Oh dear. You’ve got to hand it to the anti-AV lot—they’re pretty sneaky. On today’s inevitable daily BBC article on the matter, ex-Labour minister Caroline Flint wades in with her size whatevers:
The suffragettes fought for One Person, One Vote, not a political stitch-up like AV, which has been rejected by almost every country that has used it.
Yes, if you vote for AV, you are ANTI-WOMEN and ANTI-WOMAN-WHO-WANT-EQUALITY.
Unless, of course—and I might just be guessing here—what the suffragettes were in fact fighting for was the right to vote at all. They weren’t chaining themselves to unmovable objects and chanting catchy slogans like:
Voting rights for women—as long as the United Kingdom retains the first-past-the-post voting system for Parliamentary elections, otherwise we’re really not that fussed.
Flint moans about Nick Clegg’s most recent defence of AV, where he states generations to come would see the ‘no’ arguments as nonsensical. She reminds everyone that Clegg himself called AV a “miserable little compromise”. This, of course, is entirely accurate: AV is a miserable little compromise. But it’s a step forward. Flint doesn’t seem to understand this:
One Person, One Vote – the bedrock of our current system – has stood the test of time and remains the only way to ensure elections are fair.
So under AV, is Flint arguing that random people are somehow given extra votes? Or is she suggesting that FPTP is the “only way to ensure elections are fair”? Man, those countries using proportional representation to ensure their elected ministers actually broadly represent the voting patterns of the country are SUCH IDIOTS with their unfair elections.
Let’s ignore the fact that, at present, it takes three times as many votes to elect a Liberal Democrat than a Conservative. That, clearly, isn’t unfair. (And if your response has anything to do with the Lib Dems in government being a bit rubbish, do sod off. Under PR, we’d have likely had a Lab/Lib coalition from the most recent election, which would have resulted in very different options; instead, we have a very senior partner and a very junior partner, with the latter sadly run by a gutless twit. It’s the overall argument that’s important—that some parties can have MPs elected far more easily than others, which is hardly democratic in any real sense of the word.)
Let’s ignore the fact that, in 2010, we got one elected Green MP when we should have had six, and absolutely no UKIP or BNP MPs exist, despite the parties securing 3.1 and 1.9 per cent of the vote, respectively. (Also, if you’re thinking PHEW!, that’s fine, but part of democracy is that you don’t always get what you want. If 919,546 people voted for UKIP, is it fair that there are no UKIP MPs at all, even if the party is pretty reprehensible? Not unless you have some interesting ideas about what ‘fair’ happens to mean.)
Instead, let’s keep arguing for an outdated system that will, without question, more often elect a Conservative government backed by a minority of votes (because the more liberal vote is split several ways); let’s argue for a system of exclusion for smaller parties; let’s argue for a system that largely eschews the evils of coalition (read: compromise and, in many cases—as evidenced elsewhere in Europe—some degree of continuity) in favour of wild swings between the Conservatives and Labour, with a new incumbent every 10 or 15 years, keen to throw out everything its predecessor did. Because, hey, that’s been working so brilliantly for the UK since World War 2, hasn’t it, so why bother changing anything?
UPDATE: And as @alexwlchan rightly says on Twitter:
If she really hates AV, why didn’t she argue against it when Labour used it to elect their party leaders?