so are you going to bother to vote on the electoral reform referendum?

[easternstar]

Or not?

To be honest I don't think either AV or first past the post is the best method.

When I did my government and politics A-level donkey's years ago I always thought that the fairest method was to have larger constituencies and make up the difference with a party list system based on percentages.

Missing, I really struggle to read your posts .

I think you're saying that AV is a step towards AV+? But where is the evidence for this? Has anyone said we'll be having another referendum on this in the future? Why not just go the whole hog now and save on countless referendums? It's not as though this vote is in response to some huge public demand for AV.

This vote is for AV, not AV+ and there is nothing at all to suggest that our political leaders have any intention of offering anything further. In fact, I'd go as far as to say the fact that they are not offering AV+ at this point is a fairly clear indication as to how far as they want to go towards proportionality.

Nimpy, I take your point and worry about that myself, which is why I think I will vote against, but haven't completely made my mind up.

It's really another reason to be pissed off at Clegg as far as I'm concerned. Another shitty compromise that no one wanted.

ravenAK - I'm also going with 'if some screaming right wing goon is agin it, I'm for it'.

Ditto.

I will be voting. I LOVE voting.

Keep things the way they are.

score 1

I've enjoyed reading the well-argued points for and against in between the sniping and insults on this thread. On balance I think I agree with GiddyPickle, whose not-at-all-dull posts do a pretty succinct job of explaining the downsides of AV.

My impression of AV is that it'll just get us ever deeper into government by wonks in grey suits, who calculate optimum policies based on mathematical modelling and have never held proper jobs in the real world. Fewer principles, more special advisers on secondment from advertising agencies, with focus groups and 'voter segmentation' charts. More tactical voting, not less. More wishy-washy content-free campaign slogans and fewer hard policies that might risk alienating some demographic or other.

FPTP is pretty unfair, but I don't see that AV is any fairer, and I absolutely don't buy the idea that it's a step toward PR. If we vote in AV we'll be voting for yet another layer of over-engineered complexity, another few thousand special advisers funded by the public purse, and precious little to show for our money and time. I'm voting no, I reckon.

"I absolutely don't buy the idea that it's a step toward PR"

totally agree.
anyone who believes it is is sadly kidding themselves

Look at the vote to join the Common Market, April 1975 - there has never been a single follow up. Anyone less than 53 years of age has never voted on this.

I seem to be a weird minority in that the party I most support is the conservatives, I don't like PR but I am voting yes to av. In fact, I have thought for many years that av would be a really good idea.

The thing that convinces me the most is the idea that under fptp you could have two very similar candidates and one very different one in an election and the different one would win with, say, 35% of the vote and the two similar candidates' vote would be split 33% and 34% whereas under av one of the similar candidates would win in the second round with 67% which seems a hell of a lot fairer to me.

Onthehugewhatever - I think you have misunderstood what has been happening to politics in the UK - the current system means that only 100,000 votes decide the government - ie only the marginal seats - that has resulted in ever more sophisticated modelling aimed at swaying ONLY this tiny amount of voters, and it is the current system of two large 'corporations' dominating politics and encouraging the 'career path' system you are saying is detrimental - and I agree with that. Career politicians need only to work in politics, and then get parachuted into a guaranteed safe seat in order to move further into power - and then the inevitable switch to their party allows them to move into ministerial positions.

The reason the establishment politicians are keen to preserve this system is precisely because it is fixed and predictible and provides an easy way to manage career politicians into safe seats.

Making more seats more marginal does upset this market fixing by the corporate-style two main parties, but it also means the messages sent out at election time will need to appeal more closely to the electorate as a whole rather than the 100,000 voters in key marginals - a constituency adjacent to mine is a key marginal, and they had 30-40 billboards erected by the conservatives in that area and they also drafted in core party supporters from the home counties (ie constituencies over 200 miles away) to do some of the canvassing and election work in order to sway the few swing voters they needed to make the case - the arguments from both parties in that constituency were very narrow because of that offer. AV will help that by making more constituencies 'winnable' and therefore worth working for.

Its disappointing that wubblyB has misunderstood my post to read that I am somehow advocating AV+ - I am not, just pointing out that the Jenkins commission did advocate an AV based system,just thought the change could go further. If the electorate thinks it should after seeing AV work, then it would need a referendum in order to be implemented - that is the pledge for all electoral reforms.

oh, in that case you might be interested in what this chap has to say - you might well change your mind

was to zminusz

I love the racist appeals in this campaign ('Only stupid foreigners use AV', 'it will make us like the third world' (obviously a dog-whistle appeal to the BNP and other nationalists!), 'some of those foreigners who use AV are black as well!' etc etc. just shameful. Next it will be 'if we had had AV in the war we would be speaking German! german I tell you!

I will be voting

Missingwhatever - thanks for the helpful explanation, but I know the current army of special advisers focuses its energy on the handful of swing voters in marginal seats at present. My point was that this kind of political calculation wouldn't go away under AV. If anything the army of wonks would just expand its segmentation and algorithms to a wider section of the populace. It doesn't bring us closer to any kind of politics of conviction, just expands the number of wonks whose job it is to strip all hard promises out of election manifestos and spout generalist pabulum and lifestyle 'messages' calibrated on the basis of their focus group data.

In addition, when you talk about how 'the messages sent out at election time will need to appeal more closely to the electorate as a whole rather than the 100,000 voters in key marginals' in practice what this would most likely mean is a new kind of dog-whistle politics, where parties would campaign to win votes from their core, but add in messages calculated to garner second-preference votes from the various loony marginals. What you get then is the same two-party system, but with the smaller parties having a decisive but unaccountable influence, like lobbyists.

It's also not clear to me at all that introducing AV will make any difference at all to the 'safe seat' politics we both dislike. Various posters have done a good job of explaining this further up the thread.

Finally, if 'establishment politicians' are keen to preserve FPTP, what the hell is Ed Milipede doing backing it? With a political father and various wonk roles in government from the age of 24 onward, he's about as establishment a politician as it's possible to be.

*I meant what the hell is Milipede doing backing AV

In that article there is fundamental misunderstanding of how preferences are counted, which is normal, but he also misses the point that the conservatives didn't have a majority in the last election - god knows how he has based his argument on an assumption that the conservatives are 'most likely' to have a majority of first preferences after the cuts have really ruined us and slowed investment and growth. I do think he is right in saying that the first preferences will give us an idea of how the country would have voted in first past the post if people could vote honestly for who they really want that is why AV is so important.

Who's mentioned stupid foreigners, missing? I can't see any mention of stupid foreigners on the thread at all.

Just say NO to AV. NO mass workers' party (that which the Labour party used to be back in the day) - the only real alternative to the capitalist cocks lording it over us - could come out of an AV system.

millipede is backing AV because he is a conviction politician - I thought you said you liked that! also AV referendum has been a labour manifesto item.

I like the politics of conviction, I just don't like Milipede's convictions.

Just say NO, kids.

Will there be a maybe option? Or 'it depends'?

Cat- I'm not sure, the whole article seems to be a scaremongering exercise trying to frighten us with the idea that the lib dems will end up doing well. I'm not so sure that that is true and I'm not even sure if its a bad thing if it does happen. I also don't see why elections would become disputed. What am I missing?

How many drone voters would there actually be? Are people really THAT gullible?