Isn’t FPTP meant to give an inbuilt advantage to Labour over the Tories?

Can they honestly be surprised to find that Conservatives might lie sometimes? That Tories might sell their granny for an archaic voting system that gives them an unfair advantage?

Damn that pesky Tory, Dan Hodges eh?

@ 1 John

“Isn’t FPTP meant to give an inbuilt advantage to Labour over the Tories?”

A significant one, at least with the current voting spread. But that’s nothing compared to the advantage it gives both the Tories and Labour over everyone else. Most Tories opposing AV probably didn’t want to lose the two-party lock on Westminster that FPTP creates. I think the other Tory concern was that the “natural alliance” between Labour and the Lib Dems would hold true, and that they’d be indefinitely relegated to opposition against a left-wing coalition.

Its prime effect is to give the Big Two a massive advantage over everybody else. Its secondary effect is that it usually gives one of them (recently Labour, historically mostly the Tories, likely to revert to them) a smaller advantage over the other.

Worth checking out the brief on electoral reform in The Economist last week (28 April):

“In the 2010 general election, one Lib Dem MP was elected for every 120,000 Lib Dem votes, one Tory MP for every 35,000 Conservative votes and one Labour MP for every 33,400 votes for that party. . . Conservatives tend to ascribe this bias almost wholly to the fact that Labour-held seats usually contain fewer registered voters than Tory ones. Between boundary reviews, that gap tends to grow inexorably, due to long-term population shifts away from (Labour-leaning) inner cities to (Tory-leaning) suburbs. This explains why Tories typically push for frequent reviews of constituency boundaries, and Labour resists.”
http://www.economist.com/node/18617926

This (non-partisan) brief usefully analyses and debunks many prevailing myths.

Can I point out here that many of us who opposed AV (which hasn’t been declared to have lost yet…) did so because we thought it was a bad idea – nothing to do with partisan politics. The more reactionary elements – the bulk of the Conservative party, much of the ‘traditional’ Labour party – unsurprisingly looked at the novelty and judged that it had no value.

And had the Yes campaign done their job properly and sold AV (so that the only intelligent arguments for it that I saw or heard didn’t come from a friend of mine over a pint), No would have had to have engaged. It seems a bit odd that a campaign is blaming its rivals for not raising their game above the level the campaign was running at anyway…

To be blunt, saying ‘its really unfair, you played dirty’ never goes down well with the electorate. It was always naive to think the ‘no’ campaign were going to be honest ever since they hired Sinclair, and it was stupid to expect Cameron to stay out of it.

The fact is, the yes campaign was crap. In elections you win some, you lose some. We lost (unless every opinion poll turns out to be wrong). Lets move on and figure out how to get PR on the agenda, and how to win a campaign on it.

@ 6 Watchman

“It seems a bit odd that a campaign is blaming its rivals for not raising their game above the level the campaign was running at anyway…”

That’s hardly accurate. The main issue is that the No campaign used outright lies (“it means some people get eight times as many votes”, “It’ll cost £250m because of these voting machines we made up”) because they apparently couldn’t come up with any convincing arguments when sticking to the truth. The bullshit on those posters would not have been accepted if they were advertising food or banking services, but apparently political lies get a free pass.

The referendum WAS stolen (although there’s no reason to assume that Yes would have won in a fair fight). There’s no point pro-AV politicians whinging about that, but they should perhaps be working to ensure that such hugely anti-democratic practices are made enforcably illegal in future, perhaps with criminal penalties.

You should, perhaps, also consider the possibility that self-righteous outrage is the default setting for many Liberal Democrats.

@ 9 oldandrew

“You should, perhaps, also consider the possibility that self-righteous outrage is the default setting for many Liberal Democrats.”

As opposed to the calm and self-effacing nature of Tory and Labour MPs, you mean? The Lib Dems always struck me as being the most chilled out of the three, although that’s probably because they didn’t have any power to worry about.

@7: “Lets move on and figure out how to get PR on the agenda, and how to win a campaign on it.”

It will be very tough to do that since the Conservatives and a large chunk of Labour MPs want to preserve FPTP because it has an overall bias against third parties and because it almost always leads to single-party majority governments.

The two-main parties have a powerful in-built dislike of coalitions, partly because coalitions have never worked well in Britain except in war-time – in WW2, Churchill left his Labour colleagues in the war cabinet to get on with the home front while he dealt with the course of the war and foreign affairs.

The fact is that coalition governments were the norm in W Germany with its PR electoral system and that yielded stable government with low inflation, a generous welfare state on the model of the European Social Market Economy and mitbestimmung (co-determination) – the last two were more than enough to make any true Conservative shudder at the very thought.

I’ll bet not many have experienced the vast difference in corporate values between Japanese car companies (in Britain and Japan) and American companies in Britain like Ford over staff dining facilities. Japanese company managers really can’t understand why it is considered essential for managers to have separate dining facilities from assembly line workers.

To hear Lib Dems bleat about cynical campaigning is such unspeakable hypocricy that it actually makes me smile.

At local level at least, the Lib Dems nearly always play very, very dirty — just ask the heroic Peter Tatchell!

@ 10 Chaise

Isn’t this the same oldandrew who always expresses such self-righteous outrage about how biased this site is against the Roman Catholic church… and got “owned” in previous threads about the Castrillon Hoyos affair…?

He certainly lacks a sense of irony…..

Watching these results?

70% No so far with Yes not winning a single district. The ‘progressive majority’ shown to be a myth invented by Ed’s spin doctors and pushed by Lefty bloggers. Stunning results for the conservatives and the centre-right. The number of Tory Councillors is going up! Unprecedented in circumstances like this.

I also notice the Labour Party has been destroyed by the Celtic Nationalists up north.

Progressive majority?

To hear Lib Dems bleat about cynical campaigning is such unspeakable hypocricy that it actually makes me smile.

Well, quite.

@15 Turn out is piss poor, perhaps the progressive majority stayed at home or spoiled their ballots because they had nowt worthy of their vote.
Not that those making gains give much of a fuck mind. If 3 blokes and a half starved dog were the only ones in the entirety of England to vote, you can bet your ass the Tories and Labour would still be happy with that arrangement.

The best bit is that when asked about how it will affect the coalition, the LibDems then say it won’t change a thing – so why whine about the nasty Tories in the first place?

@17

I suspect its more likely the ‘progressive majority’ simply doesn’t exist. There was never even the slightest shred of support for electoral reform outside the pages of the Guardian. We are seeing the real world come crashing down on the heads of CiFers.

Don’t think its fair Libs taking all this flak. The vote only happened because of them. Labour had a parliamentary dictatorship and never offered a vote on AV.

@ 19 Tory

“I suspect its more likely the ‘progressive majority’ simply doesn’t exist. There was never even the slightest shred of support for electoral reform outside the pages of the Guardian. We are seeing the real world come crashing down on the heads of CiFers.”

For “real world” see “your private fantasy version of reality”, given that AV and FPTP were neck-and-neck in the polls for most of the race. You seem to be one of the many people who assumes that everyone except for a few lunatics shares your view on everything.

As for the Celtic Nationalists: no such party exists. You may be thinking of the centre-left and fairly progressive SNP. You’re welcome.

@17

There’s plenty of evidence that a substantial proportion of the progressive majority voted No for reasons that elude rationality – because it’s not proper PR, to stick one up Clegg, etc.

The Lie Dems are sooooooooooo naive when it comes to power. The Labour party aren’t much better mind.. Cameron lied about not raising VAT, and his claim to support the NHS is another lie as he tries to flog it off on the cheap. Clegg is so stupid, it was obvious the tories would play nasty on AV. They are the nasty party, and they exist to push the policies that benefit their financial backers. ( no more lectures from scummy tory trolls about union money please. ) You never do deals with brownshirts. You never enter govt with them and you never trust them.

The brown shirts are the most ruthless political force in western Europe, and have to be fought constantly. They believe they have a divine right to power, and many of their supporters don’t recognise other political parties as being even British. They are the zombie party, they never die. You never do deals with them, and you never ever help them.

Not quite sure how many times Clegg has to be smacked in the face before he understands this. Cameron for example was even prepared to use his dying child in his hideous campaign to convince the public that he supported the NHS. This man is vile lying sack of shit, and Clegg if he does not understand that now is beyond help.

@ 19 tory

Anyone that can do simple arithmetic can see that the progressive majority exists; the reason why the current bunch of ideologically bankrupt shysters is still in power are many and various; sadly the reasons do include irrationality on the part of some of the electorate some of the time. Go figure.

Still at least the Scottish results give us something to be happy about… a left of centre party taking votes and seats from Labour, the LD’s and the Tories!

Should have hoist them by their own petard by giving 3 options: Yes, No, and Hell No.

@19: “There was never even the slightest shred of support for electoral reform outside the pages of the Guardian.”

Ignorance is strength.

I have beside me the report on Electoral Reform of the Hnsard Society in June 1976 by a commission under the chairmanship of Lord Blake, a distinguished academic historian, the author of a standard biography of Disraeli and a declared supporter of the Conservative Party.

The gist of the recommendation was that Britain should adopt an electoral system similar to that of West Germany in which voters at general elections vote for a candidate in single-member constituencies and also, separately, for a party.

The constituency candidates for half the seats in the Bundestag are elected on the FPTP system. The party vote is then applied to take candidates from party lists (subject to a minimum threshhold vote to keep out lunatic fringe candidiates) until the eventual composition of the Bundestag reflects the balance of party preference votes. The outcome in practice has almost always been a coalition government.

The Jenkins’ Commission, appointed by Blair in 1997, recommended AV+, which is somewhat similar in intent to that of the previous Hansard Society in 1976:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenkins_Commission_(UK)

Worth checking out this non-partisan brief on electoral reform in The Economist last week (28 April) which debunks many of the prevailing myths:
http://www.economist.com/node/18617926

The best bit is that when asked about how it will affect the coalition, the LibDems then say it won’t change a thing – so why whine about the nasty Tories in the first place?

Well as Richard Seymour /a> pointed out today, we now finally know why the Lib Dems went into government. As Paddy Ashdown says:

How could it affect the coalition when they fully believe in Osborne’s sweeping cuts?

The overall point of voting reform was to make politicians more accountable. For example, if someone says that they know that a certain country was a certain type of weapon and it doesn’t, then they should be out immediately. However politicians do not want anything like this kind of accountability and most do not want even some fairy footsteps on the road to that kind of accountability.

A year ago there was an assumption in some quarters that the LibDems would spearhead changes that would increase accountability. In those twelve months that belief has evaporated. The LibDems have neither used their position in the coalition to improve accountability nor have they made a strong case for steps towards a change in a voting system to help bring that about. The LibDem position on Primary Health Care Trusts is supposed to be to change their name and make them more accountable, but they are part of a coalition that wants to abolish PCTs completely and they claim that this is the same thing. Very few people are going to be convinced by Clegg that he wants more accountability, and his party hasn’t been making a strong case for this type of accountability.

So now we know: politicians are not going to be keen on makeing politicians more accountable. We’re going to have to fight for that ourselves.

“The best bit is that when asked about how it will affect the coalition, the LibDems then say it won’t change a thing – so why whine about the nasty Tories in the first place?”

This is the bit that drives you to despair. If the Lie Dems allow Moron Clegg to just jump back in with the brownshirts and merrily go along with everything they want, then they are barking mad..

The lie Dems need to put a block on things now. The public does not want the NHS flogged off to Cameron’s dodgy financial backers, Clegg must be told that he has to start saying no to brownshirt policy. But then he should never have gone into partnership with them in the first place.

Watch out for the tory media being really nice to clegg in the next few weeks to try to convince him to continue being their patsy. Clegg is sooooooooooo stupid he will fall for it.

“Anyone that can do simple arithmetic can see that the progressive majority exists”

Are you referring to the polls showing majority support for the death penalty, the Monarchy, immigration restrictions, hostility to EU integration?

Yes the majority of the country votes for left-leaning parties and yes, the public is undoubtedly to the left of the Tories on a lot of issues. But on many others they are to the right of Labour and the Lib Dems. The majority of the country is centrist, holding a mish-mash of left and right-wing views. Only a minority are consistent conservatives and progressives.

@ 28 Sally

Much as I may agree with the overall thrust of your point, I doubt they’ll be desperate to take advice from someone who calls them the “Lie Dems”. It doesn’t exactly suggest you have their best interests at heart.

@ 29 Richard

“Yes the majority of the country votes for left-leaning parties and yes, the public is undoubtedly to the left of the Tories on a lot of issues. But on many others they are to the right of Labour and the Lib Dems. The majority of the country is centrist, holding a mish-mash of left and right-wing views. Only a minority are consistent conservatives and progressives.”

I’m inclined to agree with this. Apart from anything else, “centrist” could almost be defined as “what people on average think”. Also, it’s a bit pointless arguing over who’s in the majority: numbers do not make you right, and nor do they necessarily put you in government.

On everything from council elections to the Royal Wedding, I don’t remember a time when the Left were so out of touch. I don’t think you chaps are really grasping this yet. Right now the Tories have more council seats than when they absolutely routed Labour in 2007.

‘Anyone that can do simple arithmetic can see that the progressive majority exists; the reason why the current bunch of ideologically bankrupt shysters is still in power are many and various; sadly the reasons do include irrationality on the part of some of the electorate some of the time. Go figure.’

The reason ‘shysters’ are still in power is because the electorate is irrational?

Will you be campaigning on that next time?

What’s a shyster? Is it someone who runs a coconut stall at a fair?
If so – what has that got to do with anything?

OP, Sue Marsh appears to be missing a basic point: Yes to AV was not a LibDem campaign.

Yes to AV was a non-party, cross-party venture. Response to the No to AV arguments should have been delivered in non-tribal fashion. Yes to AV didn’t know how to respond to the bizarre arguments erected against reform.

Yes to AV presented a few good arguments against FPTP. But many were arguments that supported PR, not AV. The argument for AV (a ridiculously modest reform) didn’t come across.

To suggest that LibDems failed to understand the AV campaign is mistaken. LibDems were only part of the team that ran it; and I certainly don’t want to create a blame culture about what went wrong; democrats who worked on Yes to AV will be working together on future non-party, cross-party campaigns.

@32: “I don’t remember a time when the Left were so out of touch.”

C’mon. Don’t you recall the 1983 general election which Labour went into with a manifesto (aptly) described by Gerald Kaufman as “the longest suicide note in history”?

Had Labour won we would be out of the “European Common Market”, the commanding heights of the economy would have been taken into public ownership and we would have unilaterally given up nuclear weapons – note that this was before Gorbachev had been elected general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.

Blair was first elected to Parliament on that manifesto. In the previous year, he had written a 22-page letter to Michael Foot:

“In the 22-page letter, the 29-year-old Mr Blair tells then Labour leader Michael Foot how reading Marx had ‘irreversibly altered’ his outlook. He also praises Tony Benn, agreeing with the left-winger’s analysis that Labour’s right-wing was bankrupt.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/5081798.stm

In the event, at the election, Thatcher’s majority in Parliament went up from 70 to 140 – asked at the time, I said I thought the majority would remain at about 70, to the digust of one party to that conversation.

The Yes and the No campaigns were both lamentable. And, frankly, the result either way would not have made a huge difference. Under AV, when the two major parties were more or less balanced. then some minor parties might get some representation; but AV would have magnified the Thatcher and Blair landslides…

The debate about PR will pick up within a couple of years…

Vote 2011: UK says ‘no’ to alternative vote

Nick Clegg is first out the stalls to declare ALL voting reform to be dead, not just the change to AV:

“I wish I could say this was a photo finish but it isn’t, the result is very clear. I’m a passionate supporter of political reform but when the answer is as clear as this, you have got to accept it.”

“This is a bitter blow for all those people, like me, who believe in the need for political reform.”

Perhaps Mr Clegg might reflect on the fact that reform for the sake of having a bit of reform doesn’t really translate well into passionate campaigning, so maybe if he’d stuck to his guns during the coalition discussions and made it STV or no deal, the yes campaign would have been a little less lukewarm and unenthusiastic. Course as we now know, Clegg et al were more interested in ministerial limos and firing civil servants than political reform.

@31 Chaise Guevara: “Apart from anything else, “centrist” could almost be defined as “what people on average think”.”

Electoral and political polling is piss poor (at least that which is openly published).

The centre ground favours the argument “serial murderers deserve capital punishment”, which is construed as a right wing position. The centre ground favours the argument “gay people deserve equal employment rights”, formerly a social liberal position but now the norm.

There is no “centre ground” on policy overall but there are liberal instincts. Current polls are not very good at measuring instinct. They ask blunt questions about policy and the questions are so crude that the respondents’ answers in aggregate are meaningless.

And we only get to see the aggregate numbers. We can’t break them down or cross analyse, to determine whether citizens who are concerned about climate change are also concerned about wind farms or nuclear power. We only get the information that suits the poll commissioner.

Clegg “This is a bitter blow for all those people, like me, who believe in the need for political reform.”

This guy is going to go down in history as one of the biggest political tossers to ever take office. Yea well done Nick. Give the tories their gerrymandered parliament before you find that out. But maybe after the election if you had not behaved lie a giggling bridesmaid at a wedding, and so desperately wanting to jump into bed with the best man you would not be in this mess..

You should have taken your time, told the tories that you wanted much more than the little compromise that you got. The naivety is frightening.

So what are you going to now then Nick? Privatise the NHS with call me Dave? I fear you and your morons have given the tories the next 20 years in power. Thanks a lot dipstick.

I have to agree with our Tory commentator here.

We are either SHIT at strategy, so we need to get a grip OR the public is inherently more right wing and we need to let it go?

You can go on and on but of you’re strategy WILL NOT change as it has shown with the AV game, then what’s the point to moan?

We care for the poor etc but what exactly do we do but debate with each other intellectually? When anyone mentions strategy, the left scream as if you’ve just killed their dog.

So what is it?

Is it for you or is it for them?

The right have always gotten a much better grasp on human behavior then the left because we HATE to actually get to know how people actually think or work. Or if we do research it, we do nothing about it.

Own it. What next? Maybe britain is an inherently right wing country. 27 million watching the royal wedding.

What’s the fight for?

I’m not saying to give up on people being equal but for god sake be more strategic in following through with your vision.

I say ‘your’ even though I am left because I have nothing in common with lefties who are so obsessed with their self righteous integrity that they NEVER see it coming.

Right-wing v left-wing on economic policies is but one way of measuring personal political preferences. But preferences can also be rated on another axis: libertarian v authoritarian, for example.

Try the test here and compare your placing with that of a selection of high-profile political leaders on the same axes:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis

I’ve done the test but won’t tell (yet) about the outcome – it wasn’t anywhere near Gordon Brown’s.

Other researchers have devised many other dimensions for measuring political preferences:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum#Other_proposed_dimensions

All this relates to the infamous science of focus group politics as practised by New Labour in the run up to the 1997 election. The aim was to select that bundle of policies (“the brand”) which will attract a majority of votes in an election regardless of old-fashioned stuff like legacy political principles. It worked in 1997. Between then and the election in 2005, Blair lost 4 million votes for Labour.

When was the last time the tories got 50% at a general election?

A fucking long time ago. Even at Thatcher’s height she was on 43% of the vote. So enough with all this right wing majority clap trap. The tories did not even get 50% of the vote in England at the last general election.

The big problem is the Right wing have a 24/7 megaphone which is the national media that projects everything to a right wing position. Far to many left of centre politicians will not admit the power of the media. Why do you think Blair and Cameron grovelled like the snakes they are before Murdoch to get his support?

There is an anti tory majority in this country, and there has been for the last 50 years. Until some one can figure out how to bring those groups together, then the tories will always have the edge. I have never understood why Blair /Clegg spend so much time trying to get a few tories to vote for them when there are millions of anti tory voters just wanting to be wooed.

@11 Bob B: It will be very tough to do that since the Conservatives and a large chunk of Labour MPs want to preserve FPTP because it has an overall bias against third parties and because it almost always leads to single-party majority governments.

This needn’t necessarily be an insuperable obstacle, given that less and less people identify with either of the big parties, a trend that’s been going on since the 1950s.

The No campaign was clearly going to be efficently evil from the moment they started announcing who they were hiring, what let us down was that the ‘yes’ campaign seemed to be fighting some different referendum where AV was a populist revolution which it’s actual benefits (real and worth shouting about) didn’t sync up well with.

Sure No lied about the 250 million, but everyone seemed to have that on their mind (it was usually the first thing you had to deal with when convincing someone). It’s a claim they started months ago and was clearly going to be the main attaction, how on earth did Yes not have a good counter for it? Like say, leaflets that show’d how much it actually cost rather than what Tony Robinson thinks? I can only assume there was a decision not to make our materials a reaction to theirs, but if so that was as bad call. We lost because no one was convinced it was an amazing idea, and that’d cost too much to try if it was only an OK idea. We can’t help what No did, Yes should have been better.

@43. sally: “When was the last time the tories got 50% at a general election?”

A long time ago I guess. And when was the last time that Sally managed a common front?

@44: “This needn’t necessarily be an insuperable obstacle, given that less and less people identify with either of the big parties, a trend that’s been going on since the 1950s.”

But the point is that the FPTP electoral system produces Parliaments which are thoroughly unrepresentative of political preferences across the country:

“In the 2010 general election, one Lib Dem MP was elected for every 120,000 Lib Dem votes, one Tory MP for every 35,000 Conservative votes and one Labour MP for every 33,400 votes for that party.”
http://www.economist.com/node/18617926

To claim that AV voting would abolish democracy forever – as the Mail claimed – is dishonest and absurd. By the account in The Economist, they use AV in Australia to elect the lower house of their Parliament so there is nothing extraordinary about it.

“In the event, at the election, Thatcher’s majority in Parliament went up from 70 to 140 – asked at the time, I said I thought the majority would remain at about 70…”

Bob B (36). I must respectfully suggest that you suffer from a mild form of False Memory Syndrome. Thatcher won the 1979 election with a majority of 43, increasing it to 144 in 1983, despite a fall in the Tory vote of nearly 700,000.

Even then, there was a left/centre-left majority in this country, consisting of Labour (27.6%) and the SDP/Liberal Alliance (25.4%).

@48″ I must respectfully suggest that you suffer from a mild form of False Memory Syndrome. Thatcher won the 1979 election with a majority of 43, increasing it to 144 in 1983, despite a fall in the Tory vote of nearly 700,000.”

Due apologies – although I distinctly recall predicting a majority of 70 for Thatcher at the 1983 election and, in the event, she got a majority of double that.

The essential point is that Labour shot itself in the foot at that election with a ridiculous manifesto – which Blair had wholeheartedly endorsed. Gerald Kaufman had more sense and realised that it was a liability.

The mainstream Labour view at the time of the Social Democrats was that they were traitors to the cause – a clear case of putting party loyalty above common sense.

@19: “There was never even the slightest shred of support for electoral reform”

There is plenty of support for PR. AV is hardly anyone’s favourite system — I was involved with the Yes campaign and nearly everyone said they supported AV as a step to PR.

@50: “I was involved with the Yes campaign and nearly everyone said they supported AV as a step to PR.”

I agree with that. I would go for the Hansard Society report on electoral reform of June 1976 or the recommendations of the Jenkins’ Commission in 1998.

The thing is that a sizeable number of Labour MPs want to preserve FPTP (at all costs, as best I can judge) and that is what blocks all progress towards electoral reform.

@43: “When was the last time the tories got 50% at a general election?”

Try the Conservative landslide win at the general election in November 1935:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_1935

The Conservative government’s rearmament White Paper of March that year was an issue:
http://century.guardian.co.uk/1930-1939/Story/0,,126998,00.html

George Lansbury, the Labour leader at the election and a declared pacifist, lost his seat. Attlee, his deputy, took over as leader in Parliament.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ1WOSI7Qe0

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@52

Try the Conservative landslide win at the general election in November 1935:

I think you meen 1931, and that was the only time in the last century, under very special circumstances.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_1931

Strictly speaking in 1931 it was the so called “National Government” which won the election, with the former (traitor) Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald as its figurehead. So it would be hard to argue that 1931 was a purely Conservative victory. The same could be said for 1935, however MacDonald had left by then and the victory wasn’t so resounding.

George Lansbury, the Labour leader at the election and a declared pacifist, lost his seat. Attlee, his deputy, took over as leader in Parliament.

No he didn’t. He resigned before the election was held because the Labour party didn’t go along with his pacifist views. Clement Attlee led Labour through the 1935 election, innitially as caretaker leader.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lansbury

Sorry to correct you again.

Unsurprisingly, when policiticians are allowed to lie freely & without penalty, certain reforms will get kicked into the long grass. We didn’t have a referendum of universal suffrage and for good reason.

The campaign for electoral reform, by which I mean PR rather than AV, doesn’t end here, it starts here. Labour must commit to PR in its next general election manifesto.

Labour & the Lib Dems are so completely screwed

“The Lib Dems always struck me as being the most chilled out of the three, although that’s probably because they didn’t have any power to worry about.”

Have you ever met a Liberal Democrat?

@14

Still obsessed with an argument you lost months ago? Feel free to go back to one of the relevant threads and restart it if you have a new argument. Stalking me on unconnected threads, however, just makes it look like you are still sore.

56 – Or what? Pathetic empty threats are unlikely to stir the 2 eds.

And the region with the biggest No vote, was that hotbed of toryism the North East. Painting the working class voters outside of central london who overwhelmingly voted no, as tories, is unlike to build that broad coalition Sunny is always talking about.

The campaign for electoral reform, by which I mean PR rather than AV, doesn’t end here, it starts here.

Fat chance. The issue of electoral reform has just been booted very firmly into the long grass.

Labour is not going to let the subject anywhere near its manifesto so soon after a thumping referendum defeat – it would be an utter liability.

The only way it could have got as far as it did was as a concession to the LDs as part of a coalition government. That door has now been slammed shut.

So to those people who support electoral reform in principle, but voted no to Get Clegg, or because they’re holding out for PR – well take a bow folks. That was your chance, and you fluffed it.

@59 oldandrew

Hardly; you were “owned” then, and never recovered; any impartial observer would have thought the same, and plenty of other LC posters saw you exposed for the humbug you are. Your flawed personality shines through when you imagine you are worth stalking. Still, reading your education blog it’s easy to see what a obscurantist whack job you actually are.

@ 58 oldandrew

“Have you ever met a Liberal Democrat?”

Of course. My point is that, from my personal experience, Lib Dem MPs seemed considerably calmer and more reasonable than Tory and Labour MPs until the last general election. Probably because they weren’t considered likely to gain power, so they could appeal to their core demographic rather than using populist diatribes in an attempt to woo every single voter.

My other point is that when you suggest people “also consider the possibility that self-righteous outrage is the default setting for many Liberal Democrats”, what you’re actually doing is inviting us to discuss the topic from the POV of your silly prejudices. Saying “have you ever met one?” when someone responds to you just confirms your childishness.

This vote didn’t kill electoral reform for a generation. The coalition agreement did.

I assume that we do all understand that support was largely based on a core rump of left-leaning voters thinking a more proportional system would lead to coalitions that innevitably keep the tories from power?

And we do thus all understand that a coalition created to get the tories into power utterly undermined that widespread support?

I’m not talking about constitutional geeks like us lot on chat boards. I’m talking about millions of voters.

Lib Dem support fell gradually over six months or so after the coalition agreement.

Support for electoral reform however, dropped off a cliff in the first surveys following the coalition agreement.

It wasn’t tied to views about the Lib Dems. It was a result of lots of people seeing a coalition formed that meant their reason for supporting reform was a lie. Coalitions were not, it seemed, innevitably left-leaning.

ps

The fact that we then had a referendum under such circumstances was a massive coup for the anti-reform movement. Cameron played a blinder on that one.

Chaise

based on your last comment – I have to wonder if you’ve ever met many Lib Dem MPs, or MPs from other parties.

They are genuinely, in my experience in Westminster and at years of reporting at conference seasons, the most likely of MPs from any party to be conceited, aggressive and derrisory.

Oddly while the Tories and Labour have a couple of very high profile such people – they are a much smaller exception than in the Lib Dems. (Same goes, as much as I instinctively dislike their leader, for the SNP)

It is fair to say though, that even in the lib dems, where the culture is not as congenial as in other parties, the bad eggs are still the minority – and most cases of MPs getting angry about something tends to result from a passion that MPs by and large all share.

@ Margin4Error

“based on your last comment – I have to wonder if you’ve ever met many Lib Dem MPs, or MPs from other parties.

They are genuinely, in my experience in Westminster and at years of reporting at conference seasons, the most likely of MPs from any party to be conceited, aggressive and derrisory. ”

Unsurprisingly, most of my experience of Lib Dem MPs – as opposed to Lib Dems in general – comes from media coverage. So obviously I’d be seeing their game face. That game face (pre-election) seemed to be a lot more reasonable, and Lib Dem arguments in general seem a HELL of a lot more likely to be based on rational analysis rather than knee-jerk popularism.

Look at their attitude on drugs, for example. You can have a rational conversation about narcotics and come out of it pro- or anti-legalisation, but the Tory attitude seems to be “we’re against drugs because drugs are harmful”, which obviously misses 90% of the important detail.

Obviously people’s experiences differ, and I’ll accept that you may have found that Lib Dems tend to be smarmy in the flesh. But I’m not accepting oldandrew’s “yeah well the Lib Dems are just dicks” attitude as a framework for the conversation.

Chaise

Their game face has often been better than the other parties, so I apologise for misunderstanding.

And I agree dismissing them, or indeed any party as Old Andrew does, is clearly just emotional illiteracy.

But I guess it is easy to maintain a relatively nice game face when you come under no real pressure from the media, political oponents, or from the process of governing. Labour’s has certainly improved in recent months partly because of that. And the Lib Dems are sounding more wild and inconsistent all the time now.

The really sad thing about the drugs issue of course is that Tony Blair got it. He genuinely got it. He moved to reduce the illegality of dope. He moved resources into support schemes for addicts. He used a body of scientists to advise on drugs policy – while quite rightly still trying to attack the pockets of the criminal cartels that supply them.

He couldn’t go very far because public opinion, and importantly for a labour PM, the opinions of the working class at large, constrains what a government can do. But to see that progress, however constrained, towards a more rational approach to drug policy utterly undone by Brown was a little bit heartbreaking.

@ 67 Margin4Error

Not to mention that politicians, with some justification (in terms of appealing to voters), prefer to be able to describe their policies as “tough” rather than “soft”. I think this is a big problem with crime policy in general – being tough on crime, in some cases, leads to more crime.

In the last local election, I was stuck between voting Lib Dem or Labour. What finally swung me to vote Lib Dem were the Labour flyers. Aside from the lies and the childishness (which included referring to the Libs as the “Fib Dems”, FFS), Labour said that the Lib Dems wanted to legalise heroin, and that Labour were against that because “heroin is a really dangerous drug”. Deliberate point-missing is not a desirable habit in a politician.

Chaise

I’m pleased to say I live in an area where crime and punishment is not really the big electoral issue. (poverty and services tend to be a bigger focus).

But I’d love to see that leaflet if it is online anywhere. It would make a nice scrapbook addition of horrendous campaigning.

62,

You might want to get that “impartial observer” to judge your personal outbursts against me here. I suspect you won’t like what they say.

64 and 67,

Are you trying to bait me here? Condemning another person’s opinion as a “prejudice”, or expressions of that opinion as “emotional illiteracy” (for pity’s sake), demonstrates exactly the sort of patronising, outraged, self-righteousness which I was fed up with in the first place.

@ 69

If I find it, I’ll link it.

@13 if your only example is nearly thirty years old it’s a very weak point

@65 Margin4error: “They are genuinely, in my experience in Westminster and at years of reporting at conference seasons, the most likely of MPs from any party to be conceited, aggressive and derrisory.”

An interesting comment; you may have revealed too much about yourself, M4e. Please don’t do it again because I enjoy your comments and do not wish that your employers might censor you.

My own experience is that LibDem MPs, when lubricated, become more liberal. Conceited? Yes, you need an ego to get elected. Aggressive? Yes, you need passion. Derisory? I guess that comes with ego.

“Does anyone have some skins?” When you hear that question at a LibDem conference, you know that an MP is lurking.

@70 oldandrew

That ship has already sailed; you were widely regarded at the time as an obscurantist with nutty views, which anyone who reads your fusty education blog will be able to verify for themselves.

Even on this very thread, it is quite evident in your responses to other like Chaise and M4E that you lack balance…. indeed, I seem to recall in earlier threads that such was your paranoia and self regard you insisted that Chaise and I MUST be the same person.

Once a wing nut, always a wing nut.

Charlieman

I can promise you my employer has no party bias (we deal with all parties in euqual and honest measure). Indeed I have never taken paid employment with any organisation that does otherwise.

I should add that I also have never worked for a party, or for an MP, I don’t have a PPE and I am not one of those wretched wanabe MP lackies who I despise having to deal with for their vapidity and lack of real world knowledge and experience.