Part five in my #No2AV lie of the week series, and it’s an easy one. I thought this was something we’d all learnt by now anyway?
I’ve covered the myth of the miserable little compromise in detail before but, in short, they’re saying we shouldn’t vote for it because Nick Clegg doesn’t like it? Have they forgotten who Nick Clegg is?
No to AV seem to be getting a little less bold in their lies. I guess they ran out of imagination.
Not really a lie is it. Though it is completely irrelevant and I personally wish both sides would stop the nick for nick bashing.
Well, it’s close enough that I thought I could still put it in the series. 🙂 The “As” at the beginning makes it a claim, rather than simply a report of Clegg’s words, and I’ve explained before why it’s a false one.
It’s taken out of context, though I wouldn’t go so far as saying it was false. Just meaningless when he didn’t know he was going to be confined to picking between Fptp and AV.
I will vote no for two reasons:
1) Parliament, in my mind, is the problem. Fiddling punily with the hoops the venal idiots must jump through is the tail wagging the dog. In as much as it ameliorated anything, that pacificatory tokenism will annoy me in the soggy mire it leaves. If you have a tank of turds, don’t insult my intelligence that changing the colour of one of the turds will make things better in any meaningful sense. There’s nothing gradual needed here. It’s either emptied quickly and quickly, or it continues to stink.
2) I cannot give the vile Clegg or his pusillanimous party their little bauble that they believe justifies their nasty betrayal. I shall not allow them that succour.
I voted LibDem in the last election (and encouraged others to do the same) because consistent Labour broken promises and opposition from the Tories led me to believe that a hung parliament would be the only way this country would ever see electoral reform. So, unsurprisingly, I disagree! And I plan to work damn hard to make sure that, if it’s the only good thing we get from this government, we never elect another parliament under FPTP.
1) There’s little I’d like more than to see the tank emptied quickly, but it’s not going to happen. If we wait, we’ll wait an eternity. Quoting, again, the post from Nan Sloane that I mentioned in my earlier blog:
British democracy is bad because it was never designed to be a democracy. We have little choice but to take each little concession they grant us, until we eventually give control of the tail back to the dog.All things considered, I think we’ve had a narrow escape. We could have been landed with AV+, a party list system that would have let us do nothing more than change the colours forever. AV, as the little brother of STV, isn’t about that. It’s about taking power from the parties and giving it to the people; making the electoral maths the same for a new candidate, independent or small party as that for the established powers. Of course there’s further to go, and I don’t just mean STV: a right of recall for constituents of MPs who break their promises, a ban on anyone attempting to control the votes of MPs (as the party whips do today), a massive clamp down on party funding, reducing the ministerial payroll, an elected house of Lords. And, you know, the monarchy. But it would be ridiculous to expect we’ll ever come close to that unless we make the liars fear us again.
2) Voting against the interests of the people to punish a party that’s likely to be destroyed at the next election seems a peculiar choice, to say the least.
Of course, I realise I’m writing all this on the day another country has ousted their unaccountable leader. If you have a plan for that, and a roadmap to genuine democracy afterward, well, name your date!
He said he didn’t like it, he also said it was a “miserable little compromise” but how much more stupid would it be to have a referendum and vote for something that was worse than a miserable compromise…
When a miserable compromise is all you have on offer, you take it. At least this way we get more accountability for our politicians, and if we seriously want further reform it’ll be easier to convince them we are serious and to push for it.
As for the suggestion that it only benefits the Lib Dems and Nick Clegg, they are wrong. Our FPTP system massively disadvantages the Lib Dems and other minority parties. Now anyone who dislikes them may say ‘good’ but think about it, that means anyone who wants and voted for these people to represent them are being short changed. It’s one thing to say that a party deserves to suffer, it’s quite another to say that anyone in the country deserves less of a say in our politics just because of the views they hold. That’s severely undemocratic and tantamount to abusing people’s human rights.
If a party is to be punished for it’s behaviour, let it be the people that do it and not the voting system. Why deny them that pleasure/right?
Personally I dislike a lot of the compromises the Lib Dems have made. But I don’t blame them; to be honest it’s the fault of both the voting system that gave them very little real influence in parliament and the Conservatives a much greater share than they deserve from their actual public support, and of the people who voted for the Conservatives in the first place, knowing full well what they stand for and what they wanted to do. But that’s democracy I guess, you aren’t always going to like other people’s views, but you have to work with them and respect that they are entitled to them.
I sincerely believe we would have had a much worse time with a minority tory party (which would require a pact with the Lib Dems to abstain from voting against a completely Tory budget) which would eventually break down and end in a majority Tory government being voted in… there’s no way the lib dems or labour could havce put up a fight within the next year at another election. Even on tuition fees (which I feel strongly about, however not for the obvious reasons) we would likely have ended up with a complete lifting of the fee cap (as recommended by the report commissioned by Labour itself).
The only thing I hate is the fact that the coalition is so stuck with the ‘collective responsibility’ crap.