David Macdonald says he is ‘doing the unprecedented’ to shore up the remain vote

The top Change UK choice in Scotland for this week’s European elections has written an open letter to his fellow party candidates urging them to consider following his lead and voting for the Liberal Democrats or other remain parties.

In a damaging blow for the fledgling party, David Macdonald announced last week that to avoid splitting the remain vote in Scotland, pro-remain voters who also opposed Scottish independence should instead back the Lib Dems.

Macdonald, an independent councillor in East Renfrewshire, said it was important to “shore up the remain vote”. He recommended that in other places where Change UK were polling at low levels, voters should switch to other remain parties, recommending that Green and Lib Dem voters could do the same in areas where their party was lagging.

In his open letter to the candidates, Macdonald, who has not spoken to the Lib Dems or any other parties, said that because it was too late to remove his name as a Change UK candidate he would be “doing the unprecedented, so far as I am led to believe, in a European election”.

He wrote: “I will be entering the polling booth and will vote for a party that my name is not attached to whilst at the same time seeing my name attached to a party I have now no intention of voting for.

“There comes a point in a political campaign where one realises that there are not enough resources, support or time to turn things around. The only thing I can do at this stage is to do the reasonable thing and to try to convince voters to not vote for Change UK and to now back the leading contender, here in Scotland, the Scottish Liberal Democrats.”

His comments came as Change UK’s leader, the South Cambridgeshire MP Heidi Allen, hinted that the party would have to change its name before the next election.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “If we’ve managed to bring together other MPs from the House of Commons, the format might be slightly different. But, whatever the brand new party looks like, at that point at the general election in South Cambridgeshire, absolutely, I’m not going back to the Conservatives.”

When asked why she was suggesting Change UK could change its name again, Allen replied: “Because I want us to get bigger. I want us to get more successful. I want us to have more MPs, more opportunities, to change politics in this country.”

Macdonald said other candidates for the party both in Scotland and elsewhere should consider voting for the Lib Dems: “Throughout the rest of the UK I am now asking each and every one of you to take a moment to reflect on the situation that you may also find yourselves in. I would ask that you give serious consideration to doing this too.

“We must now come together representing three political parties, the Green party, Change UK and the Liberal Democrats, and collectively discuss our realistic chances in each electoral region, collectively identify which parties are unlikely to win any seats with predicted vote shares of less than 8% and then to consider publicly supporting the strongest party in each electoral region with the highest predicted vote share and ultimately the most likely to win seats.”

This would, in practice, mainly mean abandoning Change UK. In current polling they are forecast to receive about 4% of the European elections vote nationally, against about 11% for the Greens and 17% or more for the Lib Dems.

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The other newly launched party, the Brexit party, is leading the polls and forecast to win 34% of the vote.

The time had come “to be sensible and logical about this”, Macdonald said: “We need to work together and do this for the common good. This is a crucial time in politics and it is imperative that all three parties now actively work together and assist one another so as to best ensure that we return the most pro-remain MEPs to the European parliament as possible.”

He added: “Let us all now unite to remain.”

Change UK, which launched amid some fanfare in February as a group of pro-remain Labour and Conservative MPs and split to form what was initially called the Independent Group, has struggled recently in polls.

Polling for a hypothetical general election puts the party even lower than in the European elections, at about 2% of the total, again below the Greens and Lib Dems.