It looks as if Thursday's referendum on adopting the "alternative vote" system for UK parliamentary elections is going to be defeated. (Perhaps quite heavily -- BBC News suggested last evening that the NO campaign might be leading by as much as 35 percentage points). If you live in Australia, Fiji or Papua New Guinea, countries that use this voting system, you won't need it explained to you. If you don't, well it probably isn't going to matter anyway after this week.
Knives will be out for poor Nick Clegg if that happens. In fact, they already are --over the weekend Ed Miliband was heard bemoaning the fact that the task of the YES campaigners was being made much harder by Clegg's presence in the forefront of the campaign. Gee Ed, we never heard you so much as mention AV when you were part of the Labour government and in a position to do something about it. Now that it's proving a hard sell, that's somehow Nick Clegg's fault??
Clegg may currently be having a reverse King Midas effect on everything he goes anywhere near, but he's only part of the problem for the YES side. Here are some of the factors in play...
* And we'll start with Nick Clegg, just to get him out of the way. Although AV wouldn't make a material difference in most general elections (see next point), it would tend to make it more likely that one or other of the big parties would have to form a coalition with Clegg's LibDems in order to govern. Right now it's hard to know whether that's more of a turnoff for Clegg's own party members or for his political adversaries (those two groups may be the same people, come to think of it) but it certainly isn't helpful to the AV cause.
* Nobody really, really wants AV. The LibDems have always wanted proportional representation (PR), which AV isn't. Private Eye ran a photo of Clegg and Cameron a few weeks ago, with a speech bubble of Clegg saying "AV's all right, but it wouldn't be my first choice". It's suggested that LibDems are in despair that their one and only shot at voting reform is about to go down in flames. However, advocates of real PR might actually want the AV alternative turned down, because if AV were ever adopted, it would surely put paid to the chances of real PR ever coming to a vote. That doesn't exactly contribute to fired-up campaigning on the YES side.
* The YES campaign have made the rather odd decision to recruit celebrities to front the cause: Eddie Izzard (note to non UK readers: a transvestite comedian) most prominently, but also Stephen Fry (comedian and Twitter addict), Tony Robinson (comedy actor and archaeology buff) and Richard Wilson (geriatric comedy actor). That may be a nod to the zeitgeist, where celebrity rules all, but is it really a smart choice? There were articles in the press earlier in the campaign pointing out that the NO side was a celeb-free zone, but why is that a bad thing? On issues like this, it's more important to hear from those with something to say than from those who just like to hear the sound of their own voices.
Sad to say, there's probably more interest in next week's final of the way-past-its-best Eurovision Song Contest than there is in the AV vote. That doesn't say much either for the campaigners or for the choice on offer. A YES verdict on AV wouldn't be a disaster, but it would be a potentially expensive botch that would stand in the way of real electoral reform. That's the real reason to hope for a NO victory.
2 comments:
Interesting, but just slightly unfair to Ed. Labour manifesto which he was associated with actually did propose referendum on AV, though noone noticed at the time.
Peter
That's true, Peter. However, my point was that Labour did nothing at all on electoral reform during their 13 years in power. The first electoral reform I'd like to see would be a redistribution of seats to produce more equal numbers of voters per constituency, but Labour would certainly cry foul if that happened. It takes far fewer Labour voters to elect an MP than either Tories or (especially) LibDems.
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