Dave's Top Tips for the Nay-sayers

The debate is on. The big guns have begun pounding as our Prime Minister sets out the real reasons to say No in the electoral reform referendum.

He kept it simple and clear sticking to three major themes, clever strategy from someone who thinks we're all too thick to understand AV anyway.

Certified sane by doctors

Propping up his chart at number three is the fact that only Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Australia use the system, so if nobody uses it it must be bad eh?

Oh and Ireland use it too to elect their President, and Northern Ireland for the assembly, and the Scottish assembly. Yes and the London Mayor of course. Apparently the President of India's elected this way too. And the House of Lords and New Zealand city mayors. And a lot of private elections such as leaders of Labour, Liberal Democrats and Conservatives (to some extent). Of course Big Brother and the X-factor use a longer drawn out version to get nutcases to dial 0898 numbers and waste their incapacity benefit with BT.

So more than three sunny paradises then, some right shit-holes use it too.

In second place of David's big reasons to vote no is the fact that BNP hooligans get two, three or four votes whereas your honest to goodness taxpayers only get one go. This is crap as I mentioned before. AV doesn't benefit racists, that's why the BNP supports the No to AV campaign.

And at Tip-top top of the the shot number one in the hit parade is the thought that AV allows candidates who come third to end up winning. Not really Dave, the winner ends up winning. That's why they're called the winner. What you mean is that some candidates are so like Marmite that the majority of the constituents will never support them, whereas other candidates are more like cheese & onion crisps and people will pick them and enjoy them if there's no scampi flavoured fries left. Remember MPs are elected to represent their constituents, therefore they have to be acceptable to the majority of them.

How must the Investment banker feel if he has to go to his local MPs surgery to discuss his off-shore tax issues only to be faced with an ex-mining union official with 4lb of spuds on his shoulder as his representative. Disenfranchised that's how he feels. Life would have been great if the old Major who once burnt a village school down in Tanzania while hunting rhinos had won, but after the incident with the lady-boy at the vicarage (Turns out people aren't as liberal as they like to make out) he was never going to get a majority. He'd even prefer it if it was the limp-wristed vegetarian that nobody really hated  sat there listening intently to his money problems. Unfortunately his only hope for financial assistance in his hour of need hates him and got his position with less than 30% of the votes cast. The majority of voters could well hate his chippy socialist attitude but we live in a minority rule FPTP country, he doesn't need a majority to rule.

So that's it. These are the three biggest reasons not to vote Yes (There's another one he mentions, something about that dog that sells insurance, Winston or something?). No mention of why first past the post is so much fairer, no explanation of the benefits seen by the voter of FPTP and no reasons why a FPTP government is so much more effective.

Just Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt about AV. That's all he's got. Tweet

Vote yes and we'll gag Kris

Don't vote yes - they're all racialists. This appears to be a key argument being used by the No campaign and sustained by the Mail.

First there was the lie about the BNP thugs getting more votes than normal people and now it seems that a Yes leaflet in London has a picture of a black poet on it and in Cornwall and other places a picture of Baldrick.

The Yes campaign explain this by saying "We have a number of endorsers and we vary the endorsers we use on our leaflets." Presumably using celebrity endorsers where they feel they'll have the most resonance and relevance.


The charge of racism is still further undermined as the Yes campaign, bafflingly, used annoying runner Kris Akabusi as a positive reason to vote for them. Maybe the angle is "Vote for us and we promise he'll never laugh again."

Is it Kris or Carlton Banks?

The main reason for pushing a racist agenda onto the Yes campaign is a pre-emptive defence against the fact that the BNP supports the No campaign. Surely this fact alone should be reason enough for everyone with functioning sense of self respect to vote yes. 

BNP support NotoAV campaign

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Don't you worry your pretty little head about it

The Mail has decided to back the No campaign in the electoral reform referendum. This is, obviously, well within its rights and dovetails nicely with its standpoint on life that anything developed after 1957 is scary-darey and might bring you out in hives

Personally I'm quite please as I'd decided to vote Yes and so would have felt uncomfortable holding the same view as our cancer obsessed friends. I'm not convinced AV is the best system in the world, but I don't feel it's any less fair than the current system. However should No win the vote there is little-to-no chance of another referendum in my lifetime and so no chance of me ever seeing proportional representation choosing the government we've all actually voted for.

While I'd be happy to participate and learn from a cerebral debate about the merits and dangers of each system that's not likely to be available as the No campaign seems to be following the lead of oil companies poo-pooing climate change, tobacco purveyors pouring scorn on lung cancer and religious nutjobs ridiculing Darwin's work. They've got it easy, they have no need to get involved in serious debate about the issue, they just have to create fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD).

I'll try and hunt down the lies, mistruths, deliberate mis-understandings and fear-mongering published till May 5th like an overweight country solicitor chases a fox through the fields of Berkshire. By that I mean I'll be dressed oddly, ignoring chest pains and accompanied by 28 badly treated dogs.

Here we go...

"So why do we oppose the AV system?  Firstly, the reallocation of losing votes, until somebody gets 50 per cent, destroys the principle that every member of society has one equal vote, counted only once.

Votes initially given to extremist parties such as the BNP will be counted two, three or even four times — and will prove decisive in some constituencies."

The insertion of BNP into this paragraph is outright scaremongering, you could easily replace this with Monster raving loony party or Conservatives in many Northern constituencies or Labour in the Home counties. Everybody's votes get counted the same amount of times. It's like the X-factor, after your favourite has been eliminated you have to decide who else to vote for instead, or give up and watch Strictly instead. If your crooner's still being belittled by Simon Cowell you vote for them again.

"Worse, AV will dramatically reduce the likelihood of a single party winning a general election outright ever again.

Instead, hung parliaments will become the norm — with the make-up of governments decided in shabby backroom stitch-ups.

Party manifestos will be reduced to meaningless wishlists to be discarded the moment the election campaign is over."

There's nothing to show this is true at all. Australia uses AV and has a hung parliament at the minute, as do we. We had another one in 1974 and Australia had one in 1940. So far from massively increasing the odds of coalition government it'd be the same or less.

"Experience overseas should also tell Britain to avoid AV. It is used for national elections in only three countries — one of which is Australia, whose citizens are known to loathe the system."

I've had a look around for evidence of this and can find none. A lot of Aussies hate the idea that they are forced to vote whether they want to or not, but not a lot of bile directed against their Preference system (as they call AV). Perhaps they just made this but up to fill the column up with more words.

"Mr Clegg, who once called AV a ‘miserable compromise’, only wants it now because he knows more hung parliaments mean more power for the Lib Dems. 

Each time they agree to form a coalition with Labour or the Tories, the Lib Dems will demand more steps towards proportional representation. This country would soon be on the path to the type of permanent coalition government that has led to paralysis and corruption in countries like Italy."

We won't get any more hung parliaments than we do now. Clegg wants this as he know's it's baby steps towards PR, not because it means he can privatise prisons and the NHS.

"These are the arguments Mr Cameron must make with passion and vigour — even if it upsets his LibDem partners."

The reason he has to use these arguments is because they make AV seem scary and if he'd struggle to find any real reasons for first past the post other than "It's what we've always done" he'd get nowhere.

You, my friend, are too stupid to understand AV.
Whereas I got my job because of it.

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Mixed messages

It's not often you feel sorry for the average Daily Mail reader but today's coverage of the electoral change referendum must have left them scratching heads in confusion.

What the headline appears to be saying is that if we change (Which must be bad - unless it's a change back to something that involves regaining the right to murder or molest someone weaker than yourself in which case it's way over due) then the BNP will have more say. And although this is being portrayed as a nasty thing, deep down inside there's a lot of readers who are giggling like little school girls at the thought.

On the other hand voting Yes - according to David and/or Ed Milliband would be good for progressive parties. This means more squeezing of tax payers and free plasma TVs for unmarried crack whores. So that's a bad thing.

What to do?

Is it Ant or Dec?

In fairness the point being made is a legitimate one. Will changing to AV affect the lot of smaller parties in a positive or negative manner? I personally think it will mean less chance of them getting elected as they're unlikely ever to command the support of more than 50% of the electorate's second or third choices.

This isn't the concern being raised by this article though, the worry here is that after voting for the BNP and seeing them binned alongside the other monster raving loonies their supporters second choice will be taken into consideration, thereby giving the knuckle-draggers two votes.

This is a deliberate misunderstanding of the way AV works propagated by the No campaign. If no candidate is worthy of the support of half of the voters, in effect, another vote is called for with the real dross - and they must be bad - eliminated (Think X-factor). In reality this would be a nightmare to administer and cost a fortune and as no one's making money from a premium phone line it's not going to happen. So instead an imaginary one takes place.

In this imaginary vote it's assumed if your favourite candidate is still in the running you'll vote for them again. If your boy's been evicted you can choose who to vote for from the remaining chancers or not bother. If at the end of this vote someone's mustered up half the voters support they win, if not some other loser's kicked out and we go for a second imaginary vote.

So whenever someone's second preference is counted you've also had a vote counted again if you backed someone still in the game. Either no one gets two votes or everyone gets two votes, or three or four votes...

That's quite conceptual and takes some thinking about and so it's easy to spread the lie that some people will get two or three bites at the voting cherry and others only one.

I think it's clear that the Mail will be supporting the No campaign on the basis that AV will offer less opportunity for a landslide Conservative government - or a landslide any government to be fair. In addition it will set a precedent for electoral change that could set us down the road to proportional representation, and god-forbid we should ever get the government we voted for.

The biggest clue to the Mail's opinion comes in paragraph two.

Really? Continental style is it? The greasy frogs do this do they, and the krauts eh? Probably the EUSSR (See what I did there?) forcing it on us. Well I'll not let it happen not while there's breath in my body.

Of course it's bullshit though. The only continent using this system is Australia, that's what they must mean and I'm sure everyone reading it would be made aware of that at some point. Tweet