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Neil Harding
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Wednesday, 11 January 2006

Why Tony Is Right

This post has moved to http://neilharding.blogspot.com/2006/01/why-tony-is-right.html

 

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Recent Posts at http://neilharding.blogspot.com

  • Jul 13 - My Understanding of NEC Ruling (So Far!) There are 3 ways to vote in the Labour leadership contest. 1. As a current full member whose membership started before January 12th 2016 and whose membership is continuous thereafter. 2. As a "registered" affiliate supporter through membership of an affiliated union or organisation. (Costs vary but much less than £25) and registration is possible until August 8th 2016 (to be confirmed). 3. As a newly registered supporter (cost £25) in a "48 hour window" between July 18th and 20th. (Times & dates to be confirmed this Thursday 14th July). All of this might still change, it seems...(more)
  • Jul 06 - 10 Reasons Why Remain Voters Should Be Cheerful About Brexit 1. EU Reform. Finally we are getting some real noises about the sort of progressive EU reform we've been asking for. From the Czechs to the Germans, Danes and French. Governments and EU officials are unhappy about Brexit and asking why are EU citizens so unhappy that they want out. I don't believe a Bremain vote would have kickstarted anything like this. There is talk about looser arrangements for some countries, deeper integration for others, the powers of the EU parliament enhanced and Commission powers reduced. Ironically Britain whether under Cameron or Brown fought against this, so it is...(more)
  • Jan 22 - Why It Is Time For Britain To Leave The EU. 1. Politicians are treating voters with contempt. There is just an assumption from the elites, that they'll just ramp up the pro EU propaganda and we'll all just fall into line. For democracy's sake, the establishment need to get a shock. 2. Britain is holding the EU back. This is not just about the 60m people on this island, it is about the 500m on the continent. True socialists must give them equal consideration. Has the UK given a helpful contribution in the refugee crisis? Environmental legislation? Financial transactions tax? Banker's bonus cap? Solidarity over Euro crisis? Fiscal...(more)
  • Aug 15 - The Labour Leadership & Jeremy Corbyn Let's just for one moment leave aside the popularity of Jeremy Corbyn. Can any supporter of one of the other candidates truly say their candidate is of the sort of calibre and appeal that Labour are going to need for the mammoth task of winning in 2020? Are Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham & Liz Kendall all the party can offer? They all seem very poor candidates. The evidence is in their lack of ability to motivate support behind them. Their campaigns have been dire. Even some of their biggest supporters admit that. If they cannot motivate support now, how are they going to do it in a general...(more)
  • Aug 11 - Labour Has Always Been The Party I've Felt At Home With And Jeremy Has Brought Me Back Into The Fold. I've only ever been a member of one political party - Labour. I really wanted to see Ed Miliband become PM in May and I was gutted for Labour's Nancy Platts in Kemptown. Yet I had for a number of years drifted away from Labour as they moved further to the right. I did publicly support & vote for Caroline Lucas in May but I could not join the Green party. Something held me back. They didn't feel quite right for me. Now, I am absolutely delighted to once again be a supporter of the Labour party. Jeremy Corbyn has given me real hope that Labour now have the artillery to win a general...(more)
  • Jun 07 - Labour Need Clever Populist Policies That Deliver A Left Philosophy Labour are almost certainly going to lose the 2020 general election. The electoral geography and political realities are the worst they have been for Labour since their foundation. The offer to the public in 2020 needs to be so huge and widely supported that tweaking policies here and there is just not going to cut the mustard. Labour need a 1997 level of win in votes just to achieve a small majority. These are facts, not pessimism. And if Labour do not face up to them, 2020 is already lost. Of course, a lot could happen in 5 years to change this. The Tories although in a strong position,...(more)
  • Jun 05 - The Single Non Transferable Vote Thanks to another blogger (Thank you Paul Z Templeton) I now know the name of the voting system I have been advocating (SEE TITLE, I know, I should have known this!). Paul is a big advocate of another system - the Single Transferable Vote (STV). But I'm not so impressed with STV. The main problem I have with STV is the complexity of the system. I know it is easy enough to rank candidates in order 1,2,3, but I think it is really important for the legitimacy of the system that the counting process is also easily understood. Also, preference voting itself, tends to favour centrist candidates....(more)
  • May 28 - Flexibility Is The Key To A Good Voting System My proposal is that every elector gets one vote for one candidate and the top candidates in votes are elected to the seats. So if there are 16 MPs in a county, the 16 candidates with the most votes are elected. The more I look into the practicalities of this, the more I like it. It is very proportional and very easy to understand. The candidates with the most votes are elected. No complicated formulas or party lists. No safe seats, expensive boundary reviews or 2 classes of MP. And most of all no silly results with parties amassing millions of votes for little or no MPs. The clever part is...(more)
  • May 25 - All Voting Systems Are Crazy (Except Mine). Currently with our voting system of first-past-the-post (FPTP), the number of seats a party receives bears little relation to their number of votes. In the 2010 election campaign, the polls briefly showed the Lib Dems on the most support, yet they were predicted to finish a poor third in seats. The third placed Labour party were predicted to get most seats. In this general election 5 million votes delivered just 2 seats out of 650 for the Greens and Ukip but 1.5 million votes delivered 56 to the SNP. Not to forget we now regularly get "majority" government on 30 something percent of the...(more)
  • May 22 - Fair Past The Post What most voters want. 1. A Local MP. You vote for one candidate that represents your local area and is directly accountable to voters at a geographical level similar to now. 2. Simplicity. You have one vote by placing a X next to the candidate of your choice. The candidates with the most votes are elected. 3. Fairness. The number of seats is in line with the number of votes. Our present system of first-past-the-post, delivers on the first two principles, but not the last one. Basically what people seem to want is a proportional version of first-past-the-post and it is a possibility. A...(more)
  • May 14 - What Is A Tory? Like the Guardian's Suzanne Moore, my parents were "working class Tories". Not lifelong Tories, like her parents, but intermittant Tories. I particularly remember they voted Thatcher in 1979 (and later regretted it). They voted for pretty much every party available from there on in. Liberal/SDP throughout the 80s, Blair in the 90s, BNP, even Green, then finally UKIP. This seems completely baffling and irrational from the point of view of a political anorak like myself. As Suzanne Moore says, it is easy to sneer. Are all Tories politically uninformed and/or selfish? I have many friends from...(more)
  • May 13 - My General Election Prediction Was Completely Wrong. Yeah. I know. I got the general election completely wrong (though I did ok in my council election predictions). I think I can safely say I wasn't the only one to get the general election result wrong. Some of you might remember that on a 2pt LAB lead, I predicted the following Westminster seats. LAB 279 CON 269 SNP 47 LDEM 25 UKIP 6 GRN 1 OTH 23 Whereas the actual result was. LAB 232 CON 331 SNP 56 LDEM 8 UKIP 1 GRN 1 OTH 21 Even on a slight Tory lead, I was confident both Labour and Tory would be in the range 260-290 and probably less than 20 seats apart. My biggest errors (apart from...(more)
  • May 11 - People Want To Choose Local Candidates And Ensure A Party's Seats Match Its Voteshare I think the solution to this problem is to have a hybrid voting system. Half of MPs elected in constituencies as now, half by a regional "open list" system where we vote for a regional candidate. You walk into the polling station and you are ticked off the address book by the officials. You are given your constituency ballot paper with it's official stamp and you are directed into the private polling booth (as is the case now). Now for the differences. You get two votes, one for your constituency MP and one for a new regional MP. You place an X by your chosen constituency candidate and fold...(more)
  • Mar 24 - Analysis: Individual Electoral Registration Could Swing 16 Seats For The Tories Individual Electoral Registration (IER) came into effect across the UK from July 2014. IER places the onus on the individual to register to vote rather than by household registration as before. It also places new burdens on individuals to produce proof of ID. Every year, electors will need to check to see if they have been removed from the electoral roll, or not added to it, and will need to re-register with NI number and date of birth. This particularly affects "attainers" - (those turning 18), students or anyone who changes address. Proponents claim this will improve the accuracy of the...(more)
  • Feb 21 - My Predictions For The Brighton & Hove Council Elections 2015 In 2011, I underestimated how many seats the Greens would gain. In particular I didn't foresee the Green gains from the Tories in Withdean and Central Hove. I also underestimated how badly the Tories would do. They lost 8 seats when I thought they might only lose 3. And May 2011 was not a bad time nationally for the Tories. They were riding high with decent poll leads over Labour and the coalition was in a honeymoon period (difficult to imagine this, I know). There are some strange demographics going on in Brighton and Hove. There is a huge churn of voters in the central wards. As much as...(more)
  • Jan 29 - A Green Citizen's Income. There has been criticism of the Green proposals for a Citizen Income (CI). How will it be funded? Does it really help the poorest? It's actually all very simple. What's complicated is the costly and inefficient welfare system it replaces. The Green proposals are to implement a £72 a week payment to all adult citizens, and a lesser amount to children. There have been claims (notably by Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics) that this will "cost" £280bn per year. So first a quick sum. £72 x 52 weeks x 50m [adult population] equals £187bn This is the approximate yearly amount of...(more)
  • Jan 15 - I've Seen The Future Of Low Public Spending... 11,000 Miles Away. Unaffordable housing, dire public transport, crumbling roads and infrastructure, scandalous road deaths, rising crime, desperate rising inequality and a dearth of decent paying jobs. The UK? How about New Zealand! Perhaps not the image you might think of about the land of the Hobbit and the Maori. Of course New Zealand has wondrous abundant countryside and is well worth a visit (if you don't mind lots of driving). But for a country with an abundance of natural wealth, it isn't half in a mess. Add in unaffordable healthcosts and dire TV and radio to the above list and you might understand why...(more)
  • Jan 06 - Can We Define Cameronism? As, hopefully, David Cameron's reign as PM hits it's final furlong. I'd like to look deep into it's murky backwaters. I'd like to find the defining ideology of the man, and his schizophrenic government. Not just in terms of two parties in coalition, but of the conflicting ideologies of the man himself. When the Labour party ran their shortlived and underplayed party political broadcast of a cartoon Cameron chameleon morphing from one political theme to the next, they were closer than they realised to nailing his defining characteristics. And to be fair to Cameron, they are not all bad. His...(more)
  • Jan 03 - The 2010 and 2015 General Elections Will Dispel A Lot Of Untruths About Coalition Government In 2015 we are likely to get a second consecutive hung parliament. And without radical and controversial boundary changes, that are due to come in in 2018, we could get a third or even more. We were told by proponents of our current voting system that this could only happen under proportional systems. We were also told that coalition government was unstable and couldn't be long lasting or provide "strong" or radical government. As we near the end of five years of one of the most radical governments ever, we find other myths about coalition are dismissed too. We were told coalition would...(more)
  • Jan 03 - How Easy Would It Be For Labour & The SNP To Do A Deal? With the same boundaries as 2010 and a multitude of amateur psephologists on the internet, this May general election is looking like being the most analysed ever. If most analysts are right we are heading for a very messy hung parliament with maybe 3 or 4 party co-operation needed to garner a majority. Both Labour and the Tories could end up between 265 and 290 seats. With the Lib Dems likely to be reduced to twenty something seats, this would mean the big two having to look elsewhere to make up a majority. Tories have been sounding out the Ulster Unionists and would make an offer to the...(more)
  • Jan 02 - Revised Predictions for 2015 General Election In May last year, I had a stab at predicting how many seats each party would win in the coming general election. The unforeseen (by me) rise of the SNP in Scotland has completely thrown out my predictions. I also accept that my broad brush approach to universal swings was too rough an instrument as perhaps universal swings are too generous to Labour. Lord Ashcroft's constituency polling gives some more pointers as to what is happening in the marginals. I gave predictions for scenarios ranging from a 6 point Tory lead to a 6 point Labour lead. The current Labour 2 point lead suggested a 40...(more)
  • Dec 28 - Democrats Need To Make The Most Of 2015. It Will Be The Last Hung Parliament For A Generation. In the 2010 general election campaign, the Lib Dems campaigned against austerity and tuition fees, but they also campaigned for more democracy. Sadly on all these issues they have done the opposite in government. Those of us hoping for constitutional improvements have been shocked. This 2015 election could be the last chance for smaller parties to have a say. All of the following issues will make it harder to challenge the status quo of the big two parties. As a democrat, the last thing we needed was bigger constituencies, yet from 2018 we will get them as seat numbers fall from 650 to...(more)
  • Oct 09 - UK Democracy Has Failed 1. A constituency MP is accountable. 2. Single party government is decisive. 3. One person, one vote, it must be fair. 4. The candidate with the most votes wins, this is a simple system. 5. Our hereditary and unelected Lords are best at scrutinising our elected chamber. All of the above are used to defend our present system. All are false. 1. Most constituents do not vote for their MP or even know their name. Yet 70% to 85% of seats do not change hands. 2. Our governments are slower at making decisions than those abroad and less likely to think long term. 3. The value of your vote is...(more)
  • Sep 19 - The elephant in the room is proportional representation. Westminster politicians rarely look worried. Why would they when 70% have got jobs for life as long as they keep their party happy. They are effectively immune from public opinion. Since the universal franchise, only around 15% of seats on average change hands at an election, and never more than 30%. 70% of MPs have more to fear from boundary changes than voters. Local government is increasingly about entrenched one party states in many areas. Not that that matters much with power so sucked into Westminster. We are the most centralised state in Europe, with stagnant local government and...(more)
  • Sep 14 - Scotland: Vote YES For A Better World A fundamental power of an independent state is control over its taxes. The UK is one of the most centralised states in the world. With nearly all taxation controlled from Westminster. If there is a No vote next week then that is unlikely to change. Constitutional powers such as voting systems and at what level of government control over taxation are set, are portrayed in the media as secondary issues that don't really excite the public. But something has happened in Scotland over the last 2 years in the build up to their independence referendum. The public have got excited over the...(more)

  • Recent Posts at http://electoralreformer.blogspot.com

    • Mar 18 - Labour Leader On Why He Wants a YES to AV on May 5th Ed Miliband | Speech to Labour Yes to AV campaign | 16 March 2011 "Yes to a system where more voices are heard and more votes are counted. Yes to AV." It's a pleasure to be here at the launch of the Labour Yes to AV campaign. Today I want to explain why the Alternative vote will help us build a fairer and better politics I respect those in our party who are against this change. But I believe the referendum on May Fifth is a chance to change our politics. I believe a yes vote to AV is the best way to be consistent with: -- Labour's history of campaigning for change -- our wish for a more...(more)
    • Feb 23 - 10 Facts About The Alternative Vote (AV) 1. If you have ever said to someone going to the shops - "get me a coke or if they haven't got that I'll have a lemonade', then you understand the principle behind AV voting. It only sounds complicated if you explain it badly, which the No campaigners are doing on purpose (finding the most wordy academic text they can). 2. Simply rank the candidates in order 1,2,3 etc. You can put as few or as many preferences as you want. If you only want to choose one candidate, like you HAVE to under our present system first-past-the-post (FPTP), you can. The difference is that FPTP ONLY lets you choose...(more)
    • Jan 24 - BBC Act Strange Over Electoral 'Reform' According to today's Independent, the BBC has told its journalists not to use the word 'reform' when talking about ...err.. well..ahem!..electoral reform. Apparently reform is too positive a word that compromises their impartial approach when talking about the forthcoming referendum on the Alternative Vote. As Yes To Fairer Votes have pointed out, the BBC use the word 'reform' in other debates e.g. the coalition's 'NHS reform' and education 'reforms'. A YES spokesman continues:- "This is ridiculous, but consistent, behaviour from the management of the BBC," said Paul Sinclair, the...(more)
    • Jan 06 - Fact: The Alternative Vote IS More Proportional! Daniel Finkelstein writing in the Times asks why are supporters of PR campaigning in favour of a YES vote in the forthcoming May referendum on the Alternative Vote. He claims this is strange because AV is not any more proportional than the current first-past-the-post system and that smaller parties are still just as disadvantaged (if not more so). The answer is that in practise AV has proven more proportional when used in Australia and (apart from 1997) all the projections of recent UK general elections show a more proportional result using AV (see the British Election Survey by Essex...(more)
    • Nov 15 - Contradictions In The No Campaign Less than 6 months to go to the planned referendum on May 5th 2011 on how we elect our MPs, and the strategies of the 'yes' and 'no' campaigns to the Alternative Vote are starting to become clearer. The 'Yes' campaign are pinning their hopes on being positive, 'stronger on the ground' and organising and recruiting as many activists as possible to create a good 'word of mouth' momentum to put the 'positive message out there'. It could work, however, I worry that the official 'No' campaign are stealing a march on us by 'outblogging' and 'out-twittering' the official 'Yes' campaign and the...(more)
    • Nov 04 - Why Change The Voting System? At present, the way we count votes in elections (the voting system) means that the percentage of seats allocated to each party bears little resemblence to their percentage of the vote. For example, in the last general election, the Tories got 36% of the votes, but 47% of the seats, while the Lib Dems got 23% of the vote, but just 9% of the seats. The reason this happens is because instead of a general electon being a genuine 'national' election, it is in fact a collection of hundreds of 'mini' elections in a marked out area (each called a constituency) held across the whole country at...(more)
    • Jul 12 - Will The Coalition 'Abolish' Caroline Lucas? I think the boundary changes being proposed by the government could make Caroline Lucas's re-election problematic. There is going to be massive changes to the boundaries to reduce the number of MPs from 650 to between 585 and 600. An extra 6,000 electors are going to be added on average to each constituency and 50-65 constituencies are going to 'disappear' altogether! This is the Tory price for the AV referendum. Maybe Brighton Pavilion will be one that 'disappears' and be replaced by a 'Brighton' constituency that incorporates Kemptown (without the coastal bits of Peacehaven etc). Or more...(more)
    • Jul 02 - The Case For Electoral Change Did you know that only about 5%-10% of seats change hands between boundary reviews? The biggest 'change' elections (1945, 1966, 1983, 1997, 2010) happen after a major boundary review (even then only around 20% of seats tend to change hands). It took nearly 70% of voters to vote against the Conservatives in 1997 to finally remove them from power after 18 long years, and over 70% of voters to remove Labour after 13 years in power. It has become clear to me that whoever draws the boundaries has more power than the actual voters under our present system. This is why first-past-the-post is only...(more)
    • Jul 01 - Voting System Summaries I have recently written three posts on the vagaries and superlatives of first-past-the-post, the single-transferable-vote and list-PR. The purpose of which was not to give a comprehensive guide to these voting systems - wikipedia and the Electoral Reform Society carry out that task. No, what I wanted to do was to highlight what I think are the most important points that sometimes seem to get sidelined in the debate. There are of course many other electoral systems in use and the theoretical possibilities are in fact infinite. It is a relatively new science that involves fairly basic...(more)
    • Jun 18 - List PR List based proportional representation is the system used by nearly all developed nations in the world, except the Anglo-Saxon nations. There are variations and hybridised versions that meld with first-past-the-post while keeping the proportionality, but basically modern democracies have list PR. The most equal, prosperous, democratic, environmentally friendly, politically engaged and least corrupt nations use List PR. The disadvantage is that there is less geographic link between elected representatives and where some toff has drawn some lines on a map. This also means that boundary...(more)
    • Jun 16 - Single Transferable Vote In the second of my series on voting systems (after questioning whether first-past-the-post even qualifies as a democratic electoral system), I now turn my unique eye to the single-transferable-vote. STV is the favourite voting system of a lot of reformers, most influentially the Electoral Reform Society and the Liberal Democrats. STV is the voting system used in Ireland, Malta, the Australian Senate (upper house) and...err that's it!* (*Oh, to be fair, it is now also used in Scottish and some New Zealand local government elections as well). STV is listed amongst the family of voting...(more)
    • Jun 15 - First-Past-The-Post This is the first of a series of posts with my unique take on different voting systems. I start with the favourite system of dictators the world over - first-past-the-post. First-past-the-post is used to elect councillors to local government in England and Wales and of course to elect our MPs to the UK Parliament in Westminster. It is also used in Canada, India and the US, and a host of other semi-democracies and dictatorships around the world. For those who don't know how it works, in general elections the country is divided into a number of areas called constituencies with each electing...(more)
    • Jun 10 - It is First Past The Post That Is Weak And Indecisive. This Blogger thinks he has found the perfect electoral system - basically tweaking STV to avoid coalition government, but is coalition government as bad as the right-wing mythmakers make out it is? Did you know that the countries with the smallest levels of borrowing have coalition governments? And the highest levels of democracy. I would also argue coalition government is more decisive not less. Think of the wartime coalition in this country but also look at the long-term infrastructure in European countries that have had long-term coalition government - look at the quality of their public...(more)
    • Jun 05 - FPTP, AV, PR, Hung Parliaments Now Likely Whatever Voting System Is Used Via Mark Thompson's blog I have been alerted to this excellent examination of FPTP (first-past-the-post) by Prof John Curtice in Parliamentary Briefing. John is the psephologist from Strathclyde University who in 2005 said the most likely result of the next election would be a hung parliament. Basically, it is getting increasingly difficult to achieve one party rule under first-past-the-post for 3 main reasons - 1. the declining share of vote of the two main parties. 2. the dwindling number of marginals, and 3.  the ineqitable treatment of the 2 main parties. John's analysis sadly...(more)
    • May 17 - Take Back Parliament London Rally 15th May 2010 A video has been posted of the fair votes protest in London on Saturday. There were events around the country. Sadly I was working that day so couldn't join in.
    • May 14 - All Electoral Systems Are Rubbish: Discuss. Tom Harris (Labour MP for ultra safe seat Glasgow South) has taken to defending first-past-the-post by admitting it is rubbish but that so are all other electoral systems. While it is true that all electoral systems have defects, Tom is using the standard multinational/conglomerate method used by big oil, tobacco, food and pharmaceutical companies etc, of muddying the evidential waters which is known as 'manufacturing doubt'. Ben Goldacre talks about this in his book Bad Science in relation to the 'nutritional industry' and in relation to vitamin pill conglomerates. The Tory press ...(more)
    • May 13 - 2010 General Election Stat Attack Taken from Pippa Norris's excellent site - hope she doesn't mind.
    • May 13 - Pippa Norris - Excellent Take On Electoral Reform Here is a great scatter graph on the relationship between democracy and electoral systems. Pippa also explains why electoral change can occur. As she explains, it is a shame that the referendum in the UK doesn't ask if people want reform and then put forward a range of options rather than just offering the one system. But when it comes to the Tories, beggars cannot be choosers, this is about as most as we could have possibly hoped for coming from them. I highly recommend Pippa's blog.
    • May 13 - Will Labour Campaign For AV: Response To Mark Thompson I think it all depends on which leader they get. As far as I know, of the potential candidates only Jon Cruddas would support electoral reform. And he is unlikely to win. Ed Balls and Ed Miliband are definitely against change, and I imagine David Miliband is too. I suspect Alistair Darling is against as well. I imagine Labour will largely campaign against despite their AV pledge in the manifesto, with a number of notables campaigning for - such as Alan Johnson and Peter Hain. I think Labour's position on this will also depend on what is planned for constituency boundaries. On the...(more)
    • May 13 - Why FPTP Stinks, Another Reply To Tom Harris Tom, your seat is so safe it is bad for democracy. I'm sure you don't think your seat is safe because of you, do you? You and I both know that anyone could win that seat for Labour unless they were a mass murderer or something (even then they might hold on). Don't you think it funny that the biggest defenders of FPTP tend to come from seats like yours? Anyway, what do you think of the graph showing a correlation between the seats the largest party wins and higher government debt? Also the Harvard study showing that PR run countries are more equal (which in turn means less crime, less social...(more)
    • May 13 - Why Constituency Boundaries Are As Important As Electoral Reform  This is in reply to this excellent post here by peezedtee. PZT: Very good post. It seems incredible today to think Tories were so pro-PR in the 70s, there are virtually none today. Kellner's anaylsis is good, there are two problems with FPTP for the Tories. The first is the minor problem of surburban drift where Tory constituency size grows between boundary reviews. Tory constituencies tend to have a few thousand extra constituents. A big thing is made of this and 'equalising constituencies' by the Tories, as if this will solve their problem but in fact it will make less than half a...(more)
    • May 12 - My Response To Tom Harris Tom, there are very simple answers to your points. Countries that have PR and coalition government actually have more stable and long-term government – look at the financial prudence, better public service provision, environmentalism, higher development aid budgets and political engagement of Scandanavia, Germany and other PR countries. Both AV and STV makes it more difficult for extremists to be elected. The BNP got over 500,000 votes in this country at this election. This is one of the highest figures for an extreme right party across the whole of Europe. The political vacuum of...(more)
    • May 12 - The AV Referendum I have started this blog to concentrate on reform of our electoral system and to campaign towards a likely referendum on the Alternative Vote - which after the recent coalition agreement between the Conservatives and Lib Dems, may well happen in the next 18 months. My aim will be to outline as simply as possible different electoral systems and their impact on results. This will also be a place where I will provide analysis of the current first-past-the-post system and its peculiarities in terms of results. I find it interesting that there are few if any free sites providing detailed...(more)

    • Recent Posts at http://yes2av.blogspot.com

      • Feb 23 - 10 Facts About The Alternative Vote (AV) 1. If you ever said to someone going to the shops - "get me a coke or if they haven't got that I'll have a lemonade', then you understand the principle behind AV voting. It only sounds complicated if you explain it badly, which the No campaigners are doing on purpose (finding the most wordy academic text they can). 2. Simply rank the candidates in order 1,2,3 etc. You can put as few or as many preferences as you want. If you only want to choose one candidate, like you HAVE to under our present system first-past-the-post (FPTP), you can. The difference is that FPTP ONLY lets you choose one...(more)
      • Sep 13 - Why Say YES to AV? For the first time in our history, voters in the UK are to be given a choice of voting system. The planned referendum will take place on 5th May 2011. The Alternative Vote will ensure that every MP has at least 50% support in their constituency. Our present system (First-Past-The-Post) only ensures the largest minority elect our MPs. This can mean as little as 1 in 4 votes counting and the majority of voters being ignored. The Alternative Vote is as simple as 1,2,3. Instead of just placing an X next to a candidate as at present, the voter gets to rank the candidates in order of their...(more)