Warning: what follows is an inevitably biased and—hopefully—entertaining chunk of information about the upcoming UK electoral referendum. Although I’m clearly pro-AV, my main argument to you would be to vote on Thursday, whichever system you believe in. But do so on the basis of investigating each system yourself and don’t make this the UK’s most expensive ‘Nick Clegg approval rating’ generator—he doesn’t matter and this isn’t about him. Note: if you’re unsure about what AV entails, CGPGrey explains using jungle animals.

There’s a lot of misinformation out there regarding the upcoming voting system referendum. The anti-Alternate Vote (AV) lobby suggests scrapping First Past The Post (FPTP) will be the end of the UK as we know it, leading to dead soldiers and babies and roughly fifty billion new immigrants PER DAY. Meanwhile, the pro-AV bloc seems set on telling everyone that it’s the solution to all the UK’s ills and the Best Thing Ever. Both viewpoints are bollocks, since FPTP is a crap voting system and AV is also a crap voting system.

But hang on. FPTP must be OK, because we’ve used it for years. Surely the UK would be utterly stupid to use a system that’s utterly rubbish?
To be fair to FPTP, it works brilliantly when you need a clear winner for something and only have two candidates. It’s also simple: whoever gets the most votes wins. Yay! The problem occurs when you’ve more than two candidates, as is usually the case in modern party politics. You could feasibly have three candidates in a four-way race get 24.9% of the vote each and the winner take-all with the backing of a tiny fraction of more than a quarter of the voters. Run that scenario nationwide in an election and you have a parliament that doesn’t remotely resemble what the voters voted for. (In 2005, Labour got a working majority in the Commons with 35.2% of the vote. And the same’s just happened in Canada, with the right securing a working majority with 39.6% of the vote.) You also have millions of ‘wasted’ votes in areas where a strongish candidate is always going to win, regardless of whether the second-place candidate polls pretty highly. Now multiply that across, say, an entire county, and you could have a party taking every seat, despite a third or more of the constituents voting for a sole other party.

The imbalance in the UK’s 2010 election wasn’t this severe, but it was also pretty clear that what you voted for and what you got were very different indeed.

Democracy, UK-style. (View larger)

Of the major parties, the Lib Dems were hit incredibly hard by FPTP, actually losing seats in the Commons despite gaining in terms of overall vote-share. That, frankly, is bonkers.

But the Liberal Democrats have turned out to be arseholes, and so more of them would have been awful. PHEW! FPTP SAVED US!
Not so fast. 149 Lib Dems plus 188 Labour MPs would have made for a stable and very different (possibly progressive) coalition government to what we have now. While the Lib-Dems might still have sided with the Tories, they’d have felt far less pressured into doing so, since the Conservative lead wasn’t nearly as strong as it was via FPTP. It’s likely more of the party’s liberal ideas would have come through, rather than merely taking the slightest edge off of a Thatcherite Tory government. And even if the coalition would have been the same (i.e. Conservative senior/Lib-Dem junior—something more likely with AV numbers, although under AV Labour would have secured almost as many seats as the Conservatives, making brokering a deal with the Lib-Dems possible), the balance would have been totally different. It would have been conservative in nature, but not Conservative, and it would have been far more liberal.

Ha ha! But I’m a rabid right-winger, and I want to smack liberals in the face with my fists. I WIN!
Ah, no. See, UKIP should have got about 20 seats and ended up with none at all, since none of its candidates came first in any constituency. Even the BNP, on the basis of its vote share, should have had a dozen seats in the Commons in 2010. The election in 2010 didn’t screw the left or right (or the authoritarians or liberals)—it just screwed all the small parties, as elections always do in the UK.

Yeah, but the BNP are real nutters, so, again, PHEW! FPTP SAVED US! YAY!
One man’s scum is another man’s love-juice. Personally, I trust UKIP about as far as I can throw it, but I know plenty of people in the UK think otherwise—after all, a million people or thereabouts voted for the party. As for the BNP, I’d be happy if they all quit tomorrow and ironically emigrated to sunnier climes, but I’d still fight for the BNP’s voters to have the right to representation, because that’s the fundamental basis of democracy. It’s insane that over 550,000 voted for the BNP, but there’s no representation in the Commons. (By contrast, the Greens got one MP from 285,000 votes; the SNP got six MPs from 491,000 votes, and the DUP got eight MPs from 168,000 votes.) Also, I imagine after five years of BNPs doing piss-all in the Commons, their candidates wouldn’t do so well five years later—politics has a tendency to right itself when it comes to major extremism.

Righto. So AV will fix all this, yeah?
No. The Alternate Vote is not a form of proportional representation—it doesn’t assign seats in the Commons that relate to the vote share. Instead, it has you rank candidates you’re interested in, in order of preference. If a candidate has a majority, they win the seat. If not, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes are reassigned to the remaining candidates, according to ballot preferences. This keeps going until there’s a winner. This ensures that candidates have to fight for a wider remit than just the core vote and it also means parties that tend to be people’s second choice have a shot at winning the odd seat they otherwise wouldn’t.

That sounds complicated.
Can you count to four or five?

Yes.
Can you rank things in order? Say, if you were given an apple, a chocolate bar, a chicken sandwich and a live squirrel, could you place them in order of preference regarding what you want to eat right now?

Yes. I’m not stupid.
Quite. In which case, you’ll be able to deal with AV should it win in the referendum. If you only care about one candidate, you can still use a cross; if you care about more than one, rank them in order. There’s more complexity behind the scenes, in terms of figuring out who’s won a seat, but that’s not your problem.

OK. That sounds good to me, but my MP told me that AV is worse than the spawn of Satan and Piers Morgan.
Is your MP a Tory?

Yup.
Tories hate AV (YouTube), for a number of reasons, but primarily because it may slightly reduce the number of Tory seats (the same for Labour, too—AV generally affects larger parties in this way), will increase the likelihood of coalition government, and because it’s not in common use worldwide on a national level.

And the UK doesn’t use it!
Well, apart from House of Lords elections (for hereditary peers), by-elections in Scotland and Northern Ireland, mayoral elections, and the majority of political party leadership battles. Even the Conservative leadership election is a multi-round ballot reminiscent of AV, which David Davis won the first round of. With a direct FPTP election, David Cameron might not be the leader of the Conservative party right now. (Frankly, that, if anything, is one of the best arguments for FPTP, but it’d make Cameron look stupid if he yelled “I SHOULD NOT BE HERE!”) Also, as this chap notes (YouTube), just because a system isn’t in widespread use, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing.

But if it will increase the likelihood of coalition governments, I’m out. This coalition is awful.
But that doesn’t mean coalition in and of itself is bad. Coalition is essentially a means of getting more voices heard, of compromise. Interestingly, we for the first time in a long time have a government backed by more than half of voters, although, clearly, they didn’t specifically vote for coalition. Still, the potential for talk and cross-party ideas rather than reactionary politics (do the opposite of what the other guys say) is a mature, grown-up means of dealing with politics and democracy in general. Coalition in many countries that, frankly, do a lot better than the UK politically, can also lead to a degree of continuity, since one of the partners stays in power after an election but a new partner comes in. This greatly reduces the kind of thing that happens in the UK, where the Conservatives spend a term or two reshaping the country to their ideals, only to be swept from power by Labour, who spend a term or two reshaping the country to their ideals, only to be swept from power by the Conservatives… and so on.

What are you, some kind of liberal?
Yes.

Oh. But even so, you must admit the coalition is AWFUL, even for you, Mr. Liberal-face. I heard it on the television, so it must be true.
*sigh* OK, what did you think of the last government?

That was awful too.
What about the one before that? And the last pre-Labour government—Major’s one?

Oh, I hated them. All awful.
And they were all elected by FPTP and were majority governments rather than coalitions. Therefore, that we have a poor coalition now doesn’t make AV bad any more than a poor government in previous years would make FPTP bad.

OK, so voting AV would annoy the big parties. I’m up for that!
Not quite.

Eh?
Labour’s (mostly) pro-AV.

But I thought you said Labour would get a reduced number of seats? Why are Labour pro-AV?
Two reasons. First, Labour’s now in opposition, playing reactionary politics—the party has a tendency to say the opposite of whatever the Tories say. (Labour had over a decade to implement electoral reform, remember—indeed, it was a pledge and a promise to the Lib-Dems before Blair’s landslide victory in 1997 made the entire idea of coalition redundant to Labour.) Secondly, Labour knows AV in and of itself will make little difference to the chances of a Labour victory in 2015—it will hurt the Conservatives way more than it will hurt Labour, and the Lib-Dems will be lucky to secure half the number of votes the party got in 2010. If AV does win, watch Labour suddenly become very silent on the prospect of further reform of the voting system that would negatively impact the party to a much greater degree (such as proportional representation).

So if AV won’t make any odds to the Tories and Labour, why should I vote for it?
Because it’s a first step. You have two choices in the upcoming referendum:

• Retain the status-quo (First Past The Post), and kill the argument for electoral reform stone-dead for at least a generation.
• Vote for a change (AV) that might keep the argument for electoral reform alive, leaving open the chance of something better in the future.

So you’re asking me to vote for something I don’t really care about, for a wooly chance that something better might happen at some point in the future, which would make voting fairer in the UK and mean my vote would actually count for something?
That’s it in a nutshell, yes.

OK, this post is another for the Brits, since it’s about the upcoming voting reform referendum. There’s a great YouTube video by CGPGrey on AV versus FPTP. (Hat-tip: @sneeu.) The big take-homes for people who are undecided but who haven’t written off AV:

• AV is able to simulate a bunch of elections, where the least-popular candidate is eliminated after each round, without the time and expense it’d take to run a bunch of campaigns one after another.
• AV is a better system, because it produces winners that a larger number of voters can agree on.
• While the AV system has its flaws, any problems AV has are shared by FPTP: susceptible to gerrymandering; not proportional representation; trends towards two parties over time.
• AV has no spoiler effect, where a third candidate splits the majority vote. This has long been a massive problem in the UK, where the liberal/left vote has been split between Labour and a version of the Liberal party, whereas the conservative right has been unified. Under AV, assuming the ties between Labour and Liberal Democrat voters remain somewhat intact post-coalition (and therefore vote for each-other as second choice), AV would lead to the Commons reflecting the political make-up of the UK more accurately more often.
• Using AV, citizens can help support and grow smaller parties they agree with, without worrying that they’ll put someone they don’t like into office.
• AV requires bigger parties to be less complacent and campaign harder to get more people to vote for them (which is why the Conservatives are so rabidly anti-AV and why some Labour MPs are against it).

To my mind, AV is far from perfect. I would still prefer a proportional system, where the votes cast lead to a Commons that reflects those votes. However, AV is a step in the right direction, which is why I’ll be voting in favour of it.

Whatever your intentions, though, please ensure that if you vote you do so on the basis of the system you believe in, and not propaganda. At the moment, much of the debate centres on Nick Clegg, and the referendum appears in danger of being some kind of national Nick Clegg approval rating generator. Clegg is politically toxic; unless the coalition becomes massively popular by 2015, Clegg’s dead in the water from a political standpoint and won’t even be leading the Lib-Dems into the next election. To that end, he really doesn’t matter. Ditto the Lib-Dems as a party. The no-to-AV campaign seems to think it’ll propel the Lib-Dems into some kind of equality with the Tories and Labour—it won’t. Under current polling, AV might help the Lib-Dems save a few seats, but they’ll still be down by over 60 per cent under either system. And said saving would be ‘fair’ anyway, since it always takes way more votes to elect a Liberal Democrat than a Labour or Conservative candidate.

If you favour First Past The Post, that’s fine. But vote for it because you believe in what the system is and what it represents, not because you hate Nick Clegg. And if you’re undecided, watch that YouTube video, because it might make you think a change is just what’s required to make British voting a little fairer.

EDIT: Nice overview of no vote tactics here from @unloveablesteve.

The BBC will soon air a documentary on assisted death. Hosted by Terry Pratchett, diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease in 2008 and now a campaigner for the choice to end one’s life, he will meet people suffering from degenerative conditions, and will be with a man as he carries out an assisted death at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.

I’ve never fully understood how people can be against assisted death, when the person who’s dying has made the choice and has been confirmed of sound mind, over an extended period of time. Even religious arguments dumbfound me, going on about the sanctity of life over the quality of life. Sadly, this has been the reaction to the BBC documentary in the press.

Unsurprisingly, the Daily Mail was first out of the gate with Amanda Platell’s Pratchett’s a hero, but on this he’s plain wrong. Platell starts well, but it doesn’t take long for the mask to slip. Initially, she lauds Pratchett as a “compelling champion” for research into the treatment of Alzheimer’s, noting he’s:

raised the profile of the debilitating disease and talked movingly about the horrific way it robs victims of their minds.

She also states:

He has also calmly spelt out his own desire to end his life when he chooses, not when the disease does. He won’t want to be pitied, but it is impossible not to feel deeply for Sir Terry, and one can understand only too easily why he might in time choose to take his life.

But then the article turns, violently. She talks about the aforementioned BBC documentary, using provokative language (my emphasis):

In Terry Pratchett: Choosing To Die, the author sits beside the 71-year-old man known only as Peter, who suffers from motor neurone disease, and watches him die slowly from a lethal cocktail of drugs in a Swiss clinic.

It will be the first time the moment of a suicide victim’s death is screened on television.

It’s accurate that the drugs are ‘lethal’ in that they kill you, but it’s not like Peter will neck a bottle of painkillers and hope they do the job. The drugs Dignitas use are essentially designed to make the person fall asleep. And while Peter is committing suicide, calling him a ‘victim’ seems a bit of a stretch—he’s chosen this end, for his own reasons.

More mask-slippage follows:

Whether or not you agree with assisted death and what goes on at the controversial Dignitas clinic in Switzerland where the suicide takes place is almost beside the point.

To my mind, this is the almost pathologically liberal BBC at its worst, producing a propaganda film for the pro-euthanasia lobby and deliberately offending the significant number of Britons who believe in the sanctity of life.

And there, in a nutshell, is Platell’s objectivity utterly removed. The BBC, by doing something brave and giving us insight into Peter (also doing something brave) and his reasoning, perhaps enlightening viewers and providing understanding, is ‘almost pathologically liberal’. (Is the BBC ‘almost pathologically religious’, too, for screening Songs of Praise, Platell?)

But these are the words that most anger me:

deliberately offending the significant number of Britons who believe in the sanctity of life

You know what? Tough. Too bad. If you’re that ‘offended’, don’t watch the damn show. If you believe in the sanctity of life over the quality of life, bully for you. But other people have other viewpoints, and the BBC’s remit requires that all are catered for. Just because some people are going to be most upset because of their ideals and beliefs (rather than because a man is deciding to die) shouldn’t stop the BBC from running this kind of programme, especially if it does an extremely good job in showing everything that happens during the process (as in, the process from the decision onwards—not the final moments).

Platell doesn’t get this at all:

What makes this all the more insidious is the high moral tone adopted by the corporation. ‘The BBC does not have a stance on assisted suicide, but we do think this is an important matter of debate,’ says a spokesman.

Giving Sir Terry free rein in a documentary on this highly sensitive matter seems like a pretty strong stance to me.

Again, no more a stance than the BBC being overtly religious for screening Songs of Praise. (Note: in case you’re wondering, no I don’t think the BBC is being overtly religious for screening Songs of Praise.)

And the very fact that Sir Terry is the front man is in itself a form of moral blackmail.

Gosh, yes, good point. It makes no sense at all to have the show hosted by someone with a vested interest in the subject. It would have been much better to have you host it, Platell, yelling “WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS? GOD HAS A PLAN!” at Peter, every step of the way.

Still, that’s the Daily Mail, eh? But, sadly, looming into view comes Who is to judge which lives are worth living?, by Barbara Ellen in The Observer.

Ellen’s tone is a little more impartial, but there are a lot of elements of her article that are unhelpful at best.

Pratchett says: “Everybody possessed of a debilitating and incurable illness should be allowed to pick the hour of their death.” Clearly, with him, the dignity of choice is paramount. However, while one has enormous sympathy for Pratchett suffering such a vile disease, the fact remains that he is a rich, powerful man and it is highly unlikely that his wishes would be ignored. With respect, euthanasia laws are not in place to protect people such as him. What of those who may have their “choice” taken away, even if they don’t want to die?

That is quite a leap, on a number of levels. Choice doesn’t always fully exist under the current system. Doctors make decisions every day on people’s conditions that lead to ‘care’ being withdrawn, regardless of the wishes of the patients (since said wishes often don’t exist, or aren’t available or accessible, for various reasons). But, more to the point, Ellen seems to assume that Dignitas has no safeguards, or that if the UK adopted some kind of more liberal euthanasia laws, there’d be shady characters with black bags, roaming the streets and knocking off pensioners.

What people like Pratchett are campaigning for is the right to die. He’s not campaigning for the equivalent of a drive-through death centre—it’s clear that any changes in law would make a British approach to assisted death lengthy, with many levels of protection, not only to ensure coercion isn’t happening, but also to guarantee that this is what the person who wants to die really wants (as opposed to a relatively fleeting decision).

The filming of the death seems secondary – for me, it has the opportunistic whiff of a medicalised snuff movie, but that’s just my opinion. No one is forced to watch, just as no one is forced to watch all the births on television these days.

Will people watch for ghoulish reasons? Perhaps. But that doesn’t make this a snuff movie. The documentary isn’t about the death—it’s about the reasons behind it and the fact someone in the UK cannot die in this manner in their own country, despite us—last time I looked—no longer living in the Middle Ages.

There are bigger issues at stake, not least the arrogance of the pro-euthanasia able bodied towards the profoundly ill – the unseemly rush to pronounce the lives of others “not worth living”.

I don’t know any ‘pro-euthanasia able bodied’ rushing to pronounce the lives of others “not worth living”. I would never seek to suggest to someone whether their life is worth continuing with or not, for the very obvious reason that I simply do not—and cannot—know. All I know is my own life; and should I ever be in the situation where I either cannot take any more pain or am literally slipping away (the thing Pratchett is scared of—and something I watched happen with my grandmother, who recognised no-one and remembered almost nothing of herself during her last year alive), I would hope the law is such that I at least have the right to die. I’m not saying I’d make that choice—but it should be my right.

A recent study discovered that some sufferers of locked-in syndrome – as many as three out of four of the main sample – were happy and did not want to die. Such studies are flawed (some sufferers are unable to articulate either way), but it should still give us pause for thought before blasting off about “lives not worth living”.

Again, this is misdirection. No-one’s talking about doctors visiting people with a checklist. It’s not like you get a score and—whoops!—if you’re under 3/10, out comes the needle! Any decision must come from the sufferer—and that’s what people are campaigning for.

Likewise the knee-jerk: “They wouldn’t have wanted to end up like this.” Of course not – who would? – but that might not be the end of the story. How individuals feel when they are fit may change considerably when their health fails. Like those with locked-in syndrome, they may adjust to a life that is very different, often difficult, but just as precious. Who are we to judge?

Who are we to deny someone the right to end their life if they haven’t adjusted after a long period of time with whatever condition they have? It’s their life, not yours.

Personally, if I ever get something nasty, I’d rather be with a God-botherer than somebody who decides I’m looking peaky, books a Swiss flight and whisks me off to the ghouls at Dignitas. Or maybe I wouldn’t – maybe I’d be begging for death. The hope is that I’ll choose.

And the point is, in the UK right now, you do not have that choice.

Wow, the Tories really are scared of AV, aren’t they? In BBC article Ashdown attacks Osborne over AV (whose content sadly wasn’t entirely literal—I’m sure many of us would pay good money to see Ashdown give Osborne a kicking), the former Lib-Dem leader called out Osborne for trying to dig up dirt on the ‘yes to AV’ campaign.

What Osborne had discovered was, I’m sure you’ll agree, shocking in the extreme. The pro-AV camp, in favour of electoral reform, is being partly funded by the Electoral Reform Society, in favour of electoral reform. It’s clearly broken Osborne’s little mind that a society in favour of electoral reform and called the Electoral Reform Society would use some of its money to fund a movement campaigning for electoral reform.

But wait! Osborne said it stinks for another reason: the commercial arm of the Electoral Reform Society, Electoral Reform Services Ltd (ERSL), runs election services. The BBC says:

[Osborne] claimed that ERSL stood to benefit financially from a switch. The firm has denied the accusation, saying a switch would have “absolutely no impact” on its revenue.

The thing is, even if Osborne is right, it’s interesting he’s against the ERS part-funding the pro-AV vote. After all, Osborne is a member of a party usually fine with whatever private companies get up to, positively encouraging organisations to do whatever it takes to make huge piles of cash.

But what really stinks is the manner in which the Tories are fighting against AV. Make no mistake: this isn’t about history, democracy, Britishness, complexity, finance, extremism or any other argument you’ve heard. The sole reason the Tories are against AV is because the Tories stand to lose seats. AV will rebalance British politics so that the majority liberal vote gets slightly more weight and the minority Conservative vote gets less. Tories argue this is unfair, ignoring the fact that what’s really unfair is how regularly the Tories have been in government, with majorities, despite not having the backing of the majority of the voters.

Whatever you think about Hugh Grant, your opinion might change after reading The bugger, bugged (New Statesman). Grant, by chance, met ex-News of the World hack Paul McMullan when Grant’s car broke down; he was given a lift and was invited to the hack’s pub sometime. Grant was keen to hear more about the phone-hacking scandal, since he’d been a victim. Being a canny sort, he also figured he could secretly record the conversation when he later visited the pub.

The revelations are astonishing, implicating Andy Coulson (“Coulson knew all about it and regularly ordered it”), Rebekah Wade and the Daily Mail. McMullan is quoted as saying:

For about four or five years [The Daily Mail have] absolutely been cleaner than clean. And before that they weren’t. They were as dirty as anyone… They had the most money.

McMullen revealed he was also a fan of the Daily Mail’s cash mountain when it came to non-stories about celebs:

When I went freelance in 2004 the biggest payers—you’d have thought it would be the [News of the World], but actually it was the Daily Mail. If I take a good picture, the first person I go to is—such as in your case—the Mail on Sunday. Did you see that story? The picture of you, breaking down… I ought to thank you for that. I got £3,000. Whooo!

Presumably, McMullen went to them a second time after Grant dropped by his pub, since The Daily Mail on April 4 reported Grant’s invited visit with the shocking, hard-hitting exposé Hugh Grant racks up bar tab worth £5.45 at local pub in Dover… but leaves without paying. Naturally, it neglects to mention the invitation and the chat Grant and McMullen had (and it referring to the pub as Grant’s “favourite pub in Dover” seems spurious at best). Still, perhaps McMullen will be happy he got his retaliation in first (not least those jibes about Grant’s riches, which he used to justify the invasion of celebrity privacy regarding phone-hacking) even if the Mail’s article comes across like a fey slap to the cheek compared to Grant’s knockout punch.