No to No2AV
Apr. 22nd, 2011 10:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylI'm not particularly impressed with the No2AV leaflet I've received. It seems to be a lazy collection of ad hominems and cheesy rhetoric designed to appeal to tax-hating conservatives who harbour a natural suspicion of the democratic process and would rather like to go back to the days of aristocratic rule and rotten boroughs, if only they could work out how to achieve it!
The leaflet starts badly, with an exhortation to "keep one person, one vote", ignoring the fact that that's exactly what AV is: the A is for alternative not multiple. This is followed up by a bubble telling me, "None of your taxes have been used to print this leaflet"; the implication being that the yes-to-AV lot are stuffing themselves stupid with public funds that could be used to pay for doctors and nurses and schools and fluffy kittens for every child in the country.
Inside, I'm told that AV is going to cost 250 million pounds. But how can I trust this? I don't know how much First Past the Post costs. Maybe 250M is a reasonable price to pay for an election? I'm also not sure how robust the number is, because there's no attempt to justify it. This is followed by a petulant remark about the cost of the referendum — again this is a dog whistle, given that referendum is going ahead anyway and its cost makes no difference to validity of the question being asked — and a comment that the money spent on AV could instead be spent on 2,503 doctors etc, but given the government's cost-cutting agenda, isn't it more likely that this money would be instead by spent on closing the deficit rather than funding new services? And as if this wasn't clear enough, I'm asked again "...should we really be spending money on a politicians' fix?" Which causes me to ask (a) what price democracy? and (b) aren't all changes to all laws "politician's fixes" insofar as they're necessarily made by politicians in response to a given situation?
I then get a partisan description of AV that, again, ignores the whole alternative thing — AV makes far more sense when it is thought of in terms of an instant run-off — and implies that minority views deserve to be ignored. I also get a question begging description of FPTP which tells me that "the one who comes first is always the winner", a statement that assumes that the winner is always defined as the person who gets the largest share of the votes in a single round! It also conveniently ignores the fact that, as the description of AV shows, the candidate who wins the first round (or FPTP) may actually have been opposed by a majority of voters. I'm told that AV isn't fair because most other countries don't use it and the ones that do would like to ditch it, but there doesn't seem to be any attempt to bridge the chasm between popularity and fairness — rather, it is simply assumed that what is fair is popular and vice versa.
After a few more embarrassingly misleading comments about AV — the photograph of the runners is particularly dubious; AV isn't equivalent to a group race, it's more like the FA Cup, where teams are knocked out in each round and the whole thing concludes with a one-one match between the only two left — the back page is dedicated to a series of ad hominem attacks on Nick Clegg, none of which go any way towards address the question of the voting system. Sure Clegg may have broken may of his pre-election promises including his tuition fees pledge — don't get me wrong, I'm not impressed with the guy either — but I fail to see how this tells against AV. The current coalition government and it's appalling bonfire of the policies is the direct result of FPTP: because the parties were not expecting to have to form a coalition, the subject didn't receive much in the way of scrutiny during the election campaign. However if, as the leaflet asserts, AV is likely to lead to more coalitions then questions about core policies and potential future compromises are likely to become natural parts of the campaign process.
While I don't believe that the alternative vote is a perfect solution — all voting systems are a compromise of one sort or another — it seems a damn sight better than the horrible mess that is First Past the Post...
The leaflet starts badly, with an exhortation to "keep one person, one vote", ignoring the fact that that's exactly what AV is: the A is for alternative not multiple. This is followed up by a bubble telling me, "None of your taxes have been used to print this leaflet"; the implication being that the yes-to-AV lot are stuffing themselves stupid with public funds that could be used to pay for doctors and nurses and schools and fluffy kittens for every child in the country.
Inside, I'm told that AV is going to cost 250 million pounds. But how can I trust this? I don't know how much First Past the Post costs. Maybe 250M is a reasonable price to pay for an election? I'm also not sure how robust the number is, because there's no attempt to justify it. This is followed by a petulant remark about the cost of the referendum — again this is a dog whistle, given that referendum is going ahead anyway and its cost makes no difference to validity of the question being asked — and a comment that the money spent on AV could instead be spent on 2,503 doctors etc, but given the government's cost-cutting agenda, isn't it more likely that this money would be instead by spent on closing the deficit rather than funding new services? And as if this wasn't clear enough, I'm asked again "...should we really be spending money on a politicians' fix?" Which causes me to ask (a) what price democracy? and (b) aren't all changes to all laws "politician's fixes" insofar as they're necessarily made by politicians in response to a given situation?
I then get a partisan description of AV that, again, ignores the whole alternative thing — AV makes far more sense when it is thought of in terms of an instant run-off — and implies that minority views deserve to be ignored. I also get a question begging description of FPTP which tells me that "the one who comes first is always the winner", a statement that assumes that the winner is always defined as the person who gets the largest share of the votes in a single round! It also conveniently ignores the fact that, as the description of AV shows, the candidate who wins the first round (or FPTP) may actually have been opposed by a majority of voters. I'm told that AV isn't fair because most other countries don't use it and the ones that do would like to ditch it, but there doesn't seem to be any attempt to bridge the chasm between popularity and fairness — rather, it is simply assumed that what is fair is popular and vice versa.
After a few more embarrassingly misleading comments about AV — the photograph of the runners is particularly dubious; AV isn't equivalent to a group race, it's more like the FA Cup, where teams are knocked out in each round and the whole thing concludes with a one-one match between the only two left — the back page is dedicated to a series of ad hominem attacks on Nick Clegg, none of which go any way towards address the question of the voting system. Sure Clegg may have broken may of his pre-election promises including his tuition fees pledge — don't get me wrong, I'm not impressed with the guy either — but I fail to see how this tells against AV. The current coalition government and it's appalling bonfire of the policies is the direct result of FPTP: because the parties were not expecting to have to form a coalition, the subject didn't receive much in the way of scrutiny during the election campaign. However if, as the leaflet asserts, AV is likely to lead to more coalitions then questions about core policies and potential future compromises are likely to become natural parts of the campaign process.
While I don't believe that the alternative vote is a perfect solution — all voting systems are a compromise of one sort or another — it seems a damn sight better than the horrible mess that is First Past the Post...
