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AVing a laugh, with a graph

16 Mar 11 | Re: Party political foot-shooting

I’ve just had a Lib Dem leaflet through the door and as usual it has that stupid graph about how the Tories can’t win here. This graph has been a plank of Lib Dem campaigning in Cambridge for many, many years - as long as I have lived here, in fact. I am so fed up with it I can’t tell you. I’ve had it up to here. When I wrote that, I was holding my hand some way above my head.

Yet after the referendum on May 5th, with any luck I’ll never see that graph again. Why? Because Alternative Vote makes all the “X can’t win here” arguments utterly redundant. That’s the best thing about Alternative Vote, in fact - you can vote for the person you want to win, instead of the one you want out of the two or three who you think have a chance. In other words, all parties, no matter how established, have to tell you why they’re better than all the others instead of writing most of the opposition off as no-hopers.

So that’s great. What I don’t understand is why the Lib Dems, who obviously absolutely love campaigning on the “ignore everyone but us and one other party, who we’re better than” ticket, would push so hard for the nation to change to a system that precludes it.

Makes no sense, does it? It’s actually sad - they made all these compromises to get into the coalition, and the one concession they got in return will, as far as I can tell, actually hurt them - but they’re mindlessly campaigning for Yes to AV none the less. Poor, poor Lib Dems. But they won’t be getting my sympathy vote.

Posted by OLIVIA PRIMROSE at 13:34

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