Monday, May 09, 2011

Gracious loser

AV lost 67.9% to 32.1%. I'd like to be a gracious loser and declare that - hey the people have spoken and made up their minds to stick to FPTP. I'd really like to, but I can't.

The reason I can't is that I'm willing to bet a large stack of money that the majority voted No not because they'd carefully considered the arguments for both sides and come to a reasoned conclusion; but because they wanted to punish Nick Clegg. Because they believed the outright lies and fabrications thrown about by the No2AV campaign.

Is this arrogant of me; elitist even? Perhaps, but I have to wonder what the result would have been had the political parties not stuck their oars in. If the No2AV poster campaign had been placed under the purview of the Advertising Standards Authority.

If the people had been given just the plain facts from both sides shorn of the emotional rhetoric would they have voted for AV? I'd like to think so, but who can say as that's never going to happen.

4 comments:

walkerno5 said...

To be honest, I think most people didn't understand it and wouldn't have bothered to try. The Yes campaign needed a proper leadership and someone to make the argument in a way that people could understand; unfortunately the vast majority of people simply didn't want to understand it.

Those who did vote were, as usual, the well organised and extremely efficient Tory core vote, who wouldn't vote for change if they'd paid a shilling for a sixpence.

FlipC said...

42% overall with only N. Ireland and Scotland getting a turnout over 50%.

I wonder what the turnout was for those areas not running a district/parish election at the same time?

I don't quite agree that people didn't want to understand it; more that they were passively taking everything in. They didn't want or expect to have to investigate matters for themselves they wanted someone else to condense it down into a easily digestible form then give it to them.

Sadly the majority purveyors of such are the newspapers. With the Sun, the Daily Mail, and Daily Express all taking a stance against AV how could we win?

Anonymous said...

Man, fuck Clegg.

Three words from him on the matter did more than anything to sink the YES!!!! campaign:

"Miserable little compromise."

Did he honestly think he was going to get away with having said that, and then front a campaign for it? You got the result you deserved.

FlipC said...

Which just goes to show the No campaign's result. He never said that in the context to which it was quoted and even gave an answer

Clegg claimed his remark did not refer to the voting system itself but to the previous Labour's government's attempt to shoehorn in a promise of AV that had little chance of being delivered.

He said: "I've had this a lot. What I was actually referring to was Gordon Brown's suggestion, very late in the day in his government, of making changes that everyone knew would not come into effect ...

"I was talking about the Labour party's offer in the latter days of its government which it had no way of implementing."