AV: Enough of Coalitions Already. Vote “No”
5 May 2011 2 Comments
Rant directed at the Independent after their whiney leader article slamming the “No” campaign without analysing the failure of the “Yes” campaign to get its message across:
Sirs,
You don’t half talk some bollocks sometimes! A big slab of the leader article today boils down to one thing: the Yes campaign hasn’t got enough spirit in it to put its message across. This is disguised as an extended whine at the Tories, rather than criticising the Yes campaign for wheeling out hated politicians and D-list celebrities and expecting to be taken seriously.
AV *will* produce more coalitions in the UK – that’s why the LibDems are desperate to get it in place. Coalitions make up policy after the election, after everyone has had their say. Therefore nobody gets to vote on coalition policies and they have no mandate whatsoever.
I have yet to see an effective rebuttal of this, and as such I shall be voting “No” tomorrow.
I would rather see a government with a minority mandate than a coalition with zero mandate.
AV doesn’t improve democracy, it destroys what little we have.
Paul Harper
… and bless ’em, despite editing out the first sentence (ahem!) and despite it being totally against their own stance, they published it on the morning of the voting day:
About Paul Harper
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Having made the same point as me, you then went on to say “But it doesn’t matter, and that’s the point. The Government is democratically elected because it holds office according to the laws of the land”.
Which is, of course, completely correct, and exactly why the laws of the land shouldn’t have been changed to make it more likely that zero-mandate governments get into power.
I am delighted that AV failed miserably at the ballot box. Common sense prevailed in the end and the blatant and undemocratic power-grab by the Liberals was rejected.