Yes or No to the AV Vote? Page 16

You have a touching faith in the intellect of the electorate.

But the truth is the electorate are not ready to forgive the last Labour Government, and Ed Milliband has neither the beginnings of a manifesto nor a credible front bench; the Tory vote is holding solid and the bill that provided for the AV referendum also provided for boundary changes in the Tories favour; and the Labour vote in Scotland has collapsed, and Labour have always relied on Scotland to deliver a majority.

Cameron can call an election any time in the next four years and get an overall majority. If the right of the party and their backers in the press has any say in the matter, it will happen sooner or later. And then the fun really starts.

I'm still lib dem. Sigh.

Yeah, Clegg is still the sexiest leader, and no mistake!

(According to my cousin)

(Female cousin)

They're all quite unattractive. I'm not so much a Clegg fan.

Timbo

The Scots only vote snp in local elections

Come general election time they all vote Labour

always have, always will

and the government if the day only starts to do badly in local elections after a few years in office

they only took over a year ago! That's nothing

wait 4 years when all the cuts really start to hurt and they'll be in big trouble

most people realise this mess was caused by global issues anyway

you can't blame it all on Labour

Quote: Nat Wicks @ May 8 2011, 2:00 PM BST

They're all quite unattractive. I'm not so much a Clegg fan.

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I lost most of my admiration for Cable over the tuitin fees debacle, but he is making up for it with his regular attacks on the Tories. He admits that he knows what they are really like, but it doesn't stop him doing business with them? Hmmm.

Principles, Vince?

Quote: Nogget @ May 6 2011, 9:59 PM BST

I wonder if there was a subliminal message to vote 'no' within the ballot paper itself. The voter had to put a cross against either 'yes' or 'no'. We are all conditioned to think that a 'tick' is positive and a cross is negative, so to put a cross against 'yes' might feel contradictory.

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The whole phrasing of the question probably biased it towards a NO change.

I suspect that to be totally fair, randomly, half the ballot papers should have had the question phrased the other way around. Say, pink slips for the existing format and blue slips for the reversed question.

Or it should have been done like a regular ballot with two 'Candidates'

FPTP as one and AV as the other.

Quote: TopBanana @ May 8 2011, 2:24 PM BST

I lost most of my admiration for Cable over the tuitin fees debacle, but he is making up for it with his regular attacks on the Tories. He admits that he knows what they are really like, but it doesn't stop him doing business with them? Hmmm.

Principles, Vince?

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Vince Cable has gone from sensible elder statesman to almost Wodehouse-esque buffoon in mine (and I suspect many others') minds.

You can't blame it all on Labour, but you can blame a lot on Labour, and lot of voters do, and believe rightly or wrongly that coalition cuts are necessary as a result.

Part of the Brown/Blair legacy for Labour is a dearth of talent at the top, it will take them two terms to rebuild to the point where they become a credible party of opposition. As for Scotland, I am not convinced that history is a reliable guide; new Labour's Tory-lite policies won them no love north of the border and the SNP have demonstrated that they can win elections and are worth voting for.

I expect a low turnout at the next election, with the Tory vote holding and the lost LibDem vote being divvied up among the other parties and the can't be bothereds; certainly not enough votes will go to Labour for them to topple the Tories. There was a reason why the Tories were rock solid behind the NO campaign in the referendum: it makes them bloody hard to shift.

Quote: billwill @ May 8 2011, 2:28 PM BST

The whole phrasing of the question probably biased it towards a NO change.
....

Or it should have been done like a regular ballot with two 'Candidates'

FPTP as one and AV as the other.

View original

There is a lot to that.

Quote: Timbo @ May 8 2011, 2:32 PM BST

There was a reason why the Tories were rock solid behind the NO campaign in the referendum: it makes them bloody hard to shift.

View original

That's a bit disingenuous, Timbo. Milliband (and those Labour politicians who supported AV) wasn't backing the 'Yes' campaign out of any great sense of passion for electoral reform. Labour had 13 years to introduce electoral reform and didn't. Why? Because the "safe seat" bipartisan system has benefited them as much (if not more) as the Conservatives. Milliband/Labour's 'Yes' stance had everything to do with winning over disaffected voters to their side. I bet you Labour won't be even mentioning electoral reform for the remainder of this or the next parliament. Quietly, I suspect, they're relieved. The only electoral reform issue that they'll be interested in now is opposing the constituency boundary changes - which are designed to reduce the prospect of safe seats.

Possibly been mentioned by someone, without looking, but what I did find interesting about that little referendum was the coalition parties taking sides against one another, breaking free from their public relations based happy relationship for a few days.

But I can imagine many people not too up on politics being quite confused about what they were seeing. Very good for democracy but not too great for the stability of coalition govts maybe. I think we should have more of both though, more referenda, more coalition govts. More democracy, in other words. In theory.