that when it comes to Europe, the Greens are clearly closer to UKIP than they are to the Lib Dems.

re. Oxford East constituency/East Oxford division. I understand the distinction.

re. Oxford Green leaflets – you are missing my point – the Greens use pie charts which they design in such a way as to make the Green share look larger than it is – the figures are right but the size is distorted to make their position appear stronger than it is – exactly the point you make about the Lib Dems not using exactly the right sized bars in their bar charts.

I think you are wrong on this. A large proportion of Tory supporters oppose tuition fees and opposed the invasion of Iraq, as do a large proportion of Green supporters. They are not left/right issues. By promoting their position on these issues the Lib Dems can appeal to both Green and Tory supporters.

Rather than expecting me to produce leaflets I couldn’t have been expected to keep, perhaps you should ask your colleagues in Headington Hill and Northway, Oxford, what they think. Is my memory at fault? Or is my recollection correct? I am, as I say, happy to stand corrected.

I am not obsessed with bar charts. I got into a discussion about them because some Lib Dem commenters on this thread refused to accept the integrity of what I initially said about Rupert’s post striking a chord without further explanation (which is reasonable to expect). I do not, in general, have an axe to grind against the LIb Dems, and while you feel able to make light of my ‘memory’, I can assure that what I have said is in earnest. I think you would do well to treat it as such, rather than dimissing what I have said as mere ‘innuendo’.

You are asking me to condemn the Oxford East Lib Dems on the basis of some half-remembered leaflet you saw a month ago. I already stated above that there was a line that, if crossed, would result in me condemning it. I asked you if this was the case. Instead of answering my question you just continued putting out this vague innuendo-laden stuff (”from memory”, yeah, I get that).

The bottom line is, if the literature attempted to pass off GE data as council data (either by stating it was or not stating what it actually was) or if the leaflet stated that figures show that X or Y “can’t win here” in a place where they were in the running, then I would happily condemn it. But you have been asked to confirm if this was the case and have notably sidestepped the issue.

In all other cases, the electorate is clever enough to work it out themselves. The idea that the average voter is an empty vessel which uncritically assumes that any bar chart they see applies wholly to whatever election happens to be coming up is frankly insulting.

As for criticising Lib Dem campaign techniques, I’m not exactly known for keeping my light under a bushel. But feel free to dismiss me as a toadying loyallist on the basis that I don’t share your curious obsession with bar charts. Personally, I happen to think the party has bigger things to sort out, but since they are on techniques which all the parties practice these days to some extent, I can see why you might prefer to focus on the peripheral.

I understand that any party sees local elections as integrated with its Parliamenray campaigns. But what you are in effect saying – and I wondered how long it would take for this to be made explicit – is that it is justifiable to present highly misleading information in the context of a local election in order to reinforce a ’squeeze message’ for a forthcoming Parliamentary election.

So here we are in Parliamentary constituency X where, at the last general election, Labour got (say) 40%, Lib Dems 37% and Tories got 10% (these are not the figures for Oxford East, but close enough for purposes of illustrating the general point). And here we are in council ward Y where, at the last ward election the split was (say) Labour 38%, Lib Dems 30% and Tories 35% – or, alternatively, imagine the split is Lib Dems 38%, Labour 36% and Tories 30%.

Now imagine the Lib Dems put out a leaflet in the council ward election citing the figures for the Parliamentary election. The leaflet includes the bar chart and is topped with a message like ‘Tories can’t win here’ or ‘It’s a two horse race’ or ‘Only the Lib Dems can beat Labour here’.

Yes, this reinforces the ’squeeze message’ for the Parliamenray election that is around the corner.But it also, quite obviously, misleads voters as to the relative state of the parties in the particular council ward election the leaflet is addressed to. THIS is what the LIb Dems have been doing in my council ward in Oxford (if memory serves – all this is from memory, and I stand to be corrected).

So, James, the logic of your position is: ‘Its OK to mislead voters in local elections for the greater good of shaping opinion ahead of a Parliamentary election.’

It does not follow from what I have said, nor have I said, that it is always wrong to use data from one election context to inform voters of how parties are likely to stand in another election context. Its all a question of what the comparison is, and how relevant it is.

For example, if the Greens can identify party shares of the vote in the European elections in the area bounded by the Oxford East constituency, then I think it would be fair game for them to draw voters’ attention to this in a Parliamentary campaign in Oxford East, just as it would be fair game for the Lib Dems to draw attention to party vote shares in Oxford East at the last Parliamentary election. In both cases, like is being compared with like insofar as the elections cover the same territory. The problem with what you are endorsing is that (a) the comparisons are being made across distinct territories, and (b) there is available data to show that the vote distribution in the two territories is quite different. This really does put the exercise on the same level as publishing a bar chart to Grimsby voters in a Parliamentary election based on voting shares at the last Parliamentary election in Coventry.

If other parties do this, then they stand equally condemned. If Labour puts out leaflets with this kind of trickery I shall refuse to deliver them and voice criticism of the trickery within the party. I am willing to face up to morally questionable tactics by my party and criticise them when they arise. Are you? Readers will judge for themselves.

I presume that you will be the first in line to denounce Labour if they ever quote the “irrelevant and misleading” county council election results in the run up to the next General Election?

No bar chart ever changed the course of an election campaign. The only thing they can do is reinforce a broader campaign that carries with it a sense of momentum.

Putting out a single leaflet in a campaign with a misleading bar chart on it won’t achieve anything. It won’t fool anyone into voting for you and you’d be better off putting something else in its place. Putting out 20 leaflets is a very different matter, but it can’t magic you votes in places where you have no support and your squeeze message doesn’t ring true. I can cite you countless by-elections where this has been the case.

This may startle some Green and Labour supporters, but the Lib Dems generally don’t put out 20 leaflets (or even 4) in constituencies where they don’t have any residual support. And where we do have residual support, the bar charts tend to be accurate.

The bar chart itself is just the tip of the iceberg. Experienced Lib Dem campaigners understand this, which is why they tend to fail to get excited by all this nowtrage.

No, they very obviously were, and if they weren’t I’d want to know why.

Successful General Election campaigns are typically fought for 3-4 year periods. You don’t just start fighting it a month before polling day. Everything up until that point is dedicated to reinforcing the tactical squeeze message.

Are you saying that they put out leaflets passing off the GE figures as county council figures? Are you saying they explicitly stated that the Tories or Greens can’t win in X division because they are in third place in divisions where they weren’t? I will happily denounce any Lib Dem campaign that did but thus far you haven’t made this claim.

What you are saying is that the Lib Dems persisted in putting out a broader squeeze message during the county elections. That is fair enough if your party has a broader objective in mind. In the case of Oxford East this is clearly the case.

What is bizarre is that you claim this is misleading whilst gloating over the fact that we didn’t do particularly well in Oxfordshire this year. Clearly the public in Oxon are better at exercising their own judgement than you give them credit for.

Across the country, perhaps, but in Oxford East I think it’s fair to say they’re criticisms from the left (or at least from people who think they’re on the left).

Liberal Neil says:

‘Stuart@150 – but the Lib Dems are fighting a parliamentary election. They have been since they got so close in 2005. And, in any event, the County Council seat you live in was between the Lib Dems and Labour – in fact it split one seat each, with the Tories third again.’

First of all, the County Council seat was NOT ‘between the Lib Dems and Labour’. Yes, the Lib Dems and Labour each got one of the two seats, but the two Tory candidates were not all that far behind. The LIb Dem leaflets, using the bar charts described in my earlier posts, used irrelevant date to give the misleading impression that the Tories were far less in contention than they actually were.

Second, the Lib Dems WILL BE fighting a Parlimanetary election sometime in the next 12 months. They were obviously not fighting a Parliamentary election in the city and county council elections this year. The use of bar charts pertaining to the Parliamentary constituency to give an impression of the distribution of support in a city or county councils each of which is much smaller than the Parliamentary constituency, and which has a very different distribution of party support to the Parliamentary constitutency as a whole, is what is misleading. If you are HONESTLY trying to inform voters in a given election about the likely relative state of party support in THAT election, then your data should be specific to the electoral constituency in question. Giving a snapshot of party support for council ward X on the basis of data for parliamentary constituency Y, where it is clear that the distribution of support in X is different from that in Y, is pretty obviously misleading. It is no less misleading than if a party were to produce a bar chart showing relative support for parties in Grimsby when the election is in Coventry.

Once again, I am astonished that I have to spell this out. When I started commenting on this thread I expected the Lib Dem response to be on the lines of: ‘Yeah, sometimes we do this, and it is dodgy. Sorry. We’ll try harder.’ Some early responses in the thread were in this vein. But latterly the response – of James Graham and Liberal Neil – seems to be to deny that anything wrong is being done. IThe thread is an interesting exercise in seeing how people who are good-natured and well-meaning can nevertheless be utterly self-deceiving about the moral questionableness of their electoral tactics.

From within the Labour party perhaps, but they are issues which people from across the political spectrum oppose, and it’s hard to argue from their voting tendencies that it is a left-wing criticism is borne out.

Stop navel-gazing.

The fact is, and I said this beforehand, everybody went round saying “vote for us to defeat the BNP”. Hindsight shows us who was right in each region (http://joeotten.blogspot.com/2009/06/what-you-should-have-voted-to-keep-bnp.html) but it is beyond the faintest shred of credibility to claim that you knew all along who it would be, and that it was the greens (which it wasn’t, anywhere).

You suggest that we should be supportive of your efforts, that we’re all progressives here. Perhaps. Perhaps under a preferential voting system it would be more feasible. And perhaps by the same token you should be supportive of our efforts. A better kind of politics, right? It might work. But it is hypocritical to damn us for not leaping first.

And anyway who says the Greens are progressive? Anti-trade, anti-science, Luddite. Yes I am saying the Luddites were wrong – I don’t begrudge them trying to defend their livelihoods, but on balance technology to improve productivity is a good thing. Greens still trumpet their new deal as delivering the most jobs (i.e. the lowest productivity) for the useful work achieved.

Responses to Liberal Neil:
Post 152 Liberal Neil: ““Ironically, the Greens are probably now better placed than the Lib Dems to be the main challengers to Labour in Oxford East” From their base of 4% last time? Don’t make me laugh!”
There is perhaps a confusion here. Don Paskini [former Labour Councillor] is talking about the Oxford East constituency. But Oxford East is also the name of the County Council Division that the Greens were campaigning in. The Green Party made it perfectly clear that the above statement or anything like it in our literature referred to the County election!

Post 155 Liberal Neil: “As to you list of things the Greens apparently don’t do, ask your Green friends in Oxford to show you their leaflets containing pie charts angled to make the Green share appear to much larger than it actually is.”
Actually the charts the Oxford Greens used were from the County Council official results for the last County elections (unlike the LibDem charts which all related to the last General Election! Since we were campaigning in the County elections, the previous County result was the honest result to use (especially as the County area is different to the Parliamentary Constituency). So Liberal Neil’s allegation is baseless.

Finally, I’d like to point out that the claims made in my LibCon piece of last year http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2008/11/24/the-case-for-supporting-greens-at-euro-elections/ have been decisively vindicated by the election results on June 4. What I argued last year was that in Regions such as NW and Eastern, the last seat would probably come down to Tories/UKIP/BNP vs Greens. This is precisely what happened. In Eastern, the LibDem misrepresentations may have been what let in a second UKIP climate-denying anti-immigrant do-nothing MEP, rather than myself. In NW, Labour (and LibDem) misrepresentations probably did let in the BNP Leader.

It would be nice if some of the commenters here admitted this, and maybe even showed a little sign of sorrow about it. Isn’t that what LibCon is supposed to be about, us working together to defeat the reactionaries? The Euro-elections were a great opportunity for this. A real shame, in my view, that dirty campaigning and systematic misrepresentation of the electoral arithmetic and/or narrow Party selfishness and/or a strong wish to strangle the Green Party (evident in some of the comments above, such as in the words of the ever-delightful Mr. Otten) meant that the opportunity was decisively and unpleasantly missed.