'A miserable little compromise' is how Nick Clegg defined the Alternative Vote. No one can claim that he is the victim of quote mining, these were his actual words, and the 'No to AV' campaign have been repeating the phrase with almost reckless abandon. However, any man who walks into the negotiating room with the lowest possible result as his opening bid is not going to win many favours. Clegg was right to deride it then, just as he is right to support it now. We always assumed that the Tories wouldn't budge on Proportional Representation, but if we had given up before the fight had begun, we would only have ourselves to blame for failure.
And failure, if the polls are to be believed, is where we are still heading. With the majority of polls firmly putting the 'No' Campaign furlongs ahead, scathing attacks on the No Campaign's strategies have been present for at least a week - and it's hard not to see why. There are good reasons for not adopting the Alternative Vote system, such as the strength of any resulting government, for example, but the No camp seem quite happy to settle for the lowest common denominator and spread misleading information and lies
The amount of money that the Alternative Vote would cost is a good example of a claim by the No camp being both misleading and false at the same time. The claim that it would cost £230 million is misleading since £91 million of the total has already been spent (on the referendum), and false because another £130 million of the total is allocated for voting machines which no-one is asking for. Taken at face value such a claim would understandably concern a number of voters, especially those who are losing jobs, finding their local services cut etc. The No camp are also quite happy to use extremist parties as an additional bogeyman to the mix, serving to frighten voters more. And this is where the Yes campaign will have failed, in it's inability to fight dirty.
Obviously, by the nature of its title ('Yes to Fairer Votes'), the campaign would have struggled to fight fire with fire, but there are a number of equally low arguments which could have frightened voters in the opposite direction. They could have for instance linked the 'MP's Expenses' scandal with the 'safe seat' phenomenon and played that ace repeatedly. They could have played the extremist card themselves, since the BNP are campaigning for a 'No' vote. But most importantly, they could have claimed, loud and clear, that voting 'No' will set back voting reform for a generation. Admittedly, all of these things have been said, loosely, by the Yes camp, but none of them have been their central arguments, and perhaps they should have been.
Whilst dismissed as scaremongering by some, it is a concern that a 'No' vote tomorrow will put the reform genie back in the bottle, and you only need look at the language used by politicians to see why. When Labour and the Conservatives both promised (and failed to deliver) a referendum on Europe in the run up the election, one phrase was repeated ad nauseum. "The voters will decide once and for all" was what MPs promised, and it is this very language that we should be wary of. The notion that a referendum can decide an issue, any issue, once and for all is a very seedy one, and implies of course that any negative result is likely to be taken into account regarding any future referendums for some time to follow. Indeed, it would not be unwise to suspect that future referendums would need to be triggered by a suitably large cry for one in parliament, rather than by a progressive elected government. This should worry all of us who are in favour of reform.
The Conservatives and Labour are unlikely to call for voting reform once in power. It is going to take a minority party to make particularly vocal stand (or a second coalition government) to bring this issue back to the table. Even then it is unlikely that such a party would have the clout to be able to successfully get one. Once past that hurdle, the years since the last referendum would have to be sufficient in number to successfully argue that the mood of the public has changed. As you can see, it will not be easy, and the Conservatives are well aware of this. Were they really committed to electoral reform, they could have enacted an AV-style referendum, offering the public a variety of different voting methods - but they didn't. Instead they offered one alternative, and picked the one which was most likely to fail at the ballot box. We should not be at all surprised if a 'No' vote is proclaimed as a ringing endorsement for First Past The Post - my only hope will be that the 'No' voters who get stung in this way will still be around to draw on the experience for the next referendum on voting reform - whenever it may come.
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