The Conservative Party may have ended up with 91 extra MPs if Brits had not turned to tactical voting in the general election, according to a report.
Pro-EU campaign group, Best for Britain, launched a tactical voting website called GetVoting.org shortly before the electorate hit the ballot box on July 4, in an effort to discourage voters from backing the Conservatives (or Reform UK).
And, according to their own report into their performance, it made quite a difference.
Best for Britain says 17% of all Brits voted tactically, which works out to around five million people – and supposedly 21 constituencies were influenced by GetVoting.org in defeating the Tories.
The group claims it recorded 6.15 million hits on the website and reached five million people via advertising.
Tactical voting also supposedly gave Labour 62 more MPs and the Liberal Democrats 29 more MPs, as their parties managed to oust a total of 91 Conservatives from various constituencies.
According to the researchers’ claims, big Conservative names like ex-PM Liz Truss as well as former ministers Grant Shapps and Jacob Rees-Mogg could have ended up keeping their seats.
The report also claims there were no seats where an incorrect tactical voting recommendation led to a Tory or Reform UK candidate winning – but there were six seats where one opposition party was recommended by Best for Britain, and a different party won.
There is also no denying this year’s election completely transformed parliament.
Labour ended up with 412 MPs (including the speaker, and before any MPs were suspended) in a landslide victory for Keir Starmer, just seven seats shy of Tony Blair’s historic win in 1997.
Meanwhile, the Tories took home only 121 MPs, the lowest in the party’s history, suffering a net loss of 251 seats.
Their second-worst ever result was recorded in 1906, when the Conservatives took home 156 seats.
The Liberal Democrats, on the other hand, secured a record-breaking total of 72 MPs after ousting plenty of Tories from their previously safe seats.
And, despite Best for Britain’s efforts to deter voters away from eurosceptic parties, the right-wing party Reform UK secured five seats, having had just one in the last parliament after Lee Anderson defected from the Tories.
Best for Britain’s director of operations and strategy, Cary Mitchell, said: This report is about our impact at this election, but we did none of this just for the satisfaction of winning. We now have a Parliament with more pro-European MPs than ever and a new UK government set on ending the chaos of the past few years.
“Our greatest impact is yet to come as we look to work with the new UK government and new MPs across Parliament to fix the problems Britain faces after Brexit.”
He added: “Tactical voting got us this far.
“Our next step is getting the new UK government to back the fixes to the problems Britain faces after Brexit.”