Zack Polanski in a Yes to AV campaign video

I remember very little of the Alternative Vote referendum campaign except that it turned out to be a referendum on Nick Clegg instead. The only party that much liked AV was the Labour Party, and it campaigned against it.

So thanks to Josiah Mortimer for posting this video from the Yes side, which turns out to feature a young Zack Polanski in the days before he joined the Liberal Democrats. Presumably he turned up here because he was still working as an actor.

I don't imagine this video converted many people. Though it sets out to show that AV is simple, it risks making it seem rather complicated. Worse than that, I just don't care whether Zack and his friends go for a coffee, go to the pub or fall down an unmarked mine shaft. It's dull.

Perhaps it looks forward to the Bluesky assumption that anyone who does not share our politics must be stupid. But at least it sets out to educate them, rather than blocking them and then boasting that it has done so to its friends.

Another mercy is that it doesn't feature Stephen Fry, which it might well have done. Dan Snow, as fans of Liberal trivia will know, is Lloyd George's great great grandson.

Later. I'm told this video wasn't issued by the official Yes campaign but by an independent group of activists. They made it because they thought the official campaign material was so poor.

For an informed view of the Yes campaign, see this post by James Graham.

James Graham looks back at the AV referendum 10 years on

Embed from Getty Images

James Graham has written a cracking post looking back at the referendum on introducing the Alternative Vote for British general elections.

This took place on 5 May 2011 and its staging formed part of the Coalition agreement. Unfortunately, it turned out that no one had any idea how to argue for AV because, as James confirms, no one much believed in the system.

I can't remember a single poster or slogan from the pro-AV campaign. I can't even remember voting in the referendum, though I suppose I must have done.

Anyway, here are a few highlights from James's post, but do hurry over to Quaequam Blog! and read the whole thing:

It was genuinely surprising to me that in the run up to the EU referendum, no-one from the Remain campaign ever approached me about my thoughts on what they should and should not do. Perhaps this is ego talking, but I’m not aware of anyone in the campaign being approached.

It seemed remarkable to me that no-one seemed to think they had anything to learn from us. But then, if I was a Cameron-supporting Tory who had been on the No to AV side and was aware of what a brutally effective campaign that had been, I would have moved the earth to avoid holding a second national referendum in the first place. It isn’t just the Lib Dems who were guilty of hubris.

And:

I’m not writing this to especially condemn the man – there has been far too much water under the bridge since – but it seems very weird to me the degree to which Lord Sharkey‘s role in the campaign has been downplayed and even airbrushed out of history. ... And yet it was my recollection that every single significant appointment or campaign decision had been made by him. No one has ever challenged this as far as I know. He’s just been essentially erased.

And:

My career weirdly mirrors Nick Tyrone’s. While the AV referendum was the finishing of my political career, it was the making of his. He went from an obscure film producer who just happened to be the husband of Nick Clegg’s Director of Policy, to the head of the Radix think tank. He fell out with the Lib Dems pretty quickly post-2015 as the party sought to distance itself from the “coalicious” period and these days has very much positioned himself in the same right wing circles as Matthew Elliot.

Enjoy!

All European referendum campaign promises were worthless

Vote Leave Watch has helpfully put together a collection of the most extravagant promises made by the Leave campaign during this year's Euro referendum.

Here are some examples:

"Asylum and Immigration Control Bill...The Bill would end the discrimination against non-EU citizens and create a genuine points-based immigration system in which the possession of suitable skills is a key element." Vote Leave press release, 15 June 2016

"If we Vote Leave we will be able to stop handing over so much money to the EU and we would be able to spend our money on priorities here in the UK like abolishing prescription charges." Gisela Stuart, Vote Leave press release, 5 April 2016

"The EU has spent £264 million on just four bridges in Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and Poland, more than the £250 million that is forecast to be spent on the UK’s Pothole Action Fund in the next five years. After we Vote Leave, we can spend our money on our priorities like fixing our roads. Taxpayers’ money should be spent on filling in potholes in Britain, rather than being squandered on foreign bridges to nowhere." Vote Leave Campaign Email, 2 February 2016

 It's easy to laugh, though hard to laugh enough,

Because all promises in the referendum campaign were worthless. What do I do when prescription charges are not abolished? Complain to Gisela Stuart?

There's no point. She is only a backbench opposition MP and, judging by the opinion polls, after the next election she won't be even that.

Equally, if Remain had won and you didn't like the way things turned out, there would have been little point complaining to Will Straw CBE or Ryan Coetzee.

You could have tried David Cameron or George Osborne, but there was no guarantee that they, or even their party, would still be in government by the time you had doubts.

Where referendums have worked it has been when the full implications of changing the status quo had already been spelt out, as in the Scottish and Welsh referendums.

Even then, referendums do not work well. The one on the Alternative Vote, for instance, turned into a vote on whether or not people liked Nick Clegg. (They didn't.)

Which is why I am a great supporter of representative democracy - what George Watson called "the English ideology".

Nobody knows anything about British politics any more

"Nobody knows anything." That's what the screenwriter William Goldman said.

He went on to explain:

Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one.

And it's certainly true of British politics now too.

Take what I wrote on Sunday:

There will be no coronation for the new Conservative leader. Two names will be put to the party's leadership. Those names will be Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom. 

May will win the ballot, but it will be no walkover - say 56 to 44 per cent.

Aww. How sweet! I love the exact percentage figures.

Everything I have seen since I wrote that had led me to believe that the Conservative members will choose Andrea Leadsom.

There are a lot of fruitcakes among them and they want a fruitcake to lead them.

It's not just me. The current Private Eye has two columns of quotes from pundits telling us that Remain would win the referendum or that Boris Johnson would be our new prime minister.

And who could forget our own Nick Tyrone? At the start of May her drew on his own experience of the Yes campaign in the AV referendum:

Twenty days out from the AV referendum vote, the polls had Yes and No neck in neck, a knife’s edge finish supposedly clearly ahead. But saner heads knew, even on the Yes campaign at that exact moment, what was coming. I recall clearly when that poll was discussed in the Yes to AV campaign HQ: the younger, inexperienced members of staff figured we were in with a real chance; the older, more experienced members knew it was all over. I remember one of them saying to me – “It’ll be about 65-35 No, for sure”. Remarkably spot on in retrospect. 

Most of the wiser heads on Yes to AV didn’t need the polls to tell them we were headed for a hiding anyhow. When every cogent voice in Westminster says something is a bad idea, while every lunatic comes out of the woodwork to support your cause, in a 50-50 plebiscite it is only going to go one way. And sure enough, it did. 

So if I’m sure we’ll be seeing a repeat of history in short order, when will the polls actually turn? We’re only seven a half weeks out, so probably not for a bit. They’ll probably go definitely Remain’s way about two weeks to ten days out, so sometime between June 9th and June 13th.

If the fact that nobody knows anything about British politics any more has an upside it is that we will hear less of people promising to run naked down Whitehall if their predictions turn out to be wrong. Call it danhodgesism.

And there is a serious point to all this. In April I wrote:

That party membership is such a minority taste now suggests that the 19th-century model of political parties we still embrace is hopelessly outdated. 

Yet no politician has the vision or overweening ambition to wrench it apart and allowing something more attuned to our needs today to take its place.

Party membership is growing again, so I was wrong about that. But maybe the tectonic plates really are moving.

Already, Remain and Leave across the UK, and Yes and No in Scotland, seem more vital and more coherent identities than the old party labels.

But I am probably wrong - and I am not sure about that "overweening".

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"An idea that was floated at one point (which thankfully never materialised) was placing gigantic, inflatable MPs arses in town centres for passersby to kick. There was a sense of enforced “fun” about the whole thing at all times that was exhausting to be around." More and more, the Leave campaign resembles Yes to AV, says Nick Tyrone. And he should know.

Michael Wilson argues that we must defend free speech on campus.

"She began by saying 'You all know me in here…' (I didn’t), I was thrown to discover that the first guest speaker at a Labour Party pressure group was a member of the Socialist Workers Party." Labour member Joe Cox attends a Momentum meeting and finds it is not for him.

Jennifer Wilkinson on the prison memoirs of the suffragette Constance Lytton.

"The exact location and nature of Ravenserodd is open to some debate, but it is often believed to have been located to the east of the present-day Spurn Point and was said in the fourteenth-century Chronica Monasterii de Melsa to have been 'distant from the mainland a space of one mile and more'." Caitlin Green explores the lost settlements of the Lincolnshire coast.

Thom Hickey reminds us of the forgotten talent of Helen Shapiro.

Conservative backbenchers are scribbling on the constitution

I have just watched Jacob Rees-Mogg trying to defend the absurdity of Conservative backbenchers voting to amend their own government's Queen's speech.

But then respect for the constitution, which used to be a hallmark of Conservatism, has pretty much been thrown out of the window. Forget Burke and representative democracy: the reaction of modern Conservative MPs when they find themselves part of a minority in the Commons, is to demand a referendum.

The latest example, reports the Guardian, is over the Coalition's plans to bring in equal marriage.

Political Animal reminded us on Twitter earlier today that Margaret Thatcher once quoted with approval Clement Attlee's argument that the referendums "a device of dictators and demagogues". He was right and so was she.

Tory backbenchers opposed AV and the reform of the Lords (even though the latter was in their own manifesto), but they are quite ready to trash the constitution if they think it is to their advantage.

Does Cameron's lurch to the right give Nick Clegg an opportunity?

I was depressed by the changes David Cameron made in his reshuffle, particularly the way they marked the death of any support for localism or green politics in Tory circles.

However, writing in tomorrow's Guardian, John Kampfner argues that those changes have presented Nick Clegg with a welcome opportunity:

What has been found to work is when, publicly but politely, one leader says: "We advocated A, they advocated B, but we agreed to settle on C." All surveys in Europe suggest that the public respects an open airing and settling of differences. 

Yet the Lib Dem leader consistently dismisses this notion. Instead he has fluctuated from the mistaken love-in on the lawn and the kamikaze mission over tuition fees, to visceral anger over Cameron's undermining of the AV campaign and House of Lords reform. 

This month's reshuffle presents Clegg with an unlikely opportunity. He can now have no doubt about Cameron's intentions. The Conservative rump of the cabinet is as red meat as it could be – authoritarian and sceptical about climate change. Some of Clegg's team were taken aback by the changes. They shouldn't have been. 

With the coalition entering the second half of its projected five-year lifespan, the Lib Dem leader needs each and every day to tell the public what his party is seeking to do, what it will put up with, and what it won't. This can be done without petulance – at least on the Lib Dem side. If Tory backbenchers, in denial over their failure to win in 2010, wish to force an early election or go into minority administration, let them.

No to a referendum: Parliament should decide on Lords reform

Mark Thompson says Liberal Democrats should not fear a Lords reform referendum. Richard Morris goes further and makes the case for holding one.

Well, I don't fear a referendum, but I don't want to see one held.

As I argued in Liberal Democrat News last year, the way that our relations with the European Union - which should have been one of the great issues in British politics for the last 20 years - have been taken our of electoral politics has been harmful to the standing of Parliament:

Why should voters feel enthusiastic about Westminster when their representatives avoid talking about one of the most important issues facing the country?

So it seems wrong to me, when faced with an important issue like Lords reform, to hurry to remove it from the jurisdiction of Parliament.

Britain is a representative democracy and that is a system that allowed democracy to survive here throughout the 20th century - quite an achievement when you look back at the history of that period. We should be wary of undermining it in this way.

If MPs duck out of taking important decision then the dreary charges that they are only in it for themselves or are all the same will only gain volume. Worse than that, supporters of parliamentary democracy will begin to suspect there is something in them.

The principle that there must be a referendum whenever constitutional change is proposed is a modern invention and it has not been applied consistently. Not every city that has opted for an elected mayor has had a referendum first.

You could, I suppose, argue that a referendum campaign would interest the public in Lords reform, but that did not happened with AV. If anything, the campaign spread ignorance and confusion while, as Willie Whitelaw would say, stirring up apathy.

Margaret Thatcher was fond of quoting the words of Clement Attlee: "plebiscites are the device of dictators and demagogues". He was right and we should be wary of undermining parliamentary democracy by rushing to hold another.

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James Graham, who worked for the campaign himself, reviews Lewis Baston and Ken Ritchie's take on the 2001 AV referendum and the future of electoral reform in Britain on Quaequam Blog! "Reading the book ...  made me realise how a number of what I regard are serious misconceptions are well on their way to acquiring legendary status. So with the referendum now more than six months ago, perhaps it is time I made another attempt to give my side of the story."

Charles Lavery says the Leveson Inquiry "has succeeded in making me squirm in my seat on a daily basis, reminding me of  the times I sat outside homes where I had little or no right to do so. Most of the time I was waiting for the bad guy to appear, but not all of the time. Sometimes I was waiting for Joe Public, who was guilty of nothing more than being “newsworthy” at that particular snapshot in time."

The decline of local newspapers is mourned by Living with Rats.

Decisions, Decision, Decisions says a little noticed aspect of the Chancellor's autumn statement was the way it will make it easier to knock about and even knock about grade II listed buildings and unlisted buildings in conservation areas.

Why is the Senate so determined to allow the US military to arrest and detain US citizens? asks Dahlia Lithwick on Slate.

What's Football? points out that, if you look at World Cups since 1966, England has had the best defence in international football. Sadly, we have been much weaker as an attacking force, which is why we have so rarely looked like winning anything.

James Graham on why the AV referendum was lost

The new Liberator has been sent to subscribers and you can find one of the articles from the issue on the magazine's website. It is "My ‘yes’ campaign hell" by James Graham, an account of his experiences of working for the unsuccessful side in the AV referendum.

Some extracts:

Research was not merely not commissioned; it was ignored. Our initial focus group work clearly showed that people were contemptuous of the idea that electoral reform would prevent corruption; people only approved of notions such as AV “making MPs work harder” in the context of them having to reach out beyond their core party support during elections. Despite this advice, the campaign repeatedly sought to conflate the two. Similarly, the advice we got from veterans of the 2004 North East referendum was that celebrities were of limited value. Despite this, we ran a campaign that was obsessed not merely with celebrities but with ones who appealed only to the educated middle classes.

This is the only office I’ve ever worked in where the female staff felt it necessary to hold regular ‘ladies lunches’ in the interests of mutual support. The initial attempt to get the campaign to entrench the principles of “respect, empower, include” into the way it treated staff and volunteers was openly mocked and disparaged by members of the senior team. In the commercial sector, this would be seen as evidence of highly aberrant behaviour, yet the situation was left to fester.

A lot of Liberal Democrats have been calling loudly for John Sharkey to be held accountable in some way for the campaign’s numerous failures, and it has to be said that the buck did stop with him – at his insistence. He certainly does need to address his critics’ points.

All of which proves that you should subscribe to Liberator.

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I have just got back from Glasgow. Rather than attempt to offer my own analysis of the election, I thought I would offer a selection of comment from within the party...

Let's start with the cheerful Stephen Tall on Liberal Democrat Voice: "I think we can now more or less officially say: these results are a disaster for the Lib Dems, worse than most of us had feared they could be."

Splash Blog! won't like my choice of graphic: "As Churchillian as ‘keep calm and carry on’ might sound, that would be simply the wrong approach to this debacle."

"I still see this Coalition Government as a great improvement on the government of Gordon Brown. I still see it as being good for Britain and good for the Liberal Democrats that we are in government. I remain convinced that, between now and May 2015, people can be persuaded of the merits of what has been achieved by the Liberal Democrats in government. " Matthew Harris strikes a more optimistic note.

More comfort comes from Strategem XXXVIII: "The alternative vote system would have been a disaster for the Liberal Democrats."

Mark Cole analyses the results in Wales in general and Ceredigion in particular.

And Disgruntled Radical puts it simply: "Time now to show that we are different. Coalition -yes, Cosmetic for the Tories - No.

Never mind Eddie Izzard and Stephen Fry: Where are the politicians?

Reading Twitter this morning you get the impression that the Yes2AV campaign is being run by Eddie Izzard, Armando Iannucci and Stephen Fry.

What has happened to the politicians?

Ed Miliband, for instance, has been next to invisible. He has declined to risk his authority as leader by trying to persuade unwilling Labour MPs to support AV. He has only begun to sound impassioned on the subject when the campaign has already been won and lost.

It wasn't always like this. Back in 1975 the European referendum campaign featured major politicians on both sides of the debate.

It wasn't left to Eric Sykes, Anita Harris and Dickie Henderson.

Nick Clegg encounters the British birther movement

James Kirkup has just written on his Telegraph blog:

Say what you like about Chris Huhne, his remarks on AV are never dull.

Not content with his historical denunciation of the Conservative Party on Sky News, he’s just used a Radio Four interview to accuse opponents of AV of “made-up facts” similar to the ones which, he said, are common in US politics.

I didn't hear Chris, but it according to Kirkup he said:

"I don’t want to see us import bad practice from the American system where the Republican right has gleefully made up facts which then turn up to be complete nonsense, like President Obama not being born in America and all this short of rubbish."

Kirkup's comment on this is:

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and call the Cabinet Office and ask for a copy of the Nick Clegg’s birth certificate…*

* – Health-warning for for the sarcasm-impaired: that was a joke.

No doubt that was meant to be a wounding attack on Chris Huhne, but I suspect Kirkup has forgotten an article about Clegg that appeared in the Daily Mail during the general election campaign. Its introduction ran:

His wife is Spanish, his mother Dutch, his father half-Russian and his spin doctor German. Is there ANYTHING British about Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg?

Strangely, that article has disappeared from the Mail's website, but you can still read a discussion of it on Lib Dem Voice.

The moral is clear: when it comes to right-wing nutjobbery, we British can still show the Yanks a thing or two.

Labour's candidate in Leicester South opposes AV

Mark Pack on Liberal Democrat Voice has picked up a Leicester Mercury report of a by-election hustings held in Evington earlier this week.

Mark highlights a comment made about AV made by the Labour candidate Jon Ashworth:

Frankly, I don’t really care – I’ve got more important things to think about.

As Mark comments:

There are some good and genuine electoral reform campaigners in the Labour Party, but this dismissive comment from someone who – if there had been no by-election – would after all have been Head of Party Relations for a man who penned a manifesto calling for a referendum (and for it to be passed) and who is now trying to win over his party to electoral reform shows just how precarious their position is in the Labour Party.

In fact it appears that Ashworth went further than that and told the meeting that he would vote against AV. The Mercury's rather odd English here does not help, but this is what its report says:

A member of the audience asked whether the candidates were for or against the alternative voting system.

Mr Haq said he was in favour of the system, which both Ms Hunt and Mr Ashworth said they would vote against it.

Chalk one up to the dinosaurs.

Why might a cat be confused about the AV referendum?

A video entitled "Is your Cat confused about the referendum on the voting system on the 5th May?" has appeared on several Liberal Democrat blogs today. Mary Reid is one example.

But I fear this video's allusion to an earlier comedy sketch may be lost on my younger readers. But do not despair: help is at hand in the shape of an earlier post on this blog.

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"Employee ownership has always been a cornerstone of Liberal policy and in every manifesto from Asquith to Ashdown. Our leaders seldom talk of it now other than to advocate a meagre bit mutualism on the margins. This is a far cry from the policy which the party championed for most of the last century." Birkdale Focus, whom I last saw moored above the top lock at Foxton, calls for employee ownership to be restored as a central concern of Liberal Democrat policy.

Neil Stockley sorts the good arguments for AV from the bad.

The Cambridgeshire Guided Busway has arrived two years late and £65m over budget, reports Focus on Bar Hill. That's what happens when you monkey about with a perfectly good railway branch line (Cambridge to St Ives), remarks Liberal England.

Tony's Musings looks at the role of Jersey as a refuge for French radicals in the years after 1848 - the Year of Revolution.

The rise and fall of "ladies only" railway compartments in the 19th century is examined by Turnip Rail.

"Perhaps one of the key performers in the punk period her powerful songs still affect and influence women and many men performers three decades later. Her band X-Ray Spex left behind an amazing legacy of songs that were utterly original in their brilliance. The songs were brilliant enough but it was her lyrics that were some of the best of era that really stood out. Great perceptive poems about plastic society and consumerism that cut through all the bullshit." Louder Than War pays tribute to Poly Styrene.

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"Either we withdraw to a traditional 'no fly zone' operation or NATO declares war on Gaddafi; these are the only two options left to NATO – it has promised not to abandon the Libyan people." Daniel Furr discusses our narrowing choices in Libya.

The Sandals Are Off believes that the longer the AV debate goes on, the more people will come over to the Yes side. He also criticises the limp leadership of Ed Miliband on this issue.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown should have been invited to the Royal Wedding, argues David Skelton on Platform 10.

Welcome to Spiderplant Land has visited the miniature railway at Knaphill in Woking.

"From the opposite end of the century, we are still reassessing the myths. But the fascination of that frozen hut, heaped with the debris of Edwardian gentlemen explorers, remains irresistible and unarguably poignant." Shaking Out the Colours considers the lure of Captain Scott's hut in Antarctica.

Rockingham Forest Cider celebrates the blossom season - thanks for the loan of the picture.

Calder on Air: Yes2AV, No2AV and Trevor Eve

My column from yesterday's Liberal Democrat News.

Strictly Debatable

Vote Yes to AV and you are against politics. Vote No to AV and you are against Western civilisation. That was the message given to people who watched the two referendum broadcasts last week.

We bloggers often get a bad press, but there is no doubt that a post by one of my fellow Liberal Democrat bloggers was part of the inspiration for the Yes broadcast. Back in May of 2009 Mark Thompson suggested there was a correlation between how safe an MP’s seat is and how likely he or she was to have been involved in the expenses scandal of the past few years. The safer the seat, he argued, the more likely the MP was to have been caught up in the scandal. Mark’s analysis received a lot of publicity at the time and his argument regularly turned up (usually without acknowledgment) in speeches by senior politicians.

It was also at the heart of the Yes to AV broadcast. We should support AV, we were told, because it will mean fewer safe seats and that, in turn, will make MPs work harder and stop them spending our money on duck houses. That is fine as far as it goes, because the safe seat is the curse of our politics. Though I wonder if moats and duck houses are the real problem these days. Wasn’t this a case of la mallard imaginaire?

Besides, the best argument for AV is more subtle. By making candidates win the support of half the voters in a constituency before they can be elected, the system will force them to reach out beyond the confines of their own party. In a Labour-Tory marginal the way to win will be to convince Liberal Democrat voters that you care about civil liberties and Green voters that you care about the environment. Just getting your vote out would no longer cut it.

So the Yes broadcast tried to tap into the anti-politics zeitgeist, but if you watched the No broadcast it looked like an episode of The Ascent of Man. Because the No broadcast was peopled by slack-jawed creatures with baseball caps and silly hair who expressed their incredulity at the idea that the candidate who finished first might not be the eventual winner. Never mind that we all understand Olympic heats, Strictly Come Dancing and The X-Factor: this is how the No campaign sees the voters. In their eyes we are all stupid, and it is by appealing to that stupidity that they hope to win the referendum.

Whatever the faults with AV, there is no doubt that the Yes side has won the campaign. To the Noes the whole thing has been nothing more than a meeting of Stupid Pride.

******

I have been mourning the end of Waking the Dead (BBC1) by collecting DVDs of the early series from the BBC Radio Leicester shop and hunting for episodes of Shoestring on Youtube. Shoestring is the series that made Trevor Eve’s name as a television star back in 1979 and 1980.

Some people laugh at Eve’s portrayal of Peter Boyd in Waking the Dead because of the way he tended to alternate between morose silence and GETTING VERY ANGRY AND SHOUTING. But for me he is an authentic star and one who has made his reputation almost entirely through British televison.

And because I wrote about Shoestring on my blog Liberal England, I learnt something about my friend from Harborough Liberal Democrats Ian Ridley. He left a comment saying that he had once taught Eve how to write equations describing black holes for a pilot episode of Doomwatch.

This was an unsuccessful attempt by Channel 5 to revive a pioneering BBC environmental drama series of the early 1970s. It never took off, but it is amazing what you learn through blogging.

GUEST POST AV, politicians and the wasted vote

Chris Slowe is an activist with Fairer Votes Leicester and Leicestershire.

I got involved in the campaign for the Alternative Vote a few months ago because there were two main things that didn’t seem to make sense about our democracy:

1. The government has to represent the will of the people not that of the politicians. No matter the size of the protest they seemed to ultimately do what they wanted, dismissing us with “They can express it at the ballot box.”
2. People should be able to vote for who they want, not tactically. I grew up in a safe seat and voted for who I wanted. But as I did so there were mutterings of “it’ll just be a wasted vote.”

Down on our shonky city centre stall every Saturday you meet some people who talk to you about the issues. And you get others who are surprisingly rude. But you get many in between and most of what they say is almost word for word identical:

1. Politicians are all the same - they’re only interested in themselves;
2. Voting is pointless as it doesn’t make a difference anyway - unless you’re voting for the main two your votes are wasted.

Hmm. So it’s not just me then.

1. They’re only interested in themselves

OK, so I know that there are some politicians out there who are doing there best in difficult circumstances. But the days of even pretending to be principled have long gone. The canny ones, I suppose, argue that by selling us mediocrity they can at best deliver, and at least not set themselves up for a fall. “Principles are all well and good in theory, sonny”. But surely in a democracy the core principle, the freedom to vote for the candidate you want, is immutable?

Under First Past the Post it seems not. Technically you can of course vote for whoever you want but for many people this right is suppressed through the requirement to vote tactically to ‘keep the other lot out’.

The Tories have always liked FPTP. As long as the left are fractured into multiple parties the vote is split and the system tends to work in their favour.

Labour toyed with the idea of electoral reform with a referendum on PR in their 1997 manifesto. But after a landslide they’d be shooting themselves in the Michael to allow true proportionality. In fact I spoke to a Labour councilor in the street and he said outright that the party is split in support of AV because many see a No vote as minimalising the effect of smaller parties. With the Lib Dems likely to lose dramatic amounts of voters, all the gains go to Labour.

The Lib Dems have finally got their dream of electoral reform, all be it watered down. But they only want it to help themselves too, right? It’s true that in the past AV would have meant a gain of a few seats, but who would say that is possible now?

At the next election people are as equally unlikely to want to vote for the party that (at least) failed to stop us getting in to this mess, the party who killed our beloved institutions, or their ‘accomplices’.

If we don’t change the system:

Some of us will vote for who we really want knowing it’ll make no difference. Some of us will grudgingly vote against the worst, or for the least worse. Many of us will just give up.

2. Unless you vote for the main parties you’re wasting your vote

AV doesn’t mean, of course, that all of a sudden the Greens will be thrown in to government. Nor is it a proportional system- your vote won’t directly affect the balance of power at a national level - the extra influence is over your constituency. But it does mean that for the first time we will be able to see accurately what sort of politics people really want. This will have a profound affect as, even if not elected, the smaller parties will be buoyed by their gains and allow them to influence political discourse with votes behind them rather than unreliable polls.

Conclusion

Implied in many people’s attitude towards politicians is a lack of trust. They are seen as unprincipled. To the public politicians seem to be too eager to dismantle our liberties or sell off our rights. They tell us that they’re just being realistic- if we don’t want terrorists we have to give up some liberty; if we want to keep the NHS we must be able to afford it. Though of course politics should be enacted pragmatically, it should be directed by ideals- the foremost of which must be the representation of the interests of the public. Democracy is our tool to ensure that they are striking that balance correctly.

Thousands of people are protesting against the cuts and yet precisely at a time when they need their democratic power they’re being told by the establishment, and their media friends, to give it up.

When you put aside your party preferences and accept that democracy is a good idea, you are also accepting that people should be able to vote for who they want to, not against who they don’t want. For those thinking voting no will punish Nick Clegg you’re playing right into the hands of a two-party system and against the plural democracy we are increasingly voting for at the ballot box.

After this parliament when again will we have a chance to improve our voting system? We must take this opportunity and vote Yes in May or the mother of all parliaments will slip further and further away from democracy.

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"Football like boxing or rowing is a game where the team that is leading at the first stage isn't always the winner at the end. As Kris Akabushi said when he appeared at a Yes2AV event even in the 100m at the Olympics there are the first and second round and semi-finals. It is rare that the eventual champion will have won every round of that race. What is important is that they win on the final round." Stephen's Liberal Journal has little time for the sporting analogies being deployed by the No2AV campaign.

Eric Avebury visits Rolls Royce in Derby, where he worked 60 years ago after leaving the Army.

The Blairite group Progress is publishing its Purple Book in the autumn. (I wonder where they got that idea from?) Writing on Liberal Conspiracy, Don Paskini cannot decide whether to be intrigued or outraged.

Under a Watling Street Tree believes public libraries have lost their way: "Our local libraries appear to be stacked with CDs, cheap paperbacks, celebrity cookbooks and other publications, that are, in many cases, of dubious educational value. Many such items could be bought in local charity shops at give-away prices."

The prospects for the campaign to restore Leicester's Braunstone Hall are examined by Mr Black's Blog.

Silent UK has some marvellous photographs of the disused Post Office railway under London. (I am sure I used to have a Blue Peter book with an article about it.) You will see that I have appropriated one of those photographs.