if this hadnt ended in a no to av image i would have thought it was for yes to av. the first part of this seems like a pretty good ironic dig at the current government and how they came into existence. iv been fairly ambivalent on the subject but im now leaning towards yes to av.

Anyone watch that execrable debate on the Daily Politics Show, with prescott/howard vs kennedy/jowell – felt sorry for kennedy, he seemed like the only one who wasn’t either a disgustingly venomous slimy liar (howard) or incapable of string two coherent words together (prescott/jowell – actually this is a bit unfair on jowell, but she was hardly convincing)

Anyway, my point is, Howard couldnt get his story straight as to whether AV would
a) result in more coalitions
or
b) be less representative and cause larger landslides.
He seemed to think it would result in both.

The ability to straightface such doublethink is astonishing. Absolute barefaced mendacity.

No to British Politics would be more appropriate. We need to bring back the guillotine, British Politics is just a sideshow to distract the masses from the real illuminati government in the shadows.

On the no2av advert they actually say that coalitions will stitch-up the public, I think I’d already worked that out for myself, lol! They still have no clue how AV works, there will be no more chance of a coalition under AV, than there is under FPTP… duh!
Also they keep on about AV being beneficial for the BNP, why then is the BNP voting no2AV, they’re on the same side as the Tories & other ‘NO’ voters.

Btw, the loser CAN’T possibly win (as shown in the ad), because the loser is eliminated and their votes are re-distributed (unless there’s a clear [over 50%] winner!)

The idiot Lie Dems have gone into govt with far right wing brownshirts. Yet they thought the tories would play nice on this. Such is the naivety and idiocy of the Lie Dems they first gave the brownshirts a gerrymandered system of reduced seats. Now they are having their arses handed to them by the rabid right wing.

And Clegg wants us to believe that he will protect the NHS. He is a moron. No doubt he bought his sofa from DFS when they did not have a sale on.

The B’stard part was bizarre. Was Rick Mayall taking the piss out of Cameron&Clegg? It certainly seemed like it.

No since I am meh2AV I have now decided not to vote for No2AV. I’ll wait and see if Yes2AV can be as brainless before deciding whether to vote for them or just not bothering at all (since AV won’t make a difference anyway).

No2AV are out of ideas. That’s an execrable ad even by the incredibly low standards of the Right.

One can only slap forehead to the:

– overwhelming irony in the first part.

– erroneous horse race analogy in the second segment.

– treatment of voters as complete ignoramuses in the classroom bit.

Sorry, when you say this is the “new Tory No2AV ad”, could you tell me when the other parties represented in No2AV (whose President, after all, is a former Leader of the Labour Party) will be getting their No2AV ads?

Or by “Tory No2AV”, do you just mean “No2AV”? In which case I’m not clear why you think a cross-party campaign should be beholden to promoting the political agenda of the coalition Government. In any event, I haven’t heard the Tories say they would prefer a coalition again in future. I’m sure they’d rather have a majority if possible.

AV benefits one party massively, and it’s a right-wing one – as outlined in my blog post in response to Rupert’s nonsense yesterday. http://s.coop/votingsystems . Overall, I thought this a pretty effective and humourous advert. Not the one I would make if I were trying to win over left-wing Yes voters who have imagined that AV will help their political agenda (it won’t, it will harm it) but certainly one that will work with a lot of the undecided public.

@oldpolitics Really? My Twitter and Facebook feeds are awash with comments from undecideds and people with no real interest in politics stating how terrible the advert was, and how they are now convinced they should vote Yes. Indeed, yours is the first positive comment I’ve seen on the broadcast. I genuinely can’t imagine what aspect of it would appeal to anybody yet to decide.

Yep, really. Absolutely nobody has mentioned it either way on my Facebook. I liked it. I found the B’stard bit a bit weird, but it’s always good to see Rik Mayall. I thought the horse racing bit was hilarious, and people objecting to the use of a horse racing analogy (when, er, discussing the merits of a system called “First Past the Post”) even more hilarious. The classroom bit made its point well, it’s not so much AV being complicated (though for some it is), but about it being counterintuitive. Could have been better scripted / acted, but overall it was witty and relevant.

oldpolitics, here you go:
https://liberalconspiracy.org/2011/04/09/labour-no-campaign-promoted-by-tories/

but about it being counterintuitive

Its not counter-intuitive as much as basically saying voters are too thick. Why not at least give people the explanation so they can judge for themselves how complicated it is? Ad doesn’t even do that. It just tells people its too complicated for them to understand

Yeah, I saw that – as the registered campaigning group they presumably have to have a nominated agent, which is one person for the whole campaign. Bizarre to use a legal technicality to brand a whole campaign as party political; on balance, I think the President of an organisation is of more relevance than its legal agent. I imagine if they’d registered as a separate organisation from the official “No” campaign you would have found a way to brand that dishonest.

“Its not counter-intuitive as much as basically saying voters are too thick. Why not at least give people the explanation so they can judge for themselves how complicated it is?”

Because this is the No Campaign’s broadcast. There is a neutral leaflet from the Electoral Commission for that. I spoke to a “Yes” campaigner the other day who thought that if nobody wins in the first round, you count *everyone’s* second preference. So evidently it’s not obvious for everyone.

what a joke and so full of lies.
Even with AV if you are first past the post eg get more than 50.1% of the vote you win!!!
so one person one vote and AV are identical in that fact.
HOWEVER
with one person one vote you can end up with someone with under 40% of the voters supporting them still getting in. So hardly a person most want to represent them.
Atleast with AV you know in the end one candidate got atleast 50.1% of the votes.
The big parties hate the idea of AV as it means they wont be able tyo hide behind their safe seats and we will find it far easier to get rid of those who fail to do what we employ them to do.
In case you forgot no its not to put profits before people or to lie to us but to represent us not big business.
Say yes to AV and get your voice back and make MP’s worried about ignoring us
For the first time in this country ever we will have our voices back rather than allowing the scum to carry on like they do.

Richard Blogger “I’ll wait and see if Yes2AV can be as brainless before deciding whether to vote for them or just not bothering at all”

You’ll be waiting a long time if you’re waiting for Yes2AV to make such a pathetic vid as no2AV have!

did they do no market research before making this unfunny, patronising pile of shit?

10/oldpolitics: and people objecting to the use of a horse racing analogy (when, er, discussing the merits of a system called “First Past the Post”)

The interesting thing about horse racing analogies is that “First Past the Post” is a better analogy for AV than it is for the system we call FPTP and most of the rest of the English-speaking world calls Plurality. (Though it’s a pretty bad analogy for either)

In most horse races, the winning horse is the one that reaches the target threshold first (by analogy with AV’s 50% quota), not the horse that gets the furthest from the starting line in a specified time.

I’m not sure what the analogy with transfers is. Maybe if a horse fails to make a jump, the people who bet on it get to move their bets to a different horse?

I just hope the majority of the British people will see what patronising nonsense this is and punish them for it. I heard the debate at the national Liberal club and the best argument against the No guy could give was that AV is a bridgehead towards PR.

So, can we expect any comment on the misleading cynical embarrassment that is the “Yes” broadcast, or are we pretending it doesn’t exist?

@ 18

Got a link?

Chaise: http://www.yestofairervotes.org/blog/entry/our-first-election-broadcast/

I keep waiting for the big reveal where it’s discovered that the campaign nomination papers got mixed up at the Electoral Commission, and it’s discovered that the official campaigns were allocated to the wrong sides. To save embarrassment, it’s been covered up, and they’re both just trying to run really bad campaigns to intentionally lose.

The bit with Alan B’stard at the start should be shown again and again come election time to show what a duplicitous lot the Tories and Lib Dems are in this loathsome coalition that was brought to us by…first past the post.

That fairer votes ‘Yes’ video isn’t very good. Given the open goal provided by the worst-of-new-labour-and-tory supported, shady ‘taxpayers’-alliance run travesty of the no campaign, at a time when the people who are behind the no campaign (the entrenched political elite) and everything they represent could not sink lower in the general public estimation, at a time where disillusionment with politics could not be higher and the possibility for a groundswell of support for change so ripe, it seems like a real wasted opportunity. Let’s hope something else pops up. Soon.

(luckily the No campaign are utterly useless – they have no product to sell that anyone could possibly want so have to resort to fatuous slurs by default in an attempt to scare enough halfwits into voting with the Sun)

We’re only having a referendum now because the Liberal Democrats won it as a concession in return for their coalition with the Conservatives – while other things (like their tuition fees pledge) were cast aside. Having initially called AV “a miserable little compromise”, does Clegg really believe in it, and could you trust him to turn a Yes vote into law if that’s the result? The referendum could even be a Conservative/Orange Book strategy to split the left; the Labour Party is certainly divided over the issue.

It’s a pretty lame referendum. We’re not being offered a choice of voting reforms including real PR, just AV or keeping FPTP. And we’re not being offered a say on the changes to the political system this government is really intending to do, like gerrymandering the parliamentary constituencies and fixing parliamentary terms.

The case made against AV, especially the videos which can be found on ‘You Tube’, has been embarrassingly poor, concentrating on such red herrings as the cost of introducing the change. All elections cost money, whatever system is used. There is a temptation to vote against AV simply because it was offered to Nick Clegg when he sold his soul (and that of his party) to the devil. Tempting, as I say, but not a good reason; Cameron also deserves a good kicking, but that doesn’t mean we should vote Yes to AV just to spite him.

Having said that, I shall be voting No. Perhaps I’m being selfish. If we’d had AV last May, I’d have given a second preference vote to the Lib Dems, but now I don’t want a second or third preference, so I see no point in changing to AV. On the other hand, there are people who, under AV, would give their first preference to the BNP, their second to UKIP, and their third to the Tories. Once the BNP and UKIP have been eliminated, those third preference votes for the Tories could overturn my first preference vote for Labour. There would be Tories who nowadays would quite happily give their second preference to their coalition partners, and vice versa. AV could therefore help the re-election of this awful government. With the exception of those who want to give their first preference to the Green Party, those who dislike the present government have no logical alternative but to vote Labour, and only Labour.

AV is a system that in the final counting can give the same value to a second or third choice vote as to a first choice vote. It can also mean that a party that is third in the initial count can eventually win. It is likely to be beneficial only to the Liberal Democrats, and to work against other minor parties. Yet I’ve read postings from people who believe mistakenly that AV will help independent candidates and smaller parties to get elected. The Green Party won the seat of Brighton Pavilion last year with just 31% of the vote on first preferences. It’s unlikely that, under AV, the party would have won enough second preference votes to get it past the 50% threshold.

In fact, it’s unlikely that any minority party would win more seats under AV than under our current system. A minority party must collect enough first preferences to be placed second, or at least third, after the first count. The reality is that it’s almost always the second placed candidate (based on first preferences) that has any chance of overtaking the leading one. The one way in which smaller parties do get an enhanced role under AV is that they can bargain with the major parties – either locally or nationally – to get policy concessions in return for delivering the second preferences of their supporters to the major party (using how-to-vote cards).

AV would not solve our democratic problems. Britain has three mainstream nationwide parties which stand accused of becoming increasingly similar, and a worrying number of potential voters abstain from deciding between them (35% last May). AV is said by specialists to be the best system for promoting centrist politics, which is just what reformers in Britain wish to avoid. As to opening up Parliament to more parties, AV does the opposite: it concentrates the vote on the two main parties, since the winner needs a bigger majority than under FPTP.

AV wouldn’t be a true transition to a more representative electoral system. Any change needs to be based on the principle that it offers at least some increase in proportionality; AV does not, and it can exaggerate landslide elections. Landslides are the worst breaches of electoral justice, giving enormous political power to a party without the equivalent mandate from the electorate.

Some people believe that AV would be a first step on the road to a fully proportional voting system. It wouldn’t be. If AV is implemented and becomes accepted, why would anyone think of changing the system again? Supporters of PR are more likely to get their wish if the discredited FPTP system, which can give large majorities to a party with only about 35% of the vote (as in 2005), stays in place until demands for something much fairer reach a crescendo. Dr David Owen tends to agree:-

“I have been a long-standing supporter of proportional representation and joined the Electoral Reform Society in 1985, determinedly campaigning for proportional representation for more than two decades. This referendum will not set Britain down the path of real electoral reform; it will replace a bad system with a worse one, and risks putting off the prospect of real reform for generations.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/david-owen-i-support-a-pr-system-but-i-will-be-voting-lsquo norsquo-in-the-av-referendum-2240525.html

Liberal Democrats are now trying to tell us that AV is the best thing since sliced bread, but it was a different story just over a year ago. This is what Chris Huhne wrote in February 2010:-

“Under AV, as under first-past-the-post, there would continue to be safe seats where the MP will effectively have a job for life…..Research has shown that the worst expenses abuses occurred in safe seats where MPs face no threat of sacking by the electorate. Conservative opposition to electoral reform gives the lie to David Cameron’s pretence that he wants real change.

Not only does AV fail to give voters the power they should have, but it also fails to remedy the unfairness of the present system……AV can be even more disproportional when there are big swings from one side to the other such as in 1997 or 1979: under AV, both Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher would have had bigger majorities. The electoral system would continue to be like an ill-fitting corset attempting to squeeze all the diverse strands of opinion in our society into an inappropriate and deeply uncomfortable shape.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/09/alternative-vote-not-the-solution?INTCMP=SRCH

Read more:-
http://cuttingedgeuk.proboards.com/index.cgi

What a load of rubbish. It’ll have to wait until morning to be dealt with though.

This is the most excrable piece of shite I’ve seen since the last output fron NO2AV (those posters claiming it was a choice between a fair voting system and soldiers and babies dying).

I was worried there was a genuine chance of NO winning but now that I’ve seen this…Alan B’Stard?! Really? Prominent former Tory MP Alan B’Stard?!

They even had a section where they literally said that school kids were too dumb to understand AV.

The Independent were spot on when they said NO2AV was a dishonest campaign that deserves to lose

Ivan White/23: “AV is said by specialists to be the best system for promoting centrist politics”

They’re wrong – Condorcet is considerably better for centrists. AV has a tendency to avoid both extremists and ultra-centrist candidates.

“On the other hand, there are people who, under AV, would give their first preference to the BNP, their second to UKIP, and their third to the Tories. Once the BNP and UKIP have been eliminated, those third preference votes for the Tories could overturn my first preference vote for Labour”

Sure, but if the BNP candidate doesn’t stand – consider Hendon constituency in 2010, for instance – their supporters’ second preferences can swing the election under FPTP.

Anyway, the most recent Yougov/Channel 4 poll on second preferences suggests that BNP and UKIP voters are not biased towards the Conservatives over Labour as much as you’d think – it’s about a 40:30 split with the rest preferencing neither. Given that neither party gets many votes to begin with, it’d have to be a very close seat for that to make a difference.

AV could therefore help the re-election of this awful government

Not really. The coalition is rather unstable, since it depends on the Conservatives having enough seats to form a coalition with the Lib Dems, but not so few that a Lab/Lib coalition is more plausible, and not so many that the Conservatives can go alone as a minority government or even a majority government. Transferring votes like that – and explicitly advocating it – would help the Conservatives but not significantly the Lib Dems.

If they actually wanted to continue as a coalition – and I’m not sure the Conservatives really do – they could do it under FPTP by not standing against each other in seats where Labour is the main opposition and by campaigning for each other’s candidates, or just merging their two parties.

The Green Party won the seat of Brighton Pavilion last year with just 31% of the vote on first preferences. It’s unlikely that, under AV, the party would have won enough second preference votes to get it past the 50% threshold.

I suspect that they probably would have, both under the way transfers were going in 2010 and the way they’re currently going.

Anyway, I agree with you that what this country really needs is a PR system. Of the choice between AV and FPTP for electing MPs by parallel single-seat elections, though, I think AV is somewhat better.

@ 23 Ivan White

“It’s a pretty lame referendum. We’re not being offered a choice of voting reforms including real PR, just AV or keeping FPTP. And we’re not being offered a say on the changes to the political system this government is really intending to do, like gerrymandering the parliamentary constituencies and fixing parliamentary terms.”

That’s because referendums need simple yes/no questions, or it’s hard to decide whether they are valid. In any case, putting PR as an option would just split the reform vote and keep FPTP in, even if most people felt it was the worst system.

“Having said that, I shall be voting No. Perhaps I’m being selfish. If we’d had AV last May, I’d have given a second preference vote to the Lib Dems, but now I don’t want a second or third preference, so I see no point in changing to AV.”

You are being pretty selfish, yes. Frankly, I wish people like you, who think that something that won’t benefit you personally is pointless, stayed out of elections entirely and left the decisions from those of us who aren’t empathy-free. This “I’m all right, Jack” attitude pretty much sums up what’s wrong with the world.

I think something that all the ‘second preferences will be weighed as much as first preferences’ people seem to miss is that this already happens. If you voted Labour in the last election but you would have voted Lib Dem given the option, you voted your second preference and yet your vote is worth exactly as much as a die-hard Labour vote. There doesn’t seem to be particularly unfair about that, everyone’s entitled to one vote regardless of how strongly they feel about their choice.

All AV does is take the tactical step out of your head and into a set of instructions for the election counters to save you having to make a choice based on your guess on how everyone else is going to vote. AV by eliminating to need for tactical voting makes voting simpler.

@ 28 Alex

“I think something that all the ‘second preferences will be weighed as much as first preferences’ people seem to miss is that this already happens. If you voted Labour in the last election but you would have voted Lib Dem given the option, you voted your second preference and yet your vote is worth exactly as much as a die-hard Labour vote. ”

Interesting point, that. “I’m voting AV because everyone should be entitled to a first preference!”

Interesting point, that. “I’m voting AV because everyone should be entitled to a first preference!”

I do actually like that. As someone who has donated money to the Yes campaign, I certainly think they could be doing a lot better in terms of ideas like this.