A pamphlet dissected:
As May 5th draws nearer I of course should not be surprised if I were to be submerged in a wash of campaign leaflets, but if the truth be told only one solitary leaflet has so far appeared on the doormat, from the 'No to AV' campaign.
Purple seems to be the colour of the month at the moment - census forms, 'Yes to Fairer Votes', and also the 'No to AV' camp seem to have taken it up, but only the 'No' camp seem to have additionally opted for this rather sickening off green colour to compliment it. This is probably to portray some sort of party political neutrality but quite frankly it makes me feel a little queasy.
None the less, the first thing to notice on the front cover is the rather spasmodic claim that 'None of your taxes have been used to print this leaflet'. I say 'spasmodic' since the thought had genuinely never entered my head - the question of campaign funding was not asked by me of anyone. But of course, once I opened this quasi-psychedelic leaflet the purpose of the outburst on the front cover becomes all too apparent - by stating the bleeding obvious immediately before stating a piece of obfuscatory nonsense the campaign hope that you, the reader, will conflate the two into one congruent and unassailable truth, that AV will cost a fortune.
The first problem with this imaginary £250 million is that it heavily relies on the notion that £130 million will be spent on electronic voting machines, something which neither the Yes campaign is advocating, nor anyone else for that matter. The exact mechanics of how a vote will be taken is beyond the scope of this referendum, and is well out of the hands of either side of the debate.
And so begins a subtle subtext of extreme condescension and insult which litters the entire leaflet. The very fact that the No campaign assert that electronic machines must be used in order to conduct a vote implies that marking an 'X' on a ballot paper is easy, but to write the numbers 1 through to 5 in sequence requires some sort of state of the art technology.
The No Campaign then append a veritable shopping list of things that could be bought using such a sum of money (forgetting of course that £91m of their £250m is already being spent in the form of the referendum itself) which fails as a cogent point in its entirety. There are any number of things which the government spends money on which inevitably are diverted from public services, the Olympics for example. The question is whether you can justify your alternative spending in terms of the net benefit it may bring to nation as a whole and whether it suitably offsets the noted sacrifices (I would argue that the Olympics is likely to be the greatest waste of money since the Millenium Dome but that's for another day). Following in this vein, the price of the Alternative Vote is, in accordance with your political standpoint, the price of a greater democracy. If you believe AV will provide an enhanced level of democracy then of course the cost is worth it, if you are against AV then the cost is obviously not worth it. The cost of the change itself is irrelevant to the argument at hand.
The literature then goes on to explain the Alternative Vote system relatively simply, in fact it does it a much better way than some of the Yes campaign's own literature, and does absolutely nothing to state why this system is deserved of opposition. Except scanning across the page, it appears they do have a second argument (hurrah!) centered around the popularity of the AV system. The first line of the page reads "AV is not a fair system. That's why only three countries in the world use it..." This is of course something of a leap to make this connection. No quotes are included from other world leaders to say that the reason they do not use the system is because it is unfair - indeed our own country has not proposed an alternative voting method in any serious context until now, and so we can safely say that at least one reason the United Kingdom does not use AV is more likely because it has never been in the offing.
The next page displays a side-by-side comparison of how the two systems work. Here is where obfuscation is taken to a higher level. The First Past The Post system is explained in just over 10 words, the AV system in over 230 words (in direct contradiction with the previous explanation which managed to do it in 20-something words with a few diagrams). A brief read of the explanation of the AV column reveals the most bizarrely constructed and protracted sentences ever written, in a deliberate attempt to make the explanation harder to follow. It should be noted that the Yes campaign's explanation of the system uses 100 fewer words to describe the same event. But as a piece of visual trickery it is at least inventive if completely devoid of a note worthy point.
Now we come to the page that most bothers me. At the top of the page is a picture of a running race with a caption indicating that second place is the winner. Obviously, politics is not an athletics event, and no runner is ever going to win because he has the majority of the crowd support - if they were, then we can expect a mountain of gold medals next summer. False analogy, move on.
Underneath this picture comes the scaremongering, in the form of a brief but vacuous paragraph. Apparently it's wrong for the person in second or third to overtake the person with the most votes because the "lower choices of supporters of extreme parties such as the BNP are counted again..." The sheer affront to democracy of this paragraph is staggering. Firstly, it appears that if you vote BNP you are not entitled to have a second preference. In fact the implication of this sentence is that because the votes of extremist parties are included that somehow makes the whole thing much worse, that in fact we would prefer to disenfranchise voters of such parties. The subtext of this is a naked argument against representation and democracy itself. When an organisation actively wishes our voting system to discriminate against the votes of BNP supporters what they arguing for is for a voting system which is palpably, and unarguably rigged.
Incidentally, the next line makes a throw statement about AV being 'the end to equal votes' but, as the pamphlet has already disclosed, they doesn't necessarily regard all votes as equal anyway.
The final page essentially attacks Nick Clegg's integrity. I'm not going to spend much time on this, since I have very little sympathy with Nick Clegg. Deriding his motives for advocating the Alternative Vote is a waste of time, and completely irrelevant to the debate. Even if I hadn't voted Lib Dem in the past I would still be in the Yes camp, and I wouldn't be remotely concerned with Clegg's performance in government.
And so to round off, the No Campaigns arguments seem to fall into four categories - 1) AV is expensive, especially if you demand voting machines to conduct it, which nobody is of course. 2) Fifteen million smokers can't be wrong. 3) Extremist votes shouldn't be counted and we want to do everything we can to rig the system against them (note that Nick Griffin is supporting a No vote) and finally 4) You don't want to side with Nick Clegg, do you?
You didn't happen to spot any major democratic principles in there did you?
As May 5th draws nearer I of course should not be surprised if I were to be submerged in a wash of campaign leaflets, but if the truth be told only one solitary leaflet has so far appeared on the doormat, from the 'No to AV' campaign.
Purple seems to be the colour of the month at the moment - census forms, 'Yes to Fairer Votes', and also the 'No to AV' camp seem to have taken it up, but only the 'No' camp seem to have additionally opted for this rather sickening off green colour to compliment it. This is probably to portray some sort of party political neutrality but quite frankly it makes me feel a little queasy.
None the less, the first thing to notice on the front cover is the rather spasmodic claim that 'None of your taxes have been used to print this leaflet'. I say 'spasmodic' since the thought had genuinely never entered my head - the question of campaign funding was not asked by me of anyone. But of course, once I opened this quasi-psychedelic leaflet the purpose of the outburst on the front cover becomes all too apparent - by stating the bleeding obvious immediately before stating a piece of obfuscatory nonsense the campaign hope that you, the reader, will conflate the two into one congruent and unassailable truth, that AV will cost a fortune.
The first problem with this imaginary £250 million is that it heavily relies on the notion that £130 million will be spent on electronic voting machines, something which neither the Yes campaign is advocating, nor anyone else for that matter. The exact mechanics of how a vote will be taken is beyond the scope of this referendum, and is well out of the hands of either side of the debate.
And so begins a subtle subtext of extreme condescension and insult which litters the entire leaflet. The very fact that the No campaign assert that electronic machines must be used in order to conduct a vote implies that marking an 'X' on a ballot paper is easy, but to write the numbers 1 through to 5 in sequence requires some sort of state of the art technology.
The No Campaign then append a veritable shopping list of things that could be bought using such a sum of money (forgetting of course that £91m of their £250m is already being spent in the form of the referendum itself) which fails as a cogent point in its entirety. There are any number of things which the government spends money on which inevitably are diverted from public services, the Olympics for example. The question is whether you can justify your alternative spending in terms of the net benefit it may bring to nation as a whole and whether it suitably offsets the noted sacrifices (I would argue that the Olympics is likely to be the greatest waste of money since the Millenium Dome but that's for another day). Following in this vein, the price of the Alternative Vote is, in accordance with your political standpoint, the price of a greater democracy. If you believe AV will provide an enhanced level of democracy then of course the cost is worth it, if you are against AV then the cost is obviously not worth it. The cost of the change itself is irrelevant to the argument at hand.
The literature then goes on to explain the Alternative Vote system relatively simply, in fact it does it a much better way than some of the Yes campaign's own literature, and does absolutely nothing to state why this system is deserved of opposition. Except scanning across the page, it appears they do have a second argument (hurrah!) centered around the popularity of the AV system. The first line of the page reads "AV is not a fair system. That's why only three countries in the world use it..." This is of course something of a leap to make this connection. No quotes are included from other world leaders to say that the reason they do not use the system is because it is unfair - indeed our own country has not proposed an alternative voting method in any serious context until now, and so we can safely say that at least one reason the United Kingdom does not use AV is more likely because it has never been in the offing.
The next page displays a side-by-side comparison of how the two systems work. Here is where obfuscation is taken to a higher level. The First Past The Post system is explained in just over 10 words, the AV system in over 230 words (in direct contradiction with the previous explanation which managed to do it in 20-something words with a few diagrams). A brief read of the explanation of the AV column reveals the most bizarrely constructed and protracted sentences ever written, in a deliberate attempt to make the explanation harder to follow. It should be noted that the Yes campaign's explanation of the system uses 100 fewer words to describe the same event. But as a piece of visual trickery it is at least inventive if completely devoid of a note worthy point.
Now we come to the page that most bothers me. At the top of the page is a picture of a running race with a caption indicating that second place is the winner. Obviously, politics is not an athletics event, and no runner is ever going to win because he has the majority of the crowd support - if they were, then we can expect a mountain of gold medals next summer. False analogy, move on.
Underneath this picture comes the scaremongering, in the form of a brief but vacuous paragraph. Apparently it's wrong for the person in second or third to overtake the person with the most votes because the "lower choices of supporters of extreme parties such as the BNP are counted again..." The sheer affront to democracy of this paragraph is staggering. Firstly, it appears that if you vote BNP you are not entitled to have a second preference. In fact the implication of this sentence is that because the votes of extremist parties are included that somehow makes the whole thing much worse, that in fact we would prefer to disenfranchise voters of such parties. The subtext of this is a naked argument against representation and democracy itself. When an organisation actively wishes our voting system to discriminate against the votes of BNP supporters what they arguing for is for a voting system which is palpably, and unarguably rigged.
Incidentally, the next line makes a throw statement about AV being 'the end to equal votes' but, as the pamphlet has already disclosed, they doesn't necessarily regard all votes as equal anyway.
The final page essentially attacks Nick Clegg's integrity. I'm not going to spend much time on this, since I have very little sympathy with Nick Clegg. Deriding his motives for advocating the Alternative Vote is a waste of time, and completely irrelevant to the debate. Even if I hadn't voted Lib Dem in the past I would still be in the Yes camp, and I wouldn't be remotely concerned with Clegg's performance in government.
And so to round off, the No Campaigns arguments seem to fall into four categories - 1) AV is expensive, especially if you demand voting machines to conduct it, which nobody is of course. 2) Fifteen million smokers can't be wrong. 3) Extremist votes shouldn't be counted and we want to do everything we can to rig the system against them (note that Nick Griffin is supporting a No vote) and finally 4) You don't want to side with Nick Clegg, do you?
You didn't happen to spot any major democratic principles in there did you?
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