Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy yesterday signalled his support for tactical voting with Labour to ensure there was no return to power by the Tories at the next General Election.
He warned a Conservative government led by William Hague would be a "disaster" for Britain, and gave his blessing to voters in marginal Tory-held constituencies uniting behind the candidate of one party or the other to oust the sitting MP.
He said voters would look at the results in their constituencies at the last election when they decided who to support.
He tacitly acknowledged that both the Liberal Democrats and Labour would concentrate their campaigning efforts on winning seats where they finished a strong second, leaving the other party a relatively clear run elsewhere.
"What is quite clear is that all three parties will have their target seats at the next election and their activists will, understandably, tend to give their attention to that," he said in a BBC interview.
He stressed that the Liberal Democrats would fight the election as an independent force, while maintaining their "constructive oppositionist" stance towards Labour.
Anne Begg, Labour MP for Aberdeen South, warned that there was a danger of the "wrong" candidate being elected if voters became confused about how they should cast their vote.
But Denis MacShane, Labour MP for Rotherham and a parliamentary private secretary at the Foreign Office, has published a list of 127 Tory seats which could fall to Labour or the Liberal Democrats if their supporters united behind the party in second place.
In his New Year message, Mr Kennedy warned that voters were being left "absolutely cold" by the "frenzy of speculation and gossip" over the election date and called for the establishment of fixed term parliaments.
"Endless point-scoring and yah-booing across the floor of the House of Commons . . . the Government thinking of nothing except re-election . . . the country's real underlying problems put on hold - people are fed up with politics and fed up with politicians," he said.
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